How To Make a TARDIS (Doctor Who)

These are pictures of our new homemade TARDIS. It wasn’t actually made for a party, but I thought it would be a nice thing to include on this blog because it’s a great Doctor Who themed party idea.

How much it costs and how long it takes is going to depend on what materials are available. Fortunately ours cost next to nothing as the only thing we didn’t have was the light and the door handles, both of which were cheap to buy.

Here is what we used:

* A large, unused TV cabinet - It was just sitting unloved in the toy shed so I decided to put it to better use! Obviously not many people have a large TV cabinet they aren’t using conveniently lying around, but you can buy them in second hand shops, boot sales, charity shops, etc for very little. Or if you are fairly confident with a saw, a hammer and some nails you can buy some wood from a DIY store and construct the box yourself.

* Wooden trimming (for the door panels)

* Scrap wood (for embellishing the top of the TARDIS).

* Paint - We happened to have a nice dark blue paint (“Dramatic” by Crown) left over from painting a feature wall in littlest boy’s bedroom. It took barely any paint at all to put a couple of coats on the TARDIS, so if you don’t have anything suitable already you’ll probably only need a very small pot of paint. Even poster paint might do (£1 - £2 for a large bottle), depending on the wood you are using.

* Door handles - We bought a cheap multipack of value door handles for about £2.50.

* Light - We used a circular handheld torch which cost less than £5.

This is how we went about making our TARDIS:

1) First of all we removed the doors and chopped off the legs of the TV cabinet, and turned it on its side.

2) We took out the two shelves, cut them to size and used hinges to hang them on the front as the TARDIS’s doors.

3) Using wood trimming we created a panel effect on the doors, using tiny nails to hold them in place. The TARDIS actually has eight panels, but the size of the cabinet meant compromising and having only six.

4) To create the POLICE BOX sign we cut some scrap wood to size and fixed it to the top of the TARDIS.

5) Using more scrap, we hammered two blocks of wood on top, slightly smaller than the top of the TV cabinet, to create the shape of the roof of the TARDIS.

6) We painted the TARDIS with two coats of blue paint.

7) Once this was dry I painted the windows with black acrylic paint.

8) Then we added the door handles.

9) Next we added the Police Box sign, the public notice and the St John’s ambulance symbol. The public notice was done on Word, the Police Box sign made on Paint Shop Pro (I used Sergoe Script), and I found a St John’s ambulance clip art via Google Images. The Police Box sign had to be constructed from 3 separate images, each roughly the width of a page of A4.

10) Finally, we put the light on top. The back is magnetic so it sticks to the top of a nail we used to hold the wood in place on top of the TV cabinet.

My boys love it. As you can see in the third picture, my eldest has decorated it with posters from the Doctor Who Adventures magazine!

Alice in Wonderland - White Rabbit Costume

I’m going to kick off this blog with something I’ll be doing quite a few posts on in the coming weeks - our upcoming Alice in Wonderland party. It’s only a few weeks away now but I’ve been planning it and busily painting white roses red, drawing Cheshire cats and making flamingo croquet mallets for a good couple of months already.

In this first Alice in Wonderland related post I’m going to share how to make a White Rabbit costume, like the one my son is wearing in the picture here:



I actually made this costume before we even decided to do the party, as his school were doing an Alice in Wonderland theme for World Book Day (at least I think that was it - there seem to be several official Book Days or Book Weeks now). It was very easy to put together, which is just as well as I only had 5 days notice that it was needed.

It was around Easter time so rabbit ears were plentiful. The ones I got were from a local party supply store and cost a couple of pounds. I’ve also seen them I pound shops, usually along with items aimed at Hen parties. The bunny ears I bought are fluffy and a little girly, but fortunately my son is too young to worry about this! I added a waistcoat, which butched up the outfit a bit. He had outgrown the waistcoat he wore to a wedding a year or so ago, but fortunately I had a little halter neck waistcoat sitting in my fabric box which I had kept for the pretty embroidered material. I shortened the neck for a better fit, and it now looks great him on him despite the fact it is a little baggy and loose on the back.

Most of the time I spent making the White Rabbit costume was on the little pocket watch. I’m sure you can probably buy something suitable at a reasonable price, but I didn’t have the time to look and didn’t want to spend more than I had to. So I made one out of junk I had already. To start with, I superglued two Pringles lids together - with the top sides facing out - with a string of gold chain protruding from between the lids. To make sure this wasn’t going to fall apart I then added small tabs of tape all around the edge. Next I cut out two circles of gold cards and glued them to either side of the watch. On one side I created a watch face out of a smaller circle made from white card. I did consider making the watch more realistic by attaching little cardboard hands to the white card circle with a paper fastener, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort when the watch may not last a day of rough playground games. So I drew the watch face on with permanent marker instead. The last thing I had to do was sew the other end of the gold chain to the inside of the waistcoat.

So that is son no.1’s costume ready for the Alice in Wonderland party. My partner and I will be wearing shop bought King and Queen of Hearts fancy dress outfits. As much as I’d like to have a go at making an exact replica of the Disney Queen of Heart’s dress I don’t have the time to sew it all by hand (I have no sewing machine!). Looking around online, more industrious people have managed to make some really amazing homemade Queen of Hearts costumes entirely from scratch.

My next job is making my littlest boy an Alice in Wonderland dormouse costume!