I recently was getting ready to perform another puppet show in my Wobbly Toggle Puppet Stage, and REALLY wanted to add a feature to it: set pieces…background and foreground paintings that would enhance each scene. They had to be lightweight, quickly changeable and easily packable.

I painted on 20 x 30” corrugated plastic sheets, duct taped together. The stage is made of 2-inch PVC pipe covered in fabric. A major challenge I had that I couldn’t work out in my head was how to fasten the set pieces to the stage, in a way that was quickly changeable. I went through my roster of favorite building materials: nylon zip ties, bungie cords, clips, velcro, etc. Nothing was fitting the bill.

I then imagined bending coat hanger wire into hooks I could tape onto the back of each set piece, so I could hang them on the “apron” of the stage.

Unfortunately, time was of the essence. On the morning I was working on this, I had a show that afternoon, and my little family was hovering around getting impatient to do something fun.

How would I make these hooks? Quickly?!

I ventured into our basement where the landlord has miscellaneous stuff laying around, paint buckets, jars of nails, etc. I was hoping to find anything I could use. And then, it happened.

Rarely in my life does any object appear that so perfectly solves a problem than what I discovered: Garden Staples.

They were perfect. Already bent in the shape that I could tape to the back of each board that created a hook that could fold down for storage.

YES! Within the hour I had rigged 5 foreground and 2 background pieces using these awesome little garden staples, a new addition to my Macgyver toolkit.