Thursday, June 21, 2012

DIY Magnetic Color/Shapes Game

For a few months now my two year old daughter is really interested in colors, shapes, sizes and matching things. And Stickers, those stinkin' fun things that little people use to decorate your furniture when you're not looking. So one afternoon I pulled out my ever growing collection of free fridge magnets to make this:
DSC_0940
A magnetic color/shape/size game box.

This is a great craft that your toddler can help with and the game will provide hours of colorful creative fun, too. Here is what you need:
-fridge magnets, the flat "pizza" or "call your electrician" advertising ones (I don't know about you but we get them on our mailbox or door all the time. I save them, for crafts like this!) If you don't have anything like this laying around there are magnet sheets available in craft stores.
-stickers in different colors, shapes and sizes 
or alternative:
-white paper, glue and markers
-scissors
-a flat plain tin box (from chocolate or cookies, if you don't have a plain colored one you can spray paint a decorated christmas cookie tin or go buy yourself some fancy chocolate in a tin!)
or alternative:
- a fridge door (it's ok to leave it attached to you fridge)
DSC_0796
you see those two-year-old hands trying to steal the tin box to check for leftover chocolate?

DSC_0815

After you gathered all your supplies and ate all the chocolate... here is what you do:
Step 1. Pull off the advert from the magnet. Depending on the quality you'll either have several layers of white paper underneath or the whole thing will just come off and leave you with a plain black magnet. Either is fine if you use stickers (Go to step 3). If you want to draw your shapes with marker it is useful to leave the white paper on. Saves you step two.
Step 2. If the advert pulled off completely or uneven glue some white paper  to the magnet. (regular craft glue should do the job)
Step 3. Create your shapes by either sticking your shape stickers on the white side of the magnet or draw and color the shapes you like. (Both can be done by your happy crafty toddler)
Step 4. Cut out the shapes with sharp scissors.
Step 5. Play.
DSC_0799
you can sort by color

DSC_0800
or shape

DSC_0801
or shape and size

DSC_0942
or build a car... or cities, or faces, or flowers....


It's a great activity to take with you on long car rides, because it's magnetic the pieces won't fall down all the time. As said above you can use it on the fridge or any other magnetic board or metal door around the house too, but the tin box offers you storage and take away play board in one. Plus it can easily be split up for two kids, one can use the top, one the bottom of the box as play board. So yeah to triple-greatness!

The game can easily be adjusted or extended with whatever you come up with... I am thinking to add some face features like magnetic goggly eyes and some wider variety of shapes to make up more faces (like mustaches or glasses).

Sunday, June 10, 2012

Tea Party

tea & cookies

I had some fun stitching going on Saturday morning... and then we had some tea parties over here.

tea & cookies

With six kinds of tea... lemon, peppermint, orange, camomile, strawberry & green tea

tea & cookies

and a jar full of delicious cookies


chocolate chip, Oreo's and sugar cookies. They are DE-LICIOUS! want the recipe? all you need is some felt, a bit of embroidery thread, some seed beads for the sugar pearls (if you make this for little kids you can just embroider this part with french knots) and some time! cut out cookie shapes, hand stitch the chocolate chips and sugar decor in place, machine stitch two layers of felt together and you're done. For the Oreo's I used one black layer on each side and two white felt layers for the filling.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...