Party Favors

I've had to remind myself repeatedly this past week that I like making things. I picked something to make for party favors because I wanted to. It's that trying-to-have-more-homemade thing. In general, my urge to re-purpose things, to make things myself, to have a result that wasn't industrially extruded seems has been growing stronger over time. But I have to say that it came close to being extinguished after this little project.

It's an easy project. I just made too many of them. I had a lot of fun up to a point, and then I just got stressed with it. So, if you make these, make a couple, not 26.

These are activity pads. They are like a clipboard, but instead of a clip, there is a ribbon tied through the pages. I chose them because it was something I wanted to have for my kids. I wanted a small format and stiff backing for Zack to color on at the doctor's office, in the church pew, or in his carseat. I wanted to make him a bunch of mazes since he's maze-crazy these days. And after seeing the great hand-drawn artwork from flipflops&applesauce, I was itching to draw some coloring pages. After working on my own, I can see how very well done hers are!

The backings of these are old boardbooks that I picked up at Goodwill and cut apart with a box cutter and punched with a regular hole punch. Then I covered each with scraps of fabric I already had using elmer's glue. The edges of the fabric are wrapped around the edges then covered by a sheet of paper. I drew some of the pages and made the others on the computer, adding hand-drawn borders or woodland creatures.

Lucky me, Office Depot sent me a free $10 copy card in the mail, which covered all the copies with some to spare. And, they had a large paper cutter, so the cutting was super fast. Here is my excellent helper, James' mom, punching and collating pages!

And here are the finished pads. Zack promptly did all his pages and I'm supposed to make him some more!