July 19, 2010

Messy Monday #21 – Trains Week

 

For this week, I made a felt mat with the kids for trains and vehicles. I’ve been looking for a carpet of some sort that can be pulled out to play vehicles and trains on and decided that making one from felt would be cheaper and smaller/easier to store – and better yet, it’s custom! We went up to the local fabric/craft store and bought felt by the yard – all this felt was about $10.

We planned out how we wanted the city/town to look and I started cutting and cutting and cutting.
This is how to make a BIG circle out of a square.

 Fold your felt like cone/snowflake (in half and in half again until you have 8 sections). Then draw a curve at the top with a white colored pencil. And cut – if your scissors are dull, fold up tin foil and cut that first and it’ll sharpen your scissors right up.

We kept it simple and basic. 
Roads – cut and piece together BEFORE you glue.

Trees.

Water.

Then we glued it all together with this Felt Glue – it works really well and dries quickly.

Here’s the finished felt town.

Now it’s time to play. We set up the train track around the town and got out trains and animals for some creative play. This is about 2 seconds into the play time – it was a pretty “busy” town in about 2 minutes.

I’m linking this up to some fun parties – check them out!

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Cleaning With Kids, Messy Monday