This week I finally put into action a project that I’ve been wanting to organise ever since our friends the Rocks showed us their fantastic puppet theatre constructed from PVC plumbing pipes. After a bit of internet research we decided that we’d try and make a fairly large theatre, as we usually have two puppets in the sketches that we do in church and school.
A quick trip to our local plumber’s merchants and £34 later (after they gave us a special discount) and we had the piping for a theatre that’s about 2m high at the back, 1.4m at the front (for a kneeling adult or standing child) and 1m deep. Our plumber’s merchant didn’t advise gluing the thin-walled 32mm piping we had, so we had to cut small joining pieces to connect the T-pieces and 90 degree bends.
Yesterday morning we had one of our holiday Cake and Chat sessions. These are pretty much the same as the ones in term time, except they start later (for holiday lie-ins) and we have more kids with us. So we took all the pipes and connecting pieces down to the church hall, together with a couple of hacksaws, and got down to work. Rocky was the man with the saw, and we had a team which included his fiancee Bee and her mum, and various children who particularly enjoyed applying washing up liquid to the joints to make it easier to connect the pipes in.
Once we’d assembled everything, we found that the frame was still a little wobbly (especially at the beginning when we were still missing the strut for the middle of the front). We will be applying some silicone (the sort you use to line the side of the bath) to the T-pieces, which should stop the rotation that caused the wobble by fixing the connectors to the pipes.
Bee and her mum have kindly offered to make some proper curtains (today’s were a random selection from my materials box) and also a kit bag to carry the rather unwieldy piping, so we are hoping to have everything looking pukka in the next couple of weeks. I’ll blog the first official appearance of the theatre so you can see the final product.
The Vicar's Wife 
That’s so cool!
I’m going to remember this for when I’m a vicar!
Love reading you blog 🙂
http://deanroberts.net
Looks brilliant! I would recommend labeling or doing a colour code with something like insulation tape of different colours and doing a simple sheet of instructions so that anyone on the puppet team or whoever joins subsequently can put it together easily. Otherwise fantastic!
Love the idea! We had such a poor one this year at our school, I will definitely log this idea for next summer. Thank you for sharing.
Hehe!!
The frame looks incredibly wobbly on that on picture. Glad we sorted that out. I love the picture of mum and I staring at the pile of pipes with cups of tea in our hands. Will be getting the fabric for the curtains this week. I am very much looking forward to the theatre being completed 🙂
[…] we made the base of the theatre with plastic plumbers piping. More about that can be found here https://thevicarswife.wordpress.com/2011/09/02/plastic-and-puppets on the Vicar’s Wife’s […]