How to Make a Mister Rogers Cardigan for a Daniel Tiger Fan

Fans that my son and I are of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, we've noticed that, on some episodes, there are little segments halfway through the show in which kids get to go on a factory tour, just like Mister Rogers himself used to do.  During these segments, the kids put on (and zip up!) a Mister Rogers sweater.  As far as I can tell, you can't buy cardigans like this anywhere -- regular readers of mine will already know how disinclined the Fred Rogers Company is in licensing their properties to merchandising.  So what to do?  Check it: you can put together a Mister Rogers/Daniel Tiger sweater just like I did for my stylish son (pictured above).  Like most online craft tutorials, this project mostly involves buying stuff.

(EDIT: The following couple paragraphs are out-of-date.  A reader tipped me off that the Heinz Center no longer sells the Mister Rogers patches.  But they can be ordered directly from the Fred Rogers Company here!)

The first thing to do is to head on over to the online gift shop at the Heinz History Center, which has a pretty impressive Mister Rogers section.  (Get the snowglobe while you're at it.  It's awesome.)  A little further down you'll see Mister Rogers trolley patches:

Order at least one, and when you get it, you'll get a Pittsburgh-themed greeting card thanking you for your purchase, signed by an actual sweet older lady (I assume from the handwriting), and here's what the patch looks like:

It doesn't have anything to do specifically with Daniel Tiger, but it's got the iconic trolley on it, and that's probably close enough for your little kid.  I've turned my kid into such a Mister Rogers nerd anyway that it doesn't matter to him.

Now you've got to get your cardigan.  Mister Rogers sometimes had button-up cardigans, but let's face it, that sweater's gotta ZIP. UP.  Land's End has pretty good ones.  Locally, we have a Land's End "Not Quite Perfect" store, where I found a returned, monogrammed cardigan for $22 (you'll see that the new ones online are a bit pricier).

It doesn't matter that it was monogrammed, because the patch goes right over it.  I dabbed some E-6000 glue on the back of the patch, and over the general area under it on the cardigan, just before I sewed it on, as a little extra adherence to the knitted surface (and because I strangely like the smell of E-6000).

Guess what?  Project's done.  Now your kid's rockin' it Daniel Tiger style in his/her own Mister Rogers sweater.

Have you made your own Mister Rogers sweater?  Be sure to let me know if you have!  Email pics and permission to post them to p_krue@hotmail.com

Here's Sarah in her awesome red Daniel Tiger sweater:

EDIT: Be sure to check out my Daniel Tiger Red Trolley fabric print, now for sale at Spoonflower -- perfect for making Daniel Tiger pajamas!

Phe Peter's Puppets Playlist pon Potify

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Halloween is Coming

 Pumpkin Baby Doll Halloween Hand Puppet

Halloween will be here before you know it!  Head on over to the Peter's Puppets shop on Etsy to order these creepy cute puppets!

 Evil Dragon Demon Hand Puppet

Cute Devil Girl Hand Puppet

Review: Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood

Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood premiered this week on PBS, and Ez and I have just seen it for the first time this morning.  In one of my posts from a few months ago, I expressed hesitant enthusiasm for the upcoming project, which revives Mister Rogers' Neighborhood of Make-Believe characters in a Blue's Clues-style environment, so I thought it would be good to post my review of the show as a follow-up.

My rating for Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood: A+++, three thumbs up, and fifty gold stars.

The magic starts right away.  If the voice of the narrator, who reads the standard PBS copy about "This program is brought to you by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation, etc, etc, and by viewers like you -- thank you" sounds familiar, it's because it's Mister Frickin' McFeely himself.  So you know from the start that this show is going to rock.

Daniel Tiger -- the son of our Daniel Striped Tiger, the timid young clock-dwelling puppet that we adults grew up knowing so well -- begins the show by talking to the audience, changing his shoes, and zipping up his cardigan.  He launches into "It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood," and then hops onto the trolley.  The trolley takes him through the current day Neighborhood of Make-Believe, as Daniel waves to friends old and new.  All our familiar landmarks are there -- the castle, the tree -- and new ones have sprouted up since we've last visited, like Music Man Sam's instrument store.  I love it.  It's like the Neighborhood is saying, "We're still here.  You've grown up, and so have we, but we're still here."  All the while, a Jack Johnson-esque vocalist is singing the "beautiful day" song with updated lyrics about Daniel Tiger, and it just hits the right pitch.  I'm not a huge fan of the Jack Johnson style on its own, but I thought his songs for the Curious George movie worked really, really well, and hearing a similar style on Daniel, but with the typical Mister Rogers jazz piano music as the instrumental accompaniment, is really nice.

There's something that hits me so hard when I hear the trolley on Daniel making the same trolley ding-ding noise as it did on the original Neighborhood.  It's like the producers are saying, "Yes, this is an updated show for 'today's kids,' but we've left every possible thing we could of the original formula in the show."

Here's a really cool thing too: our Daniel, the young Daniel's father, has grown up (obviously) and he's dressed just like Mister Rogers.  He's wearing a navy cardigan, he's still wearing his watch, and (neglect the fact that he's totally Porky Piggin' it) he comes across as a hipster dad.  I'd totally hang out with grown-up Daniel Striped Tiger.  I bet he'd want to play bass in a band with me.  And it reminds me, very sentimentally, of the coda of Mister Roger's song about growing up: "for a girl can be someday a woman, and a boy can be someday a man."  The Neighborhood characters have completed the circle, moving and developing by the same guidelines by which their creator taught.

And then the father and son tigers give each other ugga-muggas, and I have to resist the extreme, involuntary urge to get misty-eyed over a kids' cartoon show.

As far as the content of the show, I couldn't be happier.  Rather than clumsily trying to teach an awkward curriculum of phonics or whatever, the writers have kept Mister Rogers' overall theme of affective reasoning and development.  The episode we saw was all about getting angry, and what to do about it when it happens.  The other, probably more important, aspect of the show is that, apart from half the characters being anthropomorphic animals, it's completely devoid of what I think of as "magical interference."  Virtually every other current kids' show we watch -- Mickey Mouse's Clubhouse, Wild Kratts, The Cat in the Hat Knows A Lot About That, Barney, even Sesame Street -- constantly rely on a deus ex machina of either fairy dust or robotics (or a combination of both) to solve the problems that the characters face.  Curious George, and now Daniel, are about the only current kids' shows I can think of that don't use "magical interference" at all.  When Daniel and Prince Wednesday were angry that they couldn't go to the beach because it was raining, they spread a tan blanket next to a blue blanket on the floor to make an "inside beach."  Isn't that refreshingly better, and far more honest to a child's experience, than having a magic computer create a virtual beach environment or something?  I like to think that Fred Rogers would approve of this direction of the show, because I do.

So, bottom line: Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood will definitely be a fixture of our television viewing.

Ella's Deli

If you're here because you like weird old puppets (as who isn't), then I can't recommend enough that you check out Ella's Deli next time you find yourself on the east side of Madison, Wisconsin.  I had been here once or twice when I lived in the Mad City, but it's hard to appreciate it more than ironically until you've got your own kid with you.

The whole place is whirring with the mechanical susurrus of vintage motors, sending papier-mache puppets jostling and careening up the walls and across the ceiling in slow-motion frenzy; every inch of the place is knick-knacked with at least some kind of eerily unauthorized children's pop-culture-induced fever dream.   Here's some photos (and videos!) of some of the exhibits displayed at the deli.

Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals book is done!

 Remember when I mentioned that I was working on a book of illustrations to accompany Saint-Saëns' suite Carnival of the Animals?  Well folks, after a solid weekend of working on it, it's all done. 

I'm self-publishing it at Lulu, so click here if you'd like to order a copy for yourself.  I've added the aviary and the kangaroo illustrations here to the three I posted previously, just as a little bonus to my faithful readers.  Enjoy!

Future-Me Sighting

I went to Half Price Books to dig through the 45's, but Future-Me was ALREADY THERE. I would have said hi, but I've seen enough time-travel movies to know not to upset the space-time continuum.