It’s time to get loud, proud, raucous, and rowdy…the barbarians have arrived at story time!
We read Great, Now We’ve Got Barbarians! Written by Jason Carter Eaton, and illustrated by Mark Fearing (Candlewick Press, 2016). When a young man refuses to follow his mom’s orders to clean his room, he doesn’t just get pests…he gets barbarians! Soon they’re chomping cheese curls, infesting the garage, stealing pillows to make forts, and having crumb wars. Exasperated and desperate, the boy finally cleans his room. Thankfully, the barbarians skulk away. Things are peaceful again…until the boy lets the bathtub overflow one night and…oh no! PIRATES!
This story time project is a fantastic example of how we upcycle materials and reuse items from other programs. With the exception of the helmet, this entire project was sourced from previously used materials! Let’s take a look…
The barbarian costume basically consist of a helmet, tunic, belt, and sword. The helmet instructions can be found in this post. The tunics were cut from the white fabric photo backdrop we used at our thrift store costumes challenge. You can see it here, right behind Veruca Salt…
The brown and gold belts for the barbarian costumes were cut from yet another photo backdrop, this time from our Great Catsby event!
The tunics were topped of with “fur” (i.e. brown felt that found its way to our library from a campus theater production). We used some metallic markers, metallic dot stickers, plastic jewels, and masking tape to fancy everything up. As you can see, we had some seriously awesome barbarian duds!
But the runaway favorite of the entire ensemble were the swords. The foam shafts are retired archival foam spine support strips from the Special Collections reading room. We pushed the foam into toilet paper tube hilts and decorated them lavishly.
Then we screamed and had sword fights for over 20 minutes. It was right before the holidays, so it was an absolutely perfect high energy, low mess story time!
Starting the post off with the master of suspense himself, Mr. Edgar Allan Poe. This was a simple 
2023 summer intern Daniel Dias not only got to test a 
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One of my favorite programs was a historic Victorian tea, complete with costumes, games, and a glorious tea time (blog readers might recognize our beloved 
Here we have three Victorian spelunkers at a massive Journey to the Centre of the Earth event we hosted in 2013. On the right is Princeton University student Kim Freid. As you can see, we were ready to tackle anything the day threw at us, thanks to all the ancient camping equipment I scored on ebay!
We started this post with Poe, and we’ll finish with the equally gothic 
It might be a smaller, simpler Halloween this year, but that doesn’t mean it has to be any less spirited (oooo bad pun alert!). We decided to do a round up of our Halloween posts for you to peruse, just in case you needed some projects, activities, costumes, or inspiration. But if you are just here to see Katie’s ingenious candy chute, scroll to the end of the post!
