Home-made presents for boys—the car play mat…

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Trying to find home-made present ideas for boys is not easy!!  This past Christmas I toiled for weeks trying to figure out if there was anything I could make for my toddler little guy.  I wanted something meaningful, not too expensive, and not too time consuming—that shouldn’t be too much to ask, right??

I finally settled on making him a car play mat.  I had lofty ideas of sewing everything on the mat, and making all sorts of details by hand and then I started researching the best methods to adhere felt—and hot glue was the answer!  Which made this project much less labor intensive!!

I made a rough design on paper and included a soccer field, swimming pool, and airport.  I had already planned on making some wooden people for each of my kids and I thought some little soccer players would be cute!  Then I bought felt from the bolt from our local Hobby Lobby and I was ready to start.

I cut out the roads first, and then all the buildings and arranged them around the roads.  I wanted to label the buildings so I could eventually teach my little guy to recognize the names of places.  I tried writing with a permanent marker on felt—and it was a mess!  The marker tip smears and just pulls up felt fuzz and makes it look awful.  I went back to Hobby Lobby in search of a solution, and found sticky-backed felt that isn’t so fuzzy as regular felt.  It is perfect for writing on!

I hot glued everything on and backed the whole thing with iron on Pellon so it was a little more structured.

This is how it turned out…

The runway landing/take off strip has white felt glued on for the lines, but the rest of the road lines I drew with a permanent marker. 

So cute to see him play with it Christmas morning!

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