{Guest Post} Felt Dinosaur Dress-Up Set

I've asked Dyan from And Next Comes L to guest post for me today.  I learned about her blog a few months ago when I started blogging and it's just plain awesome!  She has so many great ideas for fun and learning.  My two favorite posts of hers are her Invisible Letters Sensory Bins and her Gruffalo Inspired Sensory Board - they are SO creative! 

Hi!  My name is Dyan and I write the blog And Next Comes L.  I am a stay at home mom to two boys, J (age 3.5) and K (20 months), but I also teach piano out of my home.  I love to dabble in all things creative, but my blog focuses primarily on fun, educational sensory activities and homemade toys, like activities for the felt board or quiet books.  

I am so thrilled to be guest posting on Fun at Home With Kids today, especially since I have been following/stalking/admiring Asia's blog for awhile.  I stumbled across her blog when it had a mere 200 or so Facebook fans and instantly fell in love with it.

I have been wanting to make a dress up activity for the felt board for a long time, but I didn't want to do the typical, boring dress up doll.  However, I have come across dress up bears, but I was still longing for something different.  Something that would really appeal to my boys.  I was also looking for something cute and fun like the Mix and Match Monsters that I made.  J loves those monsters.  

Then it dawned on me: dinosaurs!  What kid doesn't love dinosaurs?!  So I came up with this dinosaur dress up activity for the felt board.

As is my usual style, I cut everything free hand and hot glued pieces where needed.  It was also a great way to use up some of my felt scraps.  The pieces I made included a large dinosaur, some shirts, pants, a skirt, a ballerina tutu, a vest, some hats and shoes, a pair of underwear, and accessories like sunglasses, a tie, and a bow.

The contents of this play set.

Put the pieces together and you can make some wonderful dinosaurs like these:

A rockin' ballerina.

An explorer.

A little "Risky Business", anyone?!

Well, J loves, loves, loves this dress up dinosaur.  In fact, J is becoming quite the master of the layering technique.

Shirt, underwear, and now some shoes.

Now for some pants.

And how about an upside down tutu?

As for K, he apparently had better things to do...

K is too busy with a calculator

Thank you to Asia for having me guest post today and thank you for reading.  Be sure to check out my blog And Next Comes L, join my Facebook page, or follow us on Pinterest.

Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Giant Felt Board

Older Toddler +

As you may have noticed, we love felt.  It's so inexpensive and versatile and even durable!  We use it a lot.  Because our felt Christmas tree was such a big hit, I was inspired to make a HUGE felt board for S in the Reading Room.  I used just the prickly side of self-adhesive velcro to stick the felt sheet to the wall.  This is roughly a yard and a half of black felt.  I waited until I had a good coupon for a local fabric store, so it was less than $5!  I chose to frame it out with wood, but you certainly don't have to.  I used MDF floor trim - the most basic kind - and had Home Depot cut it for me (I had pre-measured the lengths I wanted).  So the trim cost roughly another $6.  If you don't have room for something like this in one of your rooms, it would be a great addition to hallway, perhaps?  We had our felt Christmas tree up on one of our dining room walls.

I like that the board is bigger than S, so that we can make S-sized creations.  Our first undertaking with the new board was to create a robot.  S loves robots almost as much as dinos.

My Dad (my go-to project helper, hahaha) had just helped me finish hanging the frame the night before. S and I both just love it!

I used a coupon at the fabric store to score all these felt sheets at 20% off (and they're only 29 cents to start with!).

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S got to dictate color size and shape of every robot part - and she was also in charge of placement.  Learning how to stick pieces of felt to a board does take a bit of practice.  I feel like S wasn't able to do this without getting frustrated until she was an older toddler (she's a seasoned pro now).  This could also be fun for a younger toddler, but it would involve a lot of parental help (which sometimes young toddlers don't want!  Ha!).

Robot's arms needed "thick, white stripes".

And of course he needed "a sparkly red heart" - she was undecided at first as to whether his heart should be under his body so it was "inside his body" or whether it should show on top.

And finally, she decided he ought to be saying "Wow", so I cut out the letters and she sounded out the letter ordering.  I had planned on making one or two other robots, thereby completing a "mix and match" robot felt set, but alas, S insisted on only one.  The mention of other robot friends joining him on the giant felt board was met with a "but I am his friend!!!"  Hahaha.  She finally relented the next day and let him have some pets.  I think he's much happier now, don't you?

I just love following her directions to create whatever it is that's in her head.  This is definitely not how I would have made a robot, which is what is so special to me about the process.  If I'd just made a robot set for her, I would have missed meeting the robot friend she'd envisioned!  And since he's pretty cute, it would have been quite a shame.  :)

You can read more about our Reading Room, where the giant felt board lives here.

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

Easter Bunny No-Sew Felt Playmat

Older Toddler +

S loves Dino World so much that I started contemplating an Easter-themed playmat.  If you sew, I am sure that you can create a much prettier version of this mat.  As for me, I am terrible at sewing, so for ease and speed, I used the hot glue gun.  The total cost to create this mat was under $10 (hooray for felt being really cheap!).

To make this playmat, you'll need:

Around a yard of green felt

Several small sheets of felt in various colors

Pipecleaners

Hot glue gun

3 white pom poms for bunny tails

Polyester stuffing for bunnies (though you could stuff the bunnies with felt scraps)

Shredded paper (though you could stuff the basket with shredded felt)

The main feature of the Easter Bunny Playmat (or Bunny Land, as S has dubbed it) is an Easter Egg hunt.  I used two identically sized pieces of green felt and cut slits in the upper sheet.  I then glued the two pieces together around the perimeter only.  This leaves sneaky little pockets for hiding Easter Eggs.  I cut more slits than eggs, just to make it a bit more of a guessing game.  Here I caught a picture of S just as she'd hid an egg. 

After hiding it, you pat down the slit and it almost disappears.

I also made her three little bunnies, each with distinct features.  Making the bunnies was by far the most time consuming part, so if you are crunched for time, you could always omit them.  Here's another view of a partially hidden Easter Egg so you can see how the slits work a little better. 

I also made a felt Easter Basket with a braided pipe cleaner handle and I stuffed it with some of the shredded paper from our Life-Sized Easter Basket.

And I made a little garden with removable carrots (S discovered the slits were big enough to hide eggs in there as well!  Clever girl.).

And, lastly, a hillside burrow for the three bunnies.  I did need to use pipe cleaners to reinforce the structure of the burrow.

The burrow also doubles as a good spot to hide eggs.  :)

The basket is moveable and S loves to use it to collect the eggs.

She found one!

Now that she thinks she's got them all, she starts to lay them out on the ground.  S is great with counting to 10, but from 11-15 is a little, er, fuzzy for her, so I decided to make 15 eggs as a fun way for her to practice those numbers that are a bit trickier for her.

Counting out loud (with a few corrections at the end from Mama), she put all the eggs in order.  I love the wavy line she made, and I love that 13 is totally upside down.  :)

We were having so much fun, X needed to come check things out.  He beelined for the basket first, touching the fuzzy pipecleaners, and then crinkling some of the paper.

He even raided the carrot garden.  Poor bunnies!

Bunny Land has been a big hit over here.  I love that it folds up to store when you aren't using it (or need to vacuum ).  I am planning on putting it away with our Easter decorations and bringing it out again next year.  Crazy to think that X will actually be an active participant in next year's Bunny Land play!

Oh, and for those of you who are wondering, yes the dinos have now visited Bunny Land.  Apparently dinosaurs really enjoy eating carrots.  You learn something new every day!  ;)

Have you seen our other Easter-themed activities?

Three Ways to Hunt Easter Eggs in the Dark

Edible Art: Easter Egg Toast

Melted White Crayon and Liquid Watercolor Easter Eggs

Toothbrush Painted Eggs

An Eggsperiment with Natural Dyes

Tie-Dyed Easter Eggs

Giant Easter Egg Art

Life-Sized Easter Basket

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.

No Sew Dinosaur World Playmat

Preschooler +

S LOVES dinosaurs.  So very much.  I had some felt scraps from working on another project (a doorway puppet theater for her school auction) and so I thought I'd try making a felt playmat.  It turned out great and though it ended up being a little time consuming because of the details we added, it could be a pretty quick project - and felt is certainly cheap!  I'd recommend taking a trip to a fabric store to get a yard or two of the main color you want to be using - for all the other parts we were able to use the smaller felt squares from Michaels.  To make ours extra thick, I did a layer of off-white (which became the beach sand) and layered green "grass" over the top.  This gave it a bit more structure.  My husband ultimately cut a piece of cardboard to go underneath the mat to make it easier to move (it will really grip the carpet).  All you need other than a larger piece (or pieces) of felt to get going is a glue gun, glue sticks for said glue gun, scissors, and felt squares in various colors.  

I wanted to make a multi-featured playmat, so ours did take a few hours to make, but you could always take a simpler approach by eliminating some of the features, or making them less detailed.  This was a weekend project - my husband watched the baby while S and I worked (OK, she worked a little, but mostly played on the playmat while it was being built - she just couldn't wait!)

I knew I wanted a volcano.  I was hoping to make one that was big enough that dinos could "fall" inside and be rescued.  It was actually a lot easier than I though it would be!  I just took two pieces of felt and sort of made a cone shape.  I made sure that the top was big enough for her hand and then started gluing and shaping as I went.  After it was all glued, I trimmed the excess with scissors - and voila!  Since it is not stuffed/stitched, it does require some puffing from time to time, but overall it holds its shape remarkably well.

 Rescuing T. Rex from inside the volcano.  He falls in a lot.

We asked my friends for input as we were making the playmat and someone suggested a tar pit.  I did two layers of felt on top of each other with a slit in the middle of the top layer.  This way the littler dinos can completely hide, but her bigger dino bones can peek out a bit in a rather dramatic fashion.  Haha.

I made the cave the same way as the volcano.  I laid out a single sheet of brown felt the way I wanted it, and then glued and shaped as I went.  I trimmed the excess.  And just like the volcano, it does need to be puffed occasionally, but generally holds its shape.

We also made a beach with swatches of different textured sandpaper (just glued it down) and various shells that we had left over from X's beach discovery bottle.  At the recommendation of another friend, we added some loose sticks and S has since taken some pieces of moss and some pine needles from the nature sensory board and added those as well.

I made the coconut trees by rolling tubes of felt, gluing them, and then stuffing the insides with polyester stuffing.  I think if I were doing it again, I'd also throw in a pipe cleaner to make it easier to position the trees.  The leaves are just felt pieces and the coconuts are brown pom-poms.

All in all, it was a very inexpensive project, and though it took several hours to make, it has gotten SO much use, I feel it was really worth the time it took to make.  S has come up with several scenarios, and spends several chunks of time each day quietly playing with her dinos...who have been joined by a penguin, sting ray, and goat.  Because they also wanted to play.

For even more dinosaur fun, be sure to check out our Dinosaur Fossils and our Dinosaurs and Sticky Mud Small World!

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Please always supervise your infant/child at play.  Please stay within arms reach and never leave infants/children unattended.