hopscotch mat...hot glue!!! - A girl and a glue gun

This originally posted at the IDEA ROOM. I was so excited when amy asked me to guest post because the idea room was one of the first blogs that i followed.

anyways…..I wanted something big….and hot glue and came up with this:

(oh..and there are about 100 pictures. i kept emailing amy making sure that it was okay cause heaven forbid I edit.)

so it was spring break! whoopie. I thought I would send the kids outside and get some freaking peace some cleaning done.

it snowed.

and it was cold

and windy.

Idaho really sucks sometimes.

so I thought I had better think fast and come up with some outside games that could be done inside.

hopscotch.

classic.

I went to joanns (shoutout!) and bought me some white canvas stuff. (it was 6.99 a yard…but I had my 50% off coupon)

I acutally went to home depot first to find a drop cloth but the smallest I could find was a 5 ft by 5 ft (for about the same price) so if anyone is a mad 4 square player you could buy that and do it up right.

I was on the fence about whether to hot glue stuff to it or paint…..

but I finally went with hot glue…I mean I’ve got to live up to the name right? but for the record…paint would be easy to do (as long as your canvas is thick enough) or you could even sew fabric…but those methods require a bit more work.

I bought two yards and cut it in half….but that makes two mats….so you could just buy one yard and sew the ends together to make one long mat (does that make any sense at all? basically..you want one long piece of fabric…by any means necessary)

the easy peasy way is to get those felt sheets….(I think about 25cents a piece)

I have quite a collection of felt….so I cut whatever colors I needed to size

(sidenote: when working with felt…sharp scissors are your friend)

I had a “helper” lay them out (and try them out)

if you notice..she is on a different color for each picture…

Then I had another “helper” take off the stickers on the felt sheets

and then try it out

and then ANOTHER helper laid it out exactly how she wanted the colors to be…

see how desperate we are for some entertainment!!!!

back to the task at hand

I folded the mat in half and rounded the edges of the top part of the mat

then I “hemmed” the edges using my hot glue gun

I took my felt pieces and traced the numbers

and cut it out (you could use a stencil if needs be)

Then I just hot glued the pieces right onto the canvas (make sure all the edges are glued down nice and tight seeing how there is going to be a lot of jumping on it)

(see the vacuum cord? that is what I SHOULD have been doing!)

this is where you could STOP..

BUT..I had all these leftover scraps…and I hate letting things go to waste…so I started cutting circles..

and then I added them around my mat as a border

I dug some rocks out of the frozen tundra and had my little helpers paint them

{a wall also got painted purple. awesome.}

Then you just shove all your furniture against the wall

and go to town

the best part (other than getting your kids to leave you alone so you can blog)

it folds up nice and small..

now of course..I had a whole other blank side…

so I added a few more games on the back.

and a little bag to hold all the pieces:

the tic tac toe was just some strips of felt:

the tic tac toe pieces are just x and o’s on some squares

and the target is just some “pieces of pie” cut out and then I cut out some numbers

for the “bombs” (that is what my son calls them) I just cut out some asterisk shapes

fill with some beans

then I just hot glued the sides up

and wrapped a rubber band around it

and hot glued some felt around the rubber band

then I just snipped the pieces to make it poofy.

they just stand at the top of the mat and chuck them and if they land on a number…they can add them up and the one with the biggest number wins (did you see what I did there….I added some math…and the kids will have so much fun playing that they will NEVER KNOW…{insert evil laugh} it’s like when you grate carrots and put them in brownies! little things that make us feel like we are winning the parents vs kids game.

Then I made a hot glue felt bag to hold all the stuff in it ( I should have made it bigger to hold the mat too….you live and learn)