Easy Doctor Who TARDIS Paper Napkin and Plate Tutorial

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Doctor Who paper plates and napkins aren't readily available--at least not here in the United States--so they provided the perfect opportunity to come up with an easy DIY solution for our Doctor Who birthday party.

The project started when I found perfect TARDIS blue rectangular paper napkins.  I had so many ideas for how I could turn these napkins into tiny Police Boxes.  I cut my own TARDIS stencil, I tested different inks and paper dyes and made a lot of mess and rather ugly, wrinkly napkins that looked more like they'd already been used as napkins than anything else.  It was time consuming and wasn't yielding a result I liked, so I clearly had to change my plan up entirely.

I decided to whip up a quick printable graphic of the basic iconic elements of the TARDIS.  

I simply cut out the text bar, the windows, and the sign, and used a hot glue gun to tack them in place.

I used the same graphic for both the napkins and the paper plates; I just printed out two on a page for the napkins.

I've also created PDF printable versions for both the paper napkin size and the paper plate size printed TARDIS elements:

Printable PDF TARDIS napkin elements

Printable PDF TARDIS paper plate elements

The process is exactly the same for the Doctor Who party plates. 

Cut out the elements.  Glue them to the plate.  I did trim the POLICE BOX text bar in a curved shape so it would look better with the shape of the paper plates.

Easy, fast, and absolutely perfect paper plates and napkins for our Doctor Who birthday!  SO much better in every way than my original plans and ideas!

Nicole Wills, creator of Tikkido

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