Craft a Car Shaped Ball Pit for Your Dolls

A tiny baby doll plays in his car shaped ball pit. Soon it will become a part of his bedroom in our dollhouse.

       Ball pits don't need to be round, standard shaped enclosures. These playful additions may be shaped like almost anything when you use your imagination. Just think about what you would like in your own bedroom and turn it into a ball pit for fun! After all a doll's bedroom can become any kind of a fun space, if you are willing to craft it yourself.

This ball pit, photo by Fredriksson, is
life size and inside of a pretend ship in-
stead of a car! Read more about ball 
pits at Wikipedia.

Supply List:

• a front end of a toy car
• Styrofoam balls
• papier mache pulp
• paper egg cartoon
• black tape
• black, white and orange acrylic paint
• red glitter glue
• masking tape
• cardboard
• white school glue
• two identical buttons for tail lights
  

Step-by-Step Directions:

        First you will need to acquire the front end of a toy car at resale for this project or if you have a small boy living at home, one of these may be easy to find. A project like this one allows for a bit of imagination because the ball pit could be made out of any size or shape of a broken toy vehicle. I purchased my broken car on purpose at resale. As you may well imagine, I got many strange looks from the cashier.

      Next, comes the most difficult part, shaping the wagon attached to the backside of the car from cardboard. This shape is made up of basic elements: a square, three sided wagon, wheel wells, wheel shapes, (cut from an egg carton) and the lip of the wagon that attached with a small hook onto the inside of the broken car.

You will need just the right broken toy for this project, but your version will look different from mine,
 depending upon the toy car that you find.

       Cover the entire wagon attachment with masking tape before adding the paper mache pulp to it's outside walls. This protects the cardboard surface, strengthens it and makes it mostly water proof. Well you can't dump the toy in a tub, but, you will be able to wipe it down with a damp cloth if need be...
       I left the inside of the wagon and the bottom side of the wagon free of paper mache pulp and opted to cover these with a black duct tape instead.

 

Masking the cardboard wagon before applying paper mache pulp.

       Below, you can see that I hot glued a couple of buttons on the back bumper to act as tail lights. Later, I then squeezed some red glitter glue onto the button surfaces to make these even more convincing. 

       I also left a part of the back bumper free from paper pulp so that I could paint a flat, smooth surfaced license plate.

Covering the cardboard wagon with paper mache pulp.

       Next, I painted the paper mache surface with orange acrylic paint. Then the license plate with the text "BAL-PIT" I used a bit of white black and white paint to make my egg carton wheels look similar to those original wheels of the car itself.

       Spray paint the little paper mach wagon with a acrylic sealer and add the Styrofoam balls for your dolls to romp around in.

Above is the finished car ball-pit for my playscale fashion doll's children. This looks great in their bedroom!