Felt Play Book

I'm gonna go ahead and tell you that I did NOT make this since having a baby this summer. I made it about a year ago but Rowin still pulls it out every so often. He played with it today so I snapped a few pics and thought I'd share. 

I don't know how to sew (even though my mom has tried to teach me countless times) so this is a 100% hot glue project. It does take some time but anyone could do it. You will need:

*Felt-a variety of colors

*Hot glue gun + glue

*Permanent or fabric marker

*Fabric scissors

*Ribbon or string

*Hole punch

*Ziplock bags

For the cover, you can decorate it however you want. Then punch three holes on the left side. This will be how you bind the book with ribbon later on. Here's what mine looks like.

On the back of the front cover, I hot glued a ziplock bag. Just put a line of glue across the top of the bag so that it sticks to the page but you can still open it. I did this for every page-the back of one page held a ziplock bag with the pieces for the next page. You can make the pages whatever you'd like. Here's what I did:

*Fish

*Butterfly

*Ice Cream Cone

*Shapes

*Cars

*Food

*Name

*Rainbow

Here are pictures that show each page with and without the pieces.

I made a couple of these for friends and some other pages that I did were dolls (where you add the clothes) and flowers (where you add the flowers to the stems).

I think the pictures are pretty self-explanatory. Some of the pages have things hot glued on and some pages just have things drawn or outlined in permanent marker. The pieces for each page are stored in the ziplock bag.

Once you've made all of your pages, hole punch every page, making sure that they all line up. I also added an extra piece of felt for the "back cover". Then tie a piece of ribbon through each hole to bind the pages together.

Time consuming, yes. I'm not gonna lie. But it's literally just cutting and gluing. I think I made the whole thing in about three nap times.

Spoon Matching Games

So, clearly I am a no-frills mom. I still pin all of the adorable ideas I see on Pinterest that would take me five hours to prepare and OCCASIONALLY I'll attempt a more elaborate craft or project, but for the most part, I like to keep it simple. Real simple. Like be able to whip it up in two minutes with a newborn on my lap simple. This is one such activity.

I grabbed a handful of plastic spoons and a permanent marker, drew a shape on the back of each spoon (two of each shape so they each had a match), and then mixed them all up and had Rowin find the matches and put them together.

We made another matching game with numbers. I wrote the numbers 1-5 on the backs of spoons and then drew dots to correspond with each number on the backs of five more spoons. Rowin had to match the numbers with with the dots. 

I threw each set of spoons into a ziplock bag and labeled them so that we can pull them out to play with another day. 

If these concepts are too easy for your child, you could do capitol and lowercase letters or numerals and number words.

Painted Rocks

Rowin is a little obsessed with throwing rocks right now. He is always on the lookout for rocks. We actually have a rock jar in our kitchen for him to keep his rock treasures in and when it's full, we walk down to the river so he can throw them all in. Ah, to be a two year old!

So since we usually have a rock stash handy, we decided to paint them before throwing them in the river this time. We used acrylic paint which will stay on if you wanted to keep your painted rocks. (They also stain though, so be careful!) Water colors didn't work very well. This would be fun for any age. If your child really likes this activity, grab several rocks and hang onto them for the winter when they're all burried under the snow!