Travel & Leisure: Trailer Park Felt Board set

Flannel board playsets are a perennial favorite for young children and their teachers. Small felt or felt-backed pieces will stick to a flannel board without adhesive, and can readily be moved around and manipulated. Many flannel board playsets are commercially available, including dress-up dolls, story sets, geometric shapes, numbers and letters. They're perfect for learning and clean, imaginative rainy day play.

Despite the variety offered, we were dissatisfied with their cost and to some degree their subject matter. They struck us as a trifle insipid.

What if, we wondered, we could create something interesting and unique that was cheaper? What if we could make something educational, something which would help our child understand the way of life led by his not-so-distant ancestors? Our trailer park play set is the result. We hope you'll find making it as enjoyable as we did, and find the techniques useful in creating your own designs.

How to make a felt or flannel board

To get the full benefit of the trailer park play set, you'll need a flannel board to stick the pieces to. Flannel boards can be purchased, of course - we've seen 2 x 3 foot flannel boards offered for $30 - 40 at local teacher supply stores. However, they're extremely fast, simple and cheap to make. Ours only took five minutes to make with a scrap piece of hardboard we had in the garage, $3 worth of felt, and some hot melt glue. You can make your own with just a few materials:

• Plywood, cardboard, poster board or hardboard.
  • Bigger doesn't necessarily mean better. A 2x3-foot board is perfect for leaning against a wall or a child's easel, and has the advantage of being small enough that it can be put away after play is done. A 1-foot square board would be good for carrying on trips.
• A piece of flannel or felt large enough to cover the board
  • Flannel and felt are pretty cheap, but if you wait for a sale at the fabric store you'll get it even cheaper.
• Duct tape, staple gun and staples, hot melt glue, or tacks
  • A staple gun might be best for heavier-weight materials like plywood. We found hot melt glue perfect for use on cardboard and hardboard. And of course, in a pinch duct tape will work on almost anything, for awhile at least.
    

To create your board:

• Wrap the flannel/felt around the board
• Secure the edges to the back with glue, duct tape, staples or tacks

How to make the trailer park playset

Now that you have a flannel board, you're ready to make the trailer park playset!

The trailer park pieces are created by printing the pattern pieces onto cotton inkjet printer sheets, fusing the inkjet fabric to felt, then cutting the pieces out. This method makes figures which are colorful, are fairly colorfast, and which stick to a felt board quite nicely.

To create the pieces for the trailer park playset, you'll need a few supplies:

• Our downloadable pattern pieces (page 1, page 2)
• Cotton inkjet printer sheets
  • These should be readily available at craft, fabric and computer stores.
  • We used the 8-1/2 x 11" sheets made of cotton, rather than silk. Cotton works a little better when you want the finished pieces to stick to each other, for example when making dress up dolls.
  • The sheets usually come in packages of ten or so. This project only uses two, so you'll have some left over for other projects. There are many crafts you can do with them, or perhaps you'd like to print clip art or photos on to them and make your own flannel board designs!
• Color inkjet printer
  • If you don't have one at home, places such as FedEx/Kinkos may have printers you can use.
• 2 pieces white felt with adhesive backing
  -or-
  2 pieces white felt and double stick fusible webbing (we used Steam-A-Seam2)
  

Printing the pieces
Begin by determining which way to lay the fabric sheets in the paper tray of your printer. To do that, make a pencil mark on a piece of printer paper, put it in the printer tray with the pencil mark facing down, and print something on it. If the printing comes out on the same side as the pencil mark, you'll need to lay your fabric sheet fabric side down.

Next, print the downloadable pattern pieces on the ink jet printer sheets following manufacturer's directions. Our pattern uses two fabric sheets. We highly recommend that you only place one sheet in the printer tray at a time.

Next, adhere your fabric printout to felt. If you've gotten felt with an adhesive backing, that should be pretty straightforward. Otherwise, use fusible webbing. Usually the webbing is sticky on both sides, and it's sandwiched between two pieces of glossy paper. Peel off one of the paper pieces and lay the sticky surface that's revealed on one of your felt sheets. Next, peel off the other paper piece and lay your printout on top of the felt and webbing sandwich.

You are going to need to iron your sandwich to make the adhesive stick permanently. Before ironing, trim off any stray bits of webbing that are sticking out of your sandwich; those can stick to the iron and gum it up. You should also open a window or otherwise ventilate the room you're working in; the printer ink smells bad when it gets hot, and it probably isn't healthy to breathe.

The webbing package will probably recommend using steam. We don't recommend doing that, on the off chance that it will make the ink run. We had good success simply using a very hot iron. However, if you want to try steam, try it on a small sample to see if it does make the ink run.

Once you're done ironing and your felt-and-printout sandwich has cooled, cut out the individual playset pieces.