Parenting Seminars

Friday, June 3, 2011

Craft Week - Travel checkerboard game

Our friend Henry was turning 5 and we needed a fantastic five year old birthday gift!  Lucy has been more and more interested in games and I've been thinking about ones that can move around with us easily.  Boxes with corners torn and pieces falling all over the place just doesn't cut it. 
 But a simple fabric roll in a bag with fun, heavy, shiny checkers...now that's cool!
 To make the board, I used a simple piece of muslin and created a checkerboard stencil with parchment paper. The kind with wax on one side.  I had never done this before but I'm in love with the technique!!  You just iron the parchment on to the fabric and stencil away.  It peels off easily without leaving a residue.  As long as you have the patience and attention to detail to create the stencil to begin with, this is super easy.  I used fabric paint and then added a cool patterned fabric to the back with a ribbon at the end.  I also added a piece of velcro to the ribbon after practicing the tri-fold that made sense for this set up.
With the addition of a matching drawstring bag, the whole package is complete.  The only frustrating part was that I chose washers as my checkers and tried to paint half.  But the paint kept scratching.  I had to sand them all down again and ended up coloring them with a sharpie marker.  I think that is working better. 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I made some ctack-tack board out of tiles i found at a 2nd hand store..just marked off the squares with permanent marker then put x's and o's on rocks for the pieces...keds made it at a camp i did...they loved doing it and hope they used them...we use ours!

Anonymous said...

I love it! I really like the texture of the squares with the fabric paint. We haven't made it through an entire game yet, but Henry loves the jumping rule :-)