Reversible play mat

Following on from the farm play mat, and Monty's new interest in cars, and also from a recent family lunch out (trying to keep him entertained), I decided to make a play mat that can fit in a bag, roughly the size of a large table mat, that can go everywhere with us. 






It's not easy to make a lot of roads with such a small mat so a figure eight shape seemed best. 

I had this fabric with colourful hills and houses and thought it might be nice to cut around the shapes in the fabric rather than cut straight lines across it.  Then I just stitched around the shapes.

To keep it all together I made a drawstring bag in similar colours - roughly A4 size including a 1cm seam allowance and enough for the fold to encase the drawstring.

And to make it even more fun, I made it reversible with a dinosaur side!  I made a little water hole for the dinosaurs and stitched some other dinosaurs around the edges. 

The bag holds the mat, a little car and helicopter and three pocket sized dinosaurs. 

I think we should lunch out again soon just to test it!

Car Printing

It's been a while since we had the paint out so today we decided to have another go.
We started with the little brushes and printing pads but he just wanted to lick them again and I seemed to be doing most of the actual painting.

Then I remembered when I worked with under fives that we sometimes used cars for printing with.  









Monty is just loving cars just now so we had a go at rolling it through the paint and suddenly he was more interested in watching the tracks appear instead of licking the paint. 

Rolling very fast!

Not bad for a first painting is it...and he did it all by himself.

But I couldn't resist using up the leftover paint at the end by taking a print with the paper. 


Now I just need to find a spot to hang them!