Magic Dancing Princesses Need Space!

March 20, 2013

Melanie Baron,

A few months ago, I spotted this little cutie on Pinterest. The link is not in English, but the photos are pretty self-explanatory. A little toy in an Altoids box seems charming and appealing in an aesthetic sense, but I just can’t imagine Amelia playing for very long with something so small. Also, I didn’t have an Altoids box handy this weekend when we were looking for something to do.

So I pulled out a cookie sheet and suggested to Amelia and two of her friends that we make magic dancing princesses. I had them at magic. Or maybe dancing. Could have been princess. They were all in.

Any craft supplies you have on hand will work for this project, the only important item is a few magnets. We used:

Scrap fabric and fur
Sequins
Craft foam
Googly eyes
Glue
Pencils (or chopsticks)
Markers
A glue gun (adults only, of course)
and magnets

The kids dove right in, drawing and cutting out princess shapes and dressing them in all manner of royal, sparkling finery. But what about the magic dancing, you wonder?

That’s where the magnets come in. Using a glue gun, I glued a magnet to the lowest point on each princess. And then I glued another magnet to the unsharpened tip of a pencil. Check to make sure the exposed sides of both of these magnets attract each other, rather than repel each other. If they repel, you may have magic jumping princesses instead. That might be interesting, but you’d probably have to explain magnetism and polarity, which I was unprepared to do.

So our magnets attracted. We stood a princess on top of a cookie sheet, and held the pencil magnet below it to make her move. Except she didn’t. Turns out it’s really hard to line the two up through a large, heavy, opaque cookie sheet! We tried the plastic lids from our craft supply boxes, which were much more manageable and the princesses danced. And then Amelia had the greatest idea of all.

We’d done this project outside on a glass-topped patio table. She stood her princess up on the table and easily lined up the pencil below, and it was ballroom magic! All the princesses had plenty of space, we turned on some music and danced the afternoon away. Well, ten minutes or so anyway.