When I was trying to think up some new and interesting activity bags recently, I remembered a couple posts I had seen about shower curtain playmats. They are so cool! I first heard about them through Jen (I think?), who had linked over to Filth Wizardry's excellent how-to post about this. I still have yet to actually do it for my girls, since the activity bags were for other people this time, but I am definitely still planning to!
Part of the intrigue of course is the HUGE size, but for the sake of activity bags I cut them down to about 2' by 2'. Not quite the same, but still fun and a lot more portable. I bought an "eco-friendly" PVC-free shower curtain (at Fred Meyers, for PNW-ers) because I'm nervous about the offgassy regular ones. It was a couple bucks more but still really cheap! Then you take some permanent markers and have at it!
Here is my first playmat. I copied the idea from Filth Wizardry for the road-making tool -- taping two markers to a larger marker (for the larger ones I think she used a juice bottle). I taped the edges when I was drawing to keep it from moving around. It was a little nerve-wracking just jumping in freehand, especially since I was giving these away and not just keeping it for myself! Sorry the images are not great -- I don't know how to take good pics of this kind of thing!
Playmat number two was a bit more detailed:
Once you are done (or while you are working, ha ha) the kids can color the playmat with crayons or permanent markers. We'll be sticking the the crayons here, unless the babies are in bed! In the activity bags I added a couple matchbox type cars (though what I really wanted were some even smaller ones), some free people that I got from a toystore giveaway thing, and some little plastic animals.
My kids were really interested in it and Emma helped a lot with ideas for the second one, but we have no action shots yet, since these were both packed up for other people. I'll post pictures of ours when we finally do it here, which will be soon because Emma keeps asking about it!
Posted by laura on March 12, 2010 at 02:25 AM PST #
Posted by Joanne on March 12, 2010 at 06:32 AM PST #
Posted by Marilyn @ A Lot of Loves\ on March 12, 2010 at 02:55 PM PST #
Posted by Angela on April 17, 2010 at 04:01 PM PDT #