A tuffett for tea

One of our favorite parts of volunteering with the royal court at the Great Plains Renaissance Festival is hosting the Queen's Tea. The first year we did it, we just scooted chairs from the court closer to the thrones, and had the kids munch on cookies and sip punch while the queen and princess chatted with them. 

As fun as that was, we wanted to make it more of a program - something returning fair-goers would look to year after year. So, we added story time. We chose books with a fairy tale theme, or a princess theme, and more recently a dragon theme. We had props, and tried to really engage our audience.

This last fair, we moved teatime to a separate area adjacent to the throne area and under its own sun-fly. But having the kids perch on adult sized chairs just wasn't cozy enough. The kids were wiggly, and wanted to see the pictures closer.

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If you were a Girl Scout in the mid to late 1980's, you might remember making "sit upons" out of inexpensive vinyl table cloths and stuffing them with newspaper. These went with you to meetings and camp, so you never had to sit on the cold, damp ground or on bare floors.

Being a more formal occasion than a Girl Scout meeting, we upgraded to corduroy, upholstery fabric, and velvet scraps pieced together to make big squares. We still backed them with damp-resistant inexpensive vinyl tablecloths though, and stuffed them with plastic grocery bags that we collected over the months.

We made a wide variety of pillows (as we had a wide variety of scraps), and put tassels on the corner to add a small renaissance flavor. They've been far more popular with our younger guests than the chairs ever were.