Travelling with toddlers: felt craft project

Two adults, two toddlers, two flights. This summer we took our first big trip as a family, with the boys aged 18 months and three and a half years.

I knew we needed a ploy. Something new and diverting that could keep a toddler engaged without leaving his seat for at least a few minutes. And I remembered when I was little we used to have a felt board with a set of colourful shapes that made various scenes. I think there was a nativity one, and possibly a circus. At any rate, the animals surrounding the Christmas cot were occasionally balancing balls on their noses.

Materials

• A4 cardboard sheet (I used the card backing from a pad of A4 lined paper)
• A4 decorative cardboard for backing (I used a sheet of mirror card)
• Large felt piece (I used an old pink jumper that went through the wash too many times and shrank. I checked that the felt pieces would stick to it before getting started.)
• Trim (I used some spare pom pom trim I had lying around)
• Smaller pieces of variously coloured felt
• Hot glue gun & glue

Method

First cut the large felt piece down to a rectangle roughly an inch larger than the A4 card in all directions.

Pipe glue from the hot glue gun across the thick A4 card in lines roughly two centimetres apart. Try to get an even coverage but don’t worry too much about being neat.

Quickly, before the glue has time to cool, spread the felt across the cardboard and stretch and smooth it down. You want the surface to be flat and smooth.

Turn the felt-and-card over. You should have a broad lip of felt along each side of the cardboard. Before glueing these flaps down at the back, fold them over to see how they’ll lie and trim away any excess. If it looks as though the corners will be too thick, you can cut away a triangle of fabric at each corner to make the fold neater.

Next you’ll need to fold the felt down and glue it along the back of the card on each side. Again, focus on keeping this smooth.

Take your decorative A4 card and glue it on top of the folded felt/back of the card. You should now have a board with one side covered in smooth stretched felt and the other side covered in your decorative card.

Mirror card works well here because it means that they can turn the board over and make faces at themselves in it.

Alternatively, if you had enough felt you could make two card-and-felt boards and put them back to back for a double sided felt board.

Once the board has been put together the next task is to tidy up the edges with some trim. I went for pom poms because I had them lying around and I knew they’d be an interesting tactile addition – anything to help grab a toddler’s attention!

Start in the middle of a long side. Make sure you fold the very end of the trim over. Run the hot glue gun along the end of the board leaving an even bead of glue for a few inches, then press down the trim along that length, then add some more glue and repeat until you’re nearly back where you started.

Take your time about this stage, as it can be really annoying if the glue gets smeared on the felt and you’ll want to scrape it off at once.

When you’re nearly at the end, you should be able to cut the trim to length leaving a short excess to fold back neatly under the last length as you stick it down.

Ta da! Felt board.

Next, you’ll want to cut out some shapes that the kiddo can use to make pictures with. I tried to make a combination of circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, and more interesting shapes such as hands, feet, faces, and whole people.

When we came to get the felt board out on the plane, though, the winning combination was something I threw in almost as an afterthought – four long stripes in blue and enough yellow playing pieces for a game of noughts and crosses.

We played several rounds and then I read my book while he carefully set the pieces out on the board in various different patterns. Score!

Interlude: painting with babies

Keeping both a toddler and a baby happy at the same time can be tricky.

A three-year-old can walk, use kiddy scissors, draw and paint without trying to eat the pens or the paper.

They understand complicated commands like “don’t you dare get that on the floor, the walls, or Daddy’s suit jacket. Do you hear me? And do you need a wee-wee? Well, go and try anyway and then come back and you can play with it.”

This does not work on a baby whose walking is still at the cruising-along-furniture stage, who has a homing instinct for potential danger, and whose exploration of the world happens mostly via their mouth.

In the chilly wet weather lately I’ve been scratching my head for a while for ways to keep both our boys busy and happy indoors.

Fun with paints, by two small boys. Mixed media: paper, finger paints, post it notes, felt tip pens, water, stickers, and probably drool.

They’ve both had more than their fair share of coughs, fevers, and more serious infections this winter. Turns out that starting nursery magnifies the ‘mummy’s little plague vector’ effect.

So, last weekend, rolled up the rug and sellotaped two big rolls of paper together and stuck them to the most washable part of our floor, making sure that there were no loose corners for the baby to pry up. I covered the chairs with sheets, and set up a little blow heater in one corner for warmth.

A selection of toddler paints in different colours went out on the lids of a lot of tupperware. A big bowl of water and some towels went right in front of the kitchen door – I wanted to be ready to intercept.

Finally, I put on my DIY painting clothes, stripped both boys down to pants / nappy, and let them loose. When they got bored of splashing in the paint, I fetched some stickers and pens and we kept going.

As the toddler’s favourite colour is red, the resulting work of art looks a little bit like the first chapter of an Agatha Christie novel. In a good way, I think.

It may be a little while before we do this again. We’ve only got one wall big enough to display art on this scale, and it’s taken now.

18th February 2012: baubles

Silver shells and peacock feathers and ribbon bands all in a row, row, row… having decided to let bridesmaids all chose their own dresses, in the hope of giving them something they’d be happy to wear again, it was necessary to find something that they could have in common.  Flapper girl headbands turned out to be an excellent solution, particularly with the period-appropriate peacock feathers.

To make: order tons of ribbon (about an inch wide) and peacock feathers (they come in bundles of 100) over the internet.  Turn out your bead and craft stores.  Use strong glue to stick the feather onto a small piece of tough backing material (chose a colour that works with the ribbon, not against it).  Stick another piece of material over the top, and sew a selection of beads on to the top, making sure that some loop out and dangle slightly if possible.  Stitch the finished bauble on to the ribbon so that the feather lies back at a 45 degree angle (feathers sticking straight up tend to look Hiawatha, not 1930s).  Force innocent bridesmaid to wear.