Welcome back :) We're up to our third project in the Hip Hip Hooray for holidays series.
My project today is for your little person to do - from start to finish - designing and creating their very own felt play mat.
Materials list:
♥ Felt - a big piece (ours was about 1.2 metres X 90cm) - but you can do any size.
♥ Felt scraps
♥ Craft glue
♥ Pen or pencil
♥ Scissors
♥ A4 (or larger) sheet of paper
♥ A little person's imagination
There was great excitement in our house when I explained my idea to Bella for this project. She was really keen to get started ASAP and went to work drawing up a plan for her felt play mat. I know that there are lots of designs online for play sets, but I thought it would be fun to let Bella design and make her own, from start to finish. I asked Bella to keep her design simple as she would need to cut her pieces from felt - another option is to pre cut a series of roads, trees, ponds etc.. and let your child place them down on the mat before adhering with some glue.
Step 1: Talk about the idea with your little one and ask them to draw up a design on a large piece of paper for a play set. It could be a fairy, dinosaur, car racing mat or whatever they happen to dream up at the time of drawing.
Step 2: The next step is to transfer the design to felt! Cut out the basic areas first - depending on the age of the child, they might need a little help with this.
Step 3: Add or omit details from the drawing as you go. Bella decided to add the lines on the roads and also some walk way crossings, but left off a lot of the shop signs that were on the initial drawing. Use a strong craft glue to hold each piece of felt in place.
Step 4: Add props to your creation and then play, play, play! We allowed a full afternoon to draw, create, set up and play with the set and then it was easy to roll/fold up and pop in the cupboard, ready for another day.
Don't forget to pop over to Tamar's blog and peek at her tutorial for today. She's sharing another cute idea - painted pots for the garden and the sweetest doily covered rocks.
I'll be back later on today with my sneak peek for tomorrow :)
