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!
Let me start by saying that Katie selected six OLD books for this project…retired editions that had torn pages, faded covers, and ripped bindings. Because otherwise we would have been cringing during the first step of the project…drilling holes in the spines of the books! Katie used the largest drill bit in the set – a 5/16″ bit to be exact – to drill holes in the center of the books’ spines.
Next, she used a bottle of Mod Podge and a foam paint brush to glue wrapping paper onto the covers of the books. We went all schmancy and bought our wrapping paper from Paper Source.
While the book covers were drying, Katie construct the tree base. She glued together two, 12″ cake pads, then glued wrapping paper on the top circle. She again drilled a hole in the center of the base, then threaded a cake support rod upwards, through the hole.
Annnnd here’s the finished base, ready to support some books!
Since the initial holes Katie drilled in the books were covered with wrapping paper, she carefully re-drilled them. Then she threaded the books onto the support rod. Almost immediately, she noticed a problem. The books sagged down the smooth rod and flattening out! Katie quickly fixed the problem by wrapping rubber bands around the rod to brace each book.
When the books were stacked, Katie added a star to the top. This was a cheap ornament with a sparkle stem wrapped around the ornament’s loop. The sparkle stem was threaded inside the cake support rod, then the star/rod connection was reinforced by a second sparkle stem. Add a strand of lights and you are done!