The Evolving Homemaker

Just sharing a few photos today of some felt board projects we have come up with and actually finished.  I may have a gazillion ideas in my head, and just checked out a book from the library for even more, but these are the ones that have come to fruition!

Why is it that the number of things we want to create and the amount of time in a day don’t coincide?  God must have organized time on the same day as creating the mosquito and the tick, it was just one of those days…

Here we have an oceanic scene, complete with orca, dolphin, crab, starfish, clown fish, coral and seaweed.   Who cares if there are some discrepancies in size issues…I am sure there are some breeds of octopus that are the same size as starfish…I just don’t know about them…yet.

I am most proud of these little 3-D fishies!  Their fins jut out into space!

A number activity for the little ones!

And weather for the day that the kids can observe every morning and pick out the corresponding felt! Of course by three o’clock every afternoon it will need to be changed…this is Colorado after all.  My son insisted on the tornado, so a tornado he got.  I am sure it will be used more often with our farm scene than on our whether chart, but hey, you never know.

After I go through the library book and create more madness, I will update again, and then I will be on a felt hiatus for a few weeks at least! The uses for the boards in education are really endless!

Spill it: Name one thing that you have a gazillion ideas for, yet you have not the time to complete!  I know everyone has at least one area…what is yours? Recipes?  Scrapbooking?  Trails you want to run?

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Last week I got it stuck in my little head that I just had to make a felt board for the kids.  I went online perusing and found a couple sites that had ideas, so I sort of jumbled them together and created my own.

At The Feltboard Is Your Friend, she has lots of good ideas on how to use the felt board.  At Three Sneaky Bugs, she had a fabulous idea of using a frame and hanging it on the wall.  It looked so much nicer than so many I had seen.

Here is what I did.  First we snaked our way through the Humane Society Thrift Store to find a cheap picture with a large frame that we could use.  I think I paid too much for it at $3.50 darn it.  When we got it home we realized the glass covering our circa 1983 purple flowers was not actually glass, but plastic.  Nevertheless, we carried on headed to Hancock Fabrics as they were having a felt sale! Yeah!  All of the bolts of felt were 40% of and all of the different color squares were 5/$1.  We had a heck of a fun time picking out all our goodies.

All said and done, the total project cost about $15. Pretty cheap for long term entertainment.

When we got home, I took the frame apart, dusting off the cobwebs and pulling back the staples.  I placed the cardboard from inside the frame over our blue felt and began to attempt to staple it into place.  Unfortunately the staples went all the way through to my finger a few times.  Ouch.  I couldn’t find my glue gun anywhere, big surprise, so eventually decided we probably didn’t need anything to hold the fabric in place.  Once the cardboard was back in the frame, the staples that held the cardboard in, would hold the whole thing together.

And it worked.  Much to my surprise, considering my usual failings when I just try to ‘wing’ it with a project!

Here it looks hanging on the wall in the kids play/school room!  So darn cute!  I was happy we followed the framing advice!

Here it is with my first set of cut outs.  Grass, flowers, stems, and leaves abound and the kids can put them on anyway they choose!

I know how I feel when I see these sorts of projects on other blogs, like how the hell does this Mom have time for such things?  And followed closely behind is my guilt that I can’t finish any such projects myself.  Please know, that so far, only flowers have been cut out.  I did cut out a barn and two fences too, but that is all I have finished on a barn  yard scene.  I don’t claim to be super Mom here…there is no such thing!

Spill it: What are some of your favorite ways to use a felt board?  If you have one, how have you utilized it with your kiddos?