Birthday Play Mats

Crafting for boys is always a bit tricky (as those of you who are parents of boys would know) so I was super excited to come across these play mats (and here) on Serving Pink Lemonade. My twin nephews turned 5 in August and I thought these would be perfect for them.

Now, if you've been around here a while you may know that I have a tendency to over think things and frequently end up doing things the hard way. This was one of those times.

I decided to make 3 mats for each of the boys: one town for driving cars, one landscape for playing with dinosaurs and one street scene for playing with Spider Man (one nephew is slightly obsessed with Spider Man).

I sketched my plans and quickly decided I wanted to make them 11" x 17" and foldable. I started out with felt but after many attempts I gave up. I kept envisioning painted fabric for the backgrounds. I had some heavy weight cotton canvas from an old couch cover that was perfect for this project.

After painting I added details to each with felt cutouts sewn to the painted canvas. I backed each one with some lightweight denim (forgot to take a picture of it). I made binding strips and sewed it on by machine (which took 5 or 6 false starts before I was happy with it)(oy).







I'm really happy with how they turned out. I found tubes of tiny dinosaurs, Hot Wheels cars & Spider Man figures that are all the perfect sizes (and they were all on sale for really cheap! score!) to go with the mats.

And, to further demonstrate how I can't ever just let enough be enough, I made a tote bag for each boy to carry the mats folded and all the cars, dinos & Spider Man(s).



They're made out of a lightweight denim (the same as the back of the mats) with webbing straps. I cut the boys' initials out of felt and just sewed it on to the bags before sewing.

The package is on the way to them now, but my nephews don't read my blog (that I know of) so it should be okay to post this. :)

I haven't been very good at keeping up around here lately. Thank you all for the kind comments and for reading even when I'm not very good at posting regularly! I have pictures from summer projects and will try to get caught up over the next week or so.

As for today, we're finally supposed to have some nice weather so I'm going to try to get out there. While the rest of the continent seemed to be going through the hottest summer in a long time, Alberta had a cool, rainy summer. I heard that we had less than 15 days above 25C all summer long (last year during the same time period we had 46 days above 25C). The coming week's forecast for 20C weather is making me happy, even with the trees turning colors already. I have fall knitting projects in the works which I'll try to get in progress shots of soon.