Sponsored Review
The weather in Singapore lately has been really bad – On some days, it’s crazily hot and humid, and on other days, it pours like nobody’s business. All that meant that we had been forced to stay indoors quite a lot recently and I got a little grumpy that we could not go out and have fun especially during the weekends.
Then one fine day, an ingenious idea came to me – Since we could not go outdoors, why don’t we bring the outdoors in??!
I did just that. I decided on a spur of a moment that we were going to have an indoor tea camping party. I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, but I was trying to make the best out of what we had. Turned out to be pretty fun because I roped in the girls to help and it became a fruitful afternoon of DIY project fun.
Here’s a look at our campsite! We’ve even got a giant leaf as our shelter. =P
We fixed a lamp inside our tent since we don’t have the sun shining directly above our heads. And we had Mr Cloud and Mr Sun with us too. We brought the outdoors into our bedroom!
Now, how can we forget the wild flowers if we are going outdoors? By the way, I made these flower garlands at a workshop recently using plastic flowers from Ikea – More on that later!
We played many rounds of UNO card game, but somehow it was more fun that day because we played them ‘outdoors’. =P I love the new serve wares from Ikea that come in colorful and vibrant prints of birds and fruits. They make the whole setup look so cheery and happy.
Our campsite was a simple setup put together with stuffs from Ikea that I could find in the house, but it brought us many hours of fun and laughter. Look at the girls’ gleeful smiles while we were pretending to have some tea and snacks inside their tent.
All it takes is a little creativity and some help from Ikea to turn an otherwise boring afternoon into a fun one. I give myself a big pat on my back. If you are desperately in need of an indoor activity with your bored kids too, here’s how I put the look together. You are welcome.
THE TENT
I’m not sure if you could tell by now, but the structure of my tent is actually this:
YES!! It’s the MALA Easel from Ikea!
And here’s how I transformed the easel into a tent structure:
1. Get 2 of these screw-in hooks and some sturdy thick strings.
2. Disconnect the horizontal board (the one with the red surface) and let it hang by the side (As can be seen in the right photo below).
3. Screw in the hooks on the two legs of the easel on the same side.
4. Tie a string from one hook to the other and open up the easel to your desired height and width. Congratulations, you’ve got a tent structure! (I’m not kidding)
5. Next, find a piece of cloth that’s big enough to drape over the entire structure. The cloth I used was bought from Ikea and it measured approximately 2m by 1m. Secure the top two ends of the cloth with some binder clips to make an entrance of some sort. Slip in some cushions to make sitting inside the tent a comfortable one (since we are sitting on tiles, and not grass!). To complete the look, I hung a lamp from the top of the tent structure by fastening it with a string (The lamp is the SMILA BLOMMA Wall lamp from Ikea) and placed a giant leaf bed canopy over the tent (LOVA Bed canopy from Ikea) to add on to the feel of being outdoors.
Is that simple or is that simple??!
THE WILD FLOWER GARLANDS
As I mentioned at the start of this post, I learnt how to make these pretty flower garlands at a workshop organized by Ikea for a group of bloggers several weeks ago. I love how easy it is to make them, and how lovely the final products are!
Frankly, I was pleasantly surprised when I was told that these artificial flowers were all from Ikea! Maybe it’s just me, but I often speed through the plants and flowers section in the Ikea showroom, so I’ve never really stopped to see what they have to offer. Some of these artificial flowers looked so real, it’s unbelievable!
I chose the flowers I liked and started to make garlands with them. To make the garlands more interesting, we interspersed the artificial flowers with paper cupcake holders found at Ikea (yes, so ingenious right?) and simple yarn pom poms. Fold the cupcake holders three times, flatten them and staple to secure (just like the purple one in the photo above). Pom poms are super easy to make – Just twine the yarn over your three fingers something like 30 rounds, remove and tie it tight in the middle before cutting through both ends and fluff it. To make the garlands, just make a circle with a piece of wire and secure it with washi tape. Then glue the flowers, cupcake holders and pom poms onto the wire closely to each other so that there are no empty holes.
See how lovely my Jayne looks with the garlands I made that day!
Now, these garlands are decorations for our DIY tent in the bedroom. :)
How do you like my Ikea-inspired DIY ideas? Here’s what you need from Ikea to complete the projects:
Disclosure: This is Part 1 of a series of posts done in collaboration with Ikea Singapore. The J Babies was provided with a stored value Ikea card to make purchases for purpose of the post, however some of the Ikea products mentioned in this post were existing items in our household. As usual, all photographs and opinions expressed in the post are solely ours.
