a jolly good day

we had a lovely family day yesterday!  Everyone had a good time, especially of course all the kids 🙂

The slip and slide that we bought for the nephews and neices was a big hit- it’s a double one with arcs of sprinkling water over both lanes as you slide.  Like this- but I couldn’t find a picture with the water coming out over the lanes unfortunately.

And there was of course all the good food- curries, rice, pakhoras, homemade naan bread and later that day we finally had plum pudding. 

I finally finished sewing on the bajillion million trillion buttons onto all the 54 squares (4 per square), after I had an idea for a tulip garden square

and don’t they look cute all ready to play with?

So I got my road play mat out later on when the excitement had calmed down somewhat, but unfortunately it was not a huge success.  Not like last year’s crochet cupcakes anyway.  The trouble is that each piece can only be attached one way- if you rotate them they don’t connect so the first difficulty was just creating the track with turns and straight roads, and then the second big difficulty was buttoning it altogether.  Now I knew the kids wouldn’t be able to do it on their own, but I didn’t realise it was going to take one adult (me) half an hour to attach all the squares together- by which time of course the kids had lost interest.  This is the first one we made (my 6 year old niece was helping me and Basti)

She was tickled that the little vegetables could be pulled out of the garden patch, but then tried to pick off the flowers and the trees etc which thankfully I had stitched on well!  And then she had the good idea to hatch out last year’s crochet dinosaurs and place them on the mat where they camoflaged best.  So that was fun.

And then I played with it for a bit and made this one

So visually, beautiful, and a great concept, but practically not really workable as an activity for kids.  My trouble is if I throw in the towel and unpick all the buttons (gasp!) and sew it together as a ready made play mat, that I can’t see it really get much use.  I’m racking my brains for a better way to connect the pieces that kids can do on their own and that also involves no (buttons or clasps) on the underside- the pieces mostly are able to be flipped and rotated all ways if there was not fixed back and front.  (except for the specialty squares)  Like if I could get magnetic wire and thread it through all four edges and they just snapped together.  But it hasn’t been invented yet.  Sigh.

Any ideas?  Anyone?