Kids Makey 1 - Fabric Card Treasure Hunt

Oh hello! Hello computer! Hello you!
May I please say sorry again for my absence. I have just recovered from a dreadful bout of viral tonsillitis which knocked me for six for TEN days! Isn't that outrageous? Ten days - don't bugs know children don't step down when their mother's ill? Seriously, it was emergency measures all week, family members drafted in, friends helping with lifts; I was really bed-ridden. As I said to my sister, if this were neolithic times and survival of the fittest were at the fore, I'd have been left behind by my tribe and eaten by a bear, picked over by dogs and maybe trodden on by a mammoth, just to cover off the likely creatures of Southern Britain back then. Snuffled at by a hedgehog maybe. She said, ooh no, they'd be venerating you as some ancient old mystic goddess coz you're so old, and they'd get one of the big strong cavemen to carry you.
Yeah, thanks for that, Sister, I'm only in my mid thirties. Ish.
Most insulting to walloped so by a virus, though, most insulting.

Anyway, ok, so not a particularly auspicious start to my Kids Makey Series, but this Makey is nice and easy and fun. Do this for your own kids, and for entertaining kids at your house - aren't you just such the hostess?

This is for all you fabric lovers out there whose houses are filled with things you've made, and from which you've still got bits of fabric lying around. Last year, I did an Easter treasure hunt for my little girls, who were one and a half and nearly three at the time, and so not reading yet. This year they're two and a half and nearly four (see that, maths, first thing in the morning - that's not sensible is it?) so we still needed something visual, and these lovely things gave me an idea - a fabric treasure hunt.
Now, knowing it might be their father who was helping them, I had to bear in mind that he wouldn't have a dickie bird where any of the fabric was. Not a detail person Their Father. He's more big picture; general, rough idea and take it from there. So it's what's that? Large and squashy, it's probably a sofa, I'll sit on it. Big and sort of clothy and by a window, ah, probably curtains, I'll open and close 'em; large and warm and on a bed, some sort of blanket thing is it? Snore.
As for the patterns therein, forget it.
So I had to put little wordy clues on there to help them all out, and also because when the children are older and can read, it will help them figure it out for themselves.
Incidentally, I tested the cards on The Husb the evening before, when I was making them, and out of 14, he correctly identified, I think, how many was it, er, yes that's right, 3. To be fair, that was without the word clues, just to make it doubly difficult for him. But still, honestly. One of them was right by his ear on a throw on the sofa - he was staring at the card saying "Green stripes? Green stripey thing? No way. I have never seen that in my life, where the devil is it? That must be hidden in some old pants or something." And there it was, shouting in his ear. He didn't understand why I was laughing so much.

A n y w a y .....this is a nice and easy thing to make, great if you're a beginner sewing machine user; and there are variations on the theme - you could use printable fabric to print out and use close-up photos of objects or patterns they need to search for if you don't have an abundance of fabric-made things, for example. Take a close-up of a cheese grater, a key-hole, the detail on a shoe, and photograph things from funny angles to really tax older children's brains.
I printed out my little rhyming couplets on paper, because I really liked that font, but you could handwrite them if you preferred.
I cut the edges of my bits of fabric with pinking shears, but this is mainly because I think pinking shears are fab; it's not necessary at all - and use whatever shapes you fancy. You could add another dimension to the game by cutting the fabric into a letter or shape, which conveys meaning in some way...ah the possibilities!

I used:
Plain white A4 card (220 gsm is perfect) cut into 4 rectangles (any bigger and you will not be able to fit into your sewing machine!)
Fabric swatches, scraps, and bits.
Pinking shears
Sewing machine
White thread
Fabric glue (although any would do)
Font for poem clues: Colonna MT

Lightly stick your fabric and words in place with just a few little dots of glue (not too much or you'll get glue on your needle), and begin to machine sew. Start at a corner and try and stitch in a continuous line if possible, just to save you having to lift and drop the needle and snip threads too often. You don't need to backstitch at the beginning and end. When you have finished your stitching and removed your card from the machine, turn the card over and tug at the thread on the back gently - it will pull the 'top' thread through to the back a little - pull it all the way through, and trim it to 1 inch or so - not too close to the card or your stitching may work loose.
And you're done!

If I were making them again, or if I find time one day, I would at this point stick another piece of card over the back to disguise the stitching, and as a pocket for popping a little pressie in. I decided against giving the girls a chocolate egg or sweet every time they found a card, in case they turned on me in a sugar inflated frenzy come 11am and hyerpactivated themselves completely bonkers upon my person.
Besides, I had another 'how to make this game longer' plan up my sleeve - a sticker scene. Their first activity then, was to colour in this lovely Easter Egg, which we laminated (oh, laminators, I love thee...) so they could stick stickers on it. Had I planned ahead I'd have gone long with this, and planned a proper A4 rustic Easter scene, to be completed with seasonally appropriate stickers of chicks and bunnies and baskets and bonnets and eggs and all sorts. As it was, I rounded up as many stickers as I could lay my hands on, and they included flowers, fruits, rhinoceroses, dinosaurs, helicopters, Christmas trees and pirates. Did the girls criticise my motley crue of stickers? Or course not, they were like - ooh Hetty, a flamingo! Ooh, have you got a rocket, Isla, I have!I attached a sticker wrapped in tissue paper to each card, using a paper clip (you see, a nice pocket would definitely work better wouldn't it, hm? Ah, prototypes.) And every time they found a card they had to stick the sticker on their sticker scene. Once they had 14, they could claim their Easter Egg, hoorah!
In the end, it was me who did the treasure hunt with them, and from beginning to end, including the colouring in, it took a whopping great total time of 35 minutes. Which is bonkers after all that work, but I was probably helping them out a bit to remove the risk of them going off-piste or losing interest. With older kids I think you could leave them to it much more, and retire to somewhere secret, like your greenhouse, with a cup of hot chocolate and a delicious dark chocolate Easter Egg...mmmmm.....

Ratbags

Once, the Husb, during a part of his childhood spent in Mexico, got stuck in a bathroom for 6 hours. There he perched atop the loo in terror, unable to reach and unlock the door, while a huge black rat lurked and prowled, presumably trying to figure out how to eat him. This memory, and I think in general the memory of whopping great enormous Mexican rats, has rendered him, how shall we say, somewhat unkeen on the creatures in question.
He was therefore not amused when I tried casually to break it to him that we had rats. I very nearly ended up with divorce papers on my doorstep, because it is of course, all my fault. You see, I have a compost heap. Two in fact; the Dalek kind (for those of you across the pond who are not familiar with the Dr Who television programme, this is those big black plastic ones - they look like the evil protagonists called Daleks who are the enemy of a time-travelling, um, time-lord type person, who whizzes round the universe, I think, in an old English police-box or... oh really, don't worry, it's not important). The Husb has never liked my compostification of things, especially peelings and eggshells and stuff, and shuddered visibly every time he saw me marching out there to compostify my old bits of potato. "We'll get rats!" he would shriek irrationally. Of course I pooh-poohed him and raised my eyes to the heavens, marching purposefully out there, compost bound, with my old bits of cauliflower.
However, as I stood at my kitchen window a month ago, who should I see but a jolly brown rat, milling casually around our fallen apples, scooting around under the shed, lurking suspiciously by the compost bins, and popping off to other gardens, dragging his apples with him. And then his pal too. Or most probably his good lady wife. Very attractive nice lady rat she was, and no doubt really pregnant with a litter of like, a million babies.
Ahem.
To cut a long story short, I dealt with the problem (lovely ratty multi-storey town-house dwelling in my compost bin = council rat man = what a lovely fellow = ah, yes, they're in yer compost bin = poison 'em = dead rats = possible daughter poisoning = better come clean to the Husb who is playing out in the garden...)
The husb was not amused. It was, he claimed all down to the two eggshells he had seen me put in the compost bin last August, which had apparently attracted and sustained an entire family of rats throughout the long, cold winter. I retorted that it was in fact the apples we had negligently failed to clean up for 6 months and which were giving the rats A Food Source. I had no idea. I honestly thought rats liked things like burgers. Not apples; I mean that's a bit wholesome isn't it? They did look quite wholesome actually; I think they were probably quite rustic, as rats go.
Anyway, the rats are no more, and the disposing of the compost and the dead rats brought about our garden makeover, a project hitherto only vaguely on the horizon, and precipitated by our ratty removal antics.
Which brings me at last to my point, which is - where on earth have I been?
What a lapse in blogging. I mean, how can I hope for a nice bunch of comments and new Followers (of whom I have a couple - hello you!) if I neglect my blog? Tsk.
Garden planning is where. Never mind drawing up plans for nice sewing projects, I've been printing out graph paper and drawing gazebos and leafing through 89 gardening books and 14 gardening magazines and comparing paving slabs and fences and borders and shrubs and and prancing about out there with tape measures, and liaising and negotiating and purchasing and price-checking and oh my goodness. And as you know from my pencil-roll boasts, I do like a bit of planning.
So that, and a 4th birthday party in less than 2 weeks (expect more desperate posts on that matter in the coming days) means my Makeys have been on the scant side.
Except for my tour de force that is - the lovely quilted bag o'pens at the top there - for 4 year old Isobel. It's got a little colouring book in it, and 12 pens, and I painstakingly designed the pattern myself whilst the Husb and his best pal painted the outside of the house and the daughters ran total riot around me upstairs.
And I am thinking - it's about time I started putting some of these things out there isn't it? So, to make up for my lazy blogging, I am gearing up for a nice series of How-To tutorials, one of which will be the quilted bag o'pens. Get yer needles poised ladies, collect up some pretty fabric, and prepare to become obsessed with Making Gifts for Kids, which will be the first series.
But I'll warn you now, I haven't tried any soft toy patterns yet.
But I could do.
I could start with a nice friendly giant rat...