A Unique Presentation for Theater Tickets

Sherree has previously written about how we like to give gift cards in a special presentation (see Creatively Giving Gift Cards and Dressing Up Gift Cards). Similarly, this year we gave theater tickets to my parents (for a production of Godspell) and wanted to make it more special. At about 3:00 pm on Christmas Eve, a great idea struck me! I asked Sherree, “do we have supplies?”

My idea was pretty simple: to create a “stage” where opening the curtain would reveal the tickets. I wanted to make this mildly interactive, where pulling a tab would open the curtain, and this is the part that required a little thought and effort.

I should note that we didn’t actually give them tickets — we gave them an IOU for tickets, because they don’t go on sale for a few months. So the insert was a note about the show along with the showtimes.

I started out with a piece of heavy black matboard. This gave the piece some weight and made it inflexible. This was important because pulling on the tab to open the curtains puts quite a bit of stress on the piece and using something lighter would have meant it collapsed.

I cut two pieces of fabric to use as curtains and hot-glued them to the matboard. I used some fat red ribbon to decorate the top to make it look more finished. That’s about it!

The mechanics of the pull tab took a little effort to figure out, but what I did is illustrated in the photo at the right. I poked holes in the upper corners and lower-center of the matboard for thread to pass through. Two pieces of thread were attached to different points on each curtain so that it would open smoothly. The thread went through the hole in the upper corner to then down through the middle hole where it attached to the pull tab. (The red lines on the photo indicate the thread on the front of the stage, attached to the curtains and passed through the holes in the matboard to the back where green indicates the string. The blue outline is the pull tab.)

I had to be careful to keep the thread taut when assembling this so that a slight tug on the tab would start to open it, but not so tight as to have the curtain partially open even before opening. The curtain doesn’t fall closed so this was a “test and reset” project where I pulled the curtain back into place each time.

As you might imagine, this was well-received!