Busy bags

One of the ladies in my community posted this link with the awesome idea of doing a busy bag party ourselves. If you have no idea what a busy bag is, I suggest following the link, but I will give you a brief overview.

Busy bags are educational, mind enriching, activity bags that are self contained, easily transportable and usually homemade. Seriously, that link above is full of amazingness!!

So in preparation for our gathering and swapping of bags, I made a mini felt board.

As you can see the board and all it's pieces fit inside a ziplock bag and can easily be stuffed into a diaper bag or purse and taken along for use on plane rides, in waiting rooms, in the car or at home when mom is burnt out of ideas.

As I gathered felt and hot glue, I searched for inspiration on how to make the board part not a flimsy, frustrating mess for a 2-year old strapped into a carseat. I didn't find any help, so I'm gonna share what I did, in case someone else goes looking.

First: I started by cutting the sheets of felt into quarters.

Then I sized cut up pieces of cereal boxes to hot glue between the pieces of felt, making enough for all 10 Momma's that would be at the bag swap on Saturday (everyone makes a different batch and then we all get together, swap them and leave with 10 new activities to entertain and stimulate our children's brains).

Afterwards, I hot glued a box piece to one piece of felt and then glued the other piece of felt over the board, sealing the edges and making it a reversible board.

Finally, I cut out random shapes that fit the scale of the board and could easily be used for creating multiple scenes. 

Naturally the next step was to let Emagene try it out and see if it "worked." Apparently it does!

 The turtle and flower blossom are from a set of felt stickers I found at Joann's fabrics. They were too cute not to include, but i highly recommend de-sticky-ing them by rubbing them on the carpet or something. They are easily reusable stickers, unless they stick together at which point separating them is nearly impossible!

And there you have it, my go at busy bags.