Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Travel felt boards

I made these travel felt mats for my kids and my nieces and nephews for Christmas.  They are super easy to make, and if you're making more than one, they're even faster to make assembly line style (i.e. do all cutting first, then all ironing, etc.  The only part that gets to feel like drudgery is cutting out the million little felt pieces.  I found the travel felt mat tutorial here, and got more ideas for little pieces to play with here.

I'm hoping these will be another great toy for our trip to Italy.  Here are some pictures of the mats that I made, including some ideas of my own:



I made 5 mats, 2 for girls and 3 for boys.  In the future, I would not make them so gender-specific, probably, and I also would use a blue felt background for all of them.  It makes for a more realistic background, and the other pieces look better and are easier to see because it's more contrast.

Here is a little dress-up person with some clothes.  I still want to do a few more clothes, including some dresses.  I've found patterns for making these people and their clothes on various sites and blogs, but I actually made these myself:


Butterflies - I'll probably cute out a few more body pieces.  I got this idea from the second link above.


Here are a few trees, plus some weather pieces, which are always useful to throw in for use with various other pieces and scenes.  I also have stars and a moon, which I didn't picture here.



Another tree and some flowers.  Would like to do more of these.


Houses!  These can be a lot more creative and fun, but I made these a while ago when my kids were pretty little, so I just did the basics.  You could also make other buildings like a church or a store or a school.


Cars and other vehicles!  I could get a lot more creative with these now, too.  Nothing is glued together here, the kids have to assemble the cars themselves, but if I made something more elaborate (like the tractors that Turtle is currently obsessed with) I'd probably have some pieces be fixed.  And see what I mean about the weather pieces being useful?


Pizza!  I've actually made a whole variety of fruit and vegetable pieces for our big feltboard, but I don't know how much fun they'd be for travel play:





And there you have it!  A nice mix of ideas from the internet plus my own ideas.  Have fun!  And let me know if you have other ideas, too, I'm always looking for more.

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