Homemade Toys-- Lacing Cards

I keep an old popcorn tin on a shelf in the back room. Inside, I keep a variety of quiet activities for those times when my three year old is bored, or just wants to do something different (or those times I desperately need a moment to finish supper...). Many of the things inside are homemade or re-purposed items (for an example, here's my favorite recipe for play-dough. Just as good as the store-bought stuff). 

Today, we made some lacing cards to add to the collection. 

We started with some cereal boxes, flattened out. 

The best crafts all start with stuff you normally throw in the trash. :) 

Then I had the three-year-old use a glue stick (if you plan on trying this craft yourself, using a glue stick, rather than school glue or paste, is important to keep the pictures from wrinkling and getting soggy, and it's easier to keep from getting all over the place) to paste pictures I cut out of a free in-store magazine from the local farm supply store and a calendar we got in the mail.

We then set them aside to dry for awhile (and I shored up the three-year-old's glue job).

Meanwhile, I made laces. All I had on hand was string-- thin, floppy, and hard for little hands to handle. I decided to braid what I had to make a thicker, more easily manageable lace. (If you have shoelaces handy that you can devote to this, use those instead. This part is a bit finicky). 

I started by cutting about three, three feet lengths (ish...I didn't actually measure, just eyeballed) of string. 

I used masking tape (most types of tape will work-- this is what I happened to have on hand) to bind the ends together to make a stiff section that would be easy to manipulate through the holes on the cards. 

I used a clothespin to hold the strings in place, and then I braided them.  Once I reached the other end, I finished it with more tape. 

Finished lace. 

Going back to the cardboard-- after the glue had dried, I cut out the cardboard shapes...

then borrowed my husband's three-hole-punch to punch holes on the edges for the laces to go through. 

I figured out that the center hole was actually the easiest to use for this-- the ones on the edges forced me up against the edges of the punch and I ended up with a couple holes that went right through the edges, like bites out of a cookie. Once I switched to the center, I had enough wiggle room to prevent that. 

And that's all there was to it! To play with it, all the toddler has to do is "sew" the lace through the holes.  Simple, cheap, and (hopefully) entertaining.



An idea occurred to me as I was wrapping this post up -- A possible variation of this would be to use pictures from last year's "holy art" calendar or your mother-in-law's old Magnificat magazines and use these in a "going to church" bag (my personal philosophy is that for small children, playing with quiet religious themed toys in church counts as "prayer through play". Helps keep our Sundays a little more sane).