A Felt Board For LIttle Badger

When I was little the local library where I lived had a felt board in the kids area. And every time I went there with my mom or after school I would skip past the books, past the computers (the big ol clunky 5 1/4" floppy disk using kind), past all the other toys, and straight to the back corner and stay glued to the felt board till my mom came to drag me away.

So when I started planning my future family I knew one thing was for sure, my little one(s) would have a felt board.

And even though my Little Badge is only 8 1/2 months old now and won't understand the concept of it for a while,  I still went ahead and made one for his play room. This way some of the mom's I invite over can bring their older kids and they won't be entirely board surrounded by baby toys. :) 

So, the materials, if you don't have the felt and batting on hand, can rack up pretty quick but it was worth it to me.  Then again it also depends on how big you make your board. I wanted to filled a fairly big spot of wall so I made mine 2' x 4'. 

To begin you'll need:

• One 1/2" thick board in your size choice  (Again I went it 2' x 4')
• 1 solid piece of felt large roughly the size of your board + 8" to length and width. 
• 1 solid piece of upholstery batting size of board + 6" to length and width.
• A staple gun (make sure you have enough staples for your gun as you'll be putting a staple in roughly every couple inches)
• Scissors
 

Lay down felt, and batting and trim to size around board.	First pull in and staple down corners. Work in opposites.
Next pull one side tight and staple. Then do the opposite side.	Repeat with the other two sides. Then trim off excess felt.

And easy as that!

For the shapes just go crazy. Free hand some specific fun shapes (like clouds, grass, circles, cars, people, animals). For the straight edged shapes I just zipped them all out with a rotary cutter but and exacto knife and a ruler will work lovely as well.

Mount where you want it and have fun! (Or let the little ones have fun.)

In the end I up spending about $60-$70 on the large piece of felt for covering the board,  the batting for making it soft, and the small squares of felt for cutting out shapes.  I could have probably gone of bit cheaper by just getting a 1/4 meter of 2 or 3 colours for cutting shapes but I'm a sucker for variety so I got about 15 craft sized sheets of all different colours.

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