In the kids’ advent calendars this year they each received 24 new TsumTsum figurines.  If you don’t know what they are consider yourself lucky. TsumTsums are made by Disney and feature all their characters from the movies and TV.  (The majority of the ones in the photo above came from this set or this one.)


Similar to Beanie Babies or Shopkins, the are small collectible critters and accessories that aren’t good for much more than looking at.  The excitement is in the collecting!  And boy to my kids want to collect them all!

So as a gift to them (and as a way from keeping these little suckers from showing up on every surface in my house) I built them a display shelf just for their TsumTsums (although if you kids were into any small collectible this would work for that too!)

And since they are Disney themed, I thought it was only appropriate to use the Disney castle as the silhouette for the shelf.

The backing board is 1/4 inch plywood (you could use 3/8 if you wanted it more robust) and the shelves are 1x2s.  You could also make the entire thing out of MDF, but I just used scraps I had on hand.

The actual build itself couldn’t be more straight forward. The only tricky part is cutting the back out with a jig saw.

SUPPLIES:
Plywood or MDF
Repositionable spray adhesive
Jig Saw
Miter Saw or Table Saw
Drill
1 inch wood screws
Paint (optional). I used Pittsburgh Paints in Jet Black. 

Silhouette Pattern Template:

You can download the full sized (25 inch wide) printable PDF file HERE.  You can either have it printed on large scale paper or (as I did) print it as a “poster” on multiple sheets and tape them together.



TUTORIAL:

1. Using repositionable spray adhesive to apply pattern to wood.
2. Cut out with Jig Saw.
3. Sand  (the cut edges of 1/4 inch plywood doesn’t sand very well, which is why you may want to use MDF.)
4. Cut 1x2s to the width of back silhouette, making sure to leave enough room between shelves for whatever you will be displaying.
5. Mark shelf placement on back of plywood and drill pilot holes straight through and into the shelf
6. Use 1 inch screws every few inches to hold shelves in place.
7. Paint if desired. I chose black so the TsumTsums would really stand out.


I have a quick 2 minute of video of how it went together, so you can see the whole process.


You can see I didn’t get too fancy, if you wanted to, you could dado the shelves into the back board or router the edges to finish them, but I wanted to keep this to a single day project.

You know how kids are.. today it is TsumTsums and tomorrow it will be something else, and I’ll have to come up with a whole new storage project for whatever that may be!