We had a backgammon set growing up in the 80s. It was brown pleather with tan and white triangular spaces. I loved everything about that set…I loved the snap of the clasps, the smell of the felt interior, and the smooth perfection of the playing pieces. Mind you I never played the game (I didn’t know how), but I loved to carry the set around like a briefcase holding important papers.

I finally learned to play the game during my senior year in college and gradually all of my roommates and close friends learned to play as well. We took our board everywhere…to the quad, to bars, on spring break, and to this day we still play when we’re together.

But now I’ve passed the love of the game onto my daughter Sommer. At only 7, she doesn’t have the most strategic moves and whenever I roll doubles, she declares that she’s going to lose. Whenever she sees a board at a friend’s house or restaurant, she insists on playing. And I’m always down.

I’ve seen lots of gorgeous backgammon boards, and I’ve always thought it would be the easiest of the classic games to make. Since the board itself is a lightweight bag, this DIY version is a perfect travel set. Your pieces can be virtually anything, but as I was crafting I wondered why I had never seen pieces that weren’t solid-colored circles. I thought about making ombre pieces, or patterned pieces, but then I settled on these charming, smirkish faces. And why Shrinky Dinks®? Basically because I am obsessed with them!

This is a great project to make as a gift or for yourself before a trip of any sort. Once the playing pieces are shrunk, they have a slightly rough texture which grips nicely to the felt board so no sliding.

What you’ll need:

• 4 colors of felt
• 8×10” drawstring bag
• Scissors
• Hot-glue gun
• Inkjet shrink film
• Circle paper punch (optional)
• Matchboxes (optional)
• 2 sets of dice

1. Cut a piece of felt about 1/4” smaller than your bag on all sides. Hot glue it in place.
2. Download and print this template and cut 24 triangles from felt, 12 in one color and 12 in another.
3. Cut the strip that becomes the center “wall” of the game from a fourth color of felt.
4. Glue spaces into place, alternating colors with the center wall down the middle.
5. Print the pieces onto inkjet shrink film (here’s a free download!), and let the ink dry before cutting out.
6. Use a 1 3/4” paper punch to cut out the circles, or just cut with scissors.
7. Shrink the pieces in the oven or toaster over according to package instructions.
8. Glue the 16^th extra piece, to the top of a matchbox—use the matchbox as the receptacle for the backgammon pieces.

Have fun and here’s to a lifetime of double 6’s!

This post was sponsored by P-touch Embellish ELITE.

Making Christmas ornaments is one of my favorite craft pastimes…they are like little artful  sculptures, each one with its own personality. Snowmen, angels, elves…when you make these tiny little characters, you have so much opportunity to add little details that make them super special. And that’s why I was so excited when my friends at Brother asked me to use the new P-touch Embellish Elite to make a holiday craft for my blog this year.

When you hear P-touch you may automatically think of just a label. But the P-touch Embellish ELITE is SO not just a label maker…it’s a memory-maker, a craft-maker, and a gift-maker! First it prints on ribbon (from ~1/2″ to ~1″ wide) which is super-innovative. Next, you control it from your mobile device using the free P-touch Design&Print App, so you don’t have to type on a tiny buttoned keyboard. And lastly, you connect via Bluetooth® so it’s super slick, easy, and compact.

Have fun playing with all of the different ribbon and tape colors and printable patterns, fonts, and symbols that the P-touch Embellish ELITE has to offer. Definitely make this project a family affair…while you’re printing ribbon, your kids can be cutting felt or painting. And together you can bring some little elves to life to live on your Christmas tree this year!

What you need:

• P-touch Embellish ELITE
• Felt
• Scissors
• Permanent markers
• 1” raw wood bead
• 2” raw wood bead
• Paint
• Paintbrush
• White pom-pom
• Hot-glue gun

Make It:

1. Paint about 2/3 of the larger bead white. A nice trick for painting a bead is to put it on the end of a paintbrush so it can rest untouched while drying.
2. Once the white is dry, flip the bead over and paint the other half pink (or any color of your choice). Let this dry.
3. Use a black, red, and pink permanent marker to make the face of the elf. 
4. Cut hair from felt and hot-glue it to the sides of the bead. Remember that you’ll have a hat on top, so it doesn’t have to be perfect!
5. Roll a piece of felt into a 1.5 to 2” cone and hot-glue the end to make an elf hat. Glue this on top of the doll’s head. Glue a white pom-pom to the point.
6. Cut 2-by-1/4” strips of felt to match the hat for the legs. Fold the end of the strip over and glue, then bend that folded end up and put a dot of glue to hold that part at a right angle. This creates a foot. Repeat for the second leg and glue to the bottom of the body (the non-white side).
7. Cut two thin 1-inch pieces of white felt for the arms. Cut out a small heart from red felt and glue it to connect the arms. Glue a thin white strip of felt around the base of the hat.
8. Glue the other ends of the arms to the top section of the larger bead. Glue the head to the body.
9. Print the scarf on the P-touch Embellish Elite using the thin ribbon. You can do a pattern, symbols, or vertical text and a frame, as shown here. The scarf should be about 5 to 6 inches long.
10. Print a 7 to 8-inch long wide ribbon on the P-touch Embellish Elite as the hanger. Fold ends over one another and glue the back of the elf’s hat. 

This post was sponsored by P-touch Embellish ELITE.

I have loved stickers for as long as I can remember. As kids of the 80s, I, along with all my friends, carried my sticker binder to and from school, and at any free moment, we would sit in little clusters, trading scratch-n-sniffs for oilies (you know, the ones that had the oily liquid inside?). Some people would organize their collections by color, some by type, some by theme…mine were more chronological; I just liked to organize them in neat rows so my eyes could clearly scan the goods.

When my friends at Pipsticks, a super sticker subscription club that delivers a packet of stickers to your mailbox monthly, asked me if I wanted to collaborate on a winter sticker design, I nearly died. I went to town thinking of all of the ways I could combine my love of crafting with stickers to create a sticker sheet that gave sticker-lovers some creativity to create a design that felt uniquely theirs.

I went through my craft portfolio and thought about what people love to craft in the winter months…and snow globes came to mind. Some people like nature snow globes, some want skaters, and some go for animals and log cabins. With this sticker sheet, you can create the ideal DIY snow globe of your dreams—no hot-glue gun or fake snow required!

To get the Project Kid Snow Globe sticker sheet, subscribe by November 30, 2019…and, because you are a friend of ours, enter PROJECTKID15 at checkout for 15% off your first month! For all the sticker lovers in your life, this is a gift that keeps on giving!

It’s probably been at least 35 years since I’ve made a paper handprint turkey. And to be honest, in the nine years that I’ve been a mom, I don’t think either of my kids have ever brought home a handprint turkey. I’ve never been disappointed by that, mostly because I don’t totally love them.

But this year I decided that it would be fun to make a handprint turkey, using the hands of all four of our hands…my husband Michael, me, Oliver, and Sommer. I love the idea that it was a combo of all of our hands, so I wanted to figure out how to show the blending together of us. Instead of using construction paper, I used colored vellum.

These family handprint turkeys looks so pretty hanging in the window so the light can pass through them. If you want to make your own, check out the instructions below!

Materials:

• Colored vellum
• Colored pencils
• Cereal box or brown grocery bag
• Scissors
• White china marker (or white colored pencil)
• Glue dots or glue stick
• Cardboard scraps

Make it:

1. Draw an “8” on the printed side of the cereal box or grocery bag, about 6 inches tall. Cut out. Make sure the figure-8 has a smaller top than bottom.
2. Draw eyes, beak, and waddle on the smaller part of the figure 8. Set aside.
3. Trace each of your family members hands on a different color vellum. If there is only one small person in your family, trace his or her hand two times. Cut each out.
4. Using china marker or white colored pencil, draw feather like details on the fingers.
5. Cut two or three 2-by-2-inch pieces of cardboard.
6. Stack the hands with the largest in the back, stack cardboard squares on the palms, and then the turkey body on top.
7. Attach all of the layers with glue dots or a glue stick. (If you want to hang your turkey, punch a small hole in the longest finger and thread string through.)

Thank you UBTECH’s JIMU Robot for sponsoring this post. JIMU Robot kits are a fun way to bring robotics into every kid’s day to day. The system relies on three steps: Building, Coding, and Playing. Robot kits from UBTECH offer a wide variety of challenging builds for the curious children in your lives. With JIMU Robot, kids 8+ can engage in STEM learning with their award-winning interactive robotic building block system!

If I had to list all of the things that my 9-year-old son Oliver loves, until now I would have thought that it would be impossible for a toy to exist that touches all the bases. I find it hard to find toys for him that allow him to explore his creativity, his sharp robotics skills, and his love of building all in one. Let me explain…

Oliver’s top 3 interests right now include, but are not limited to…

1. Game design and coding
2. Construction toys
3. Anything related to Percy Jackson

But along came the UBTECH JIMU FireBot. This robot is amazing…you open the box to find all of the components and pieces neatly organized and arranged with a quick-start guide. You first download the free app (it works with both iOS and Android), and it takes you step-by-step through the building process, allowing you to zoom in and rotate the diagram 360 degrees so you can really make sure you are attaching the pieces accurately.

Right now Oliver is obsessed with mythical creatures from reading all of his Percy Jackson books, but if your kid is interested in sports, UBTECH has a JIMU robot for you too. (They also make a unicorn that my daughter is now begging me for!) And if your child loves to march to the beat of her own drum, she doesn’t have to build the robot exactly as it looks on the packaging (we are all about customization here at Project Kid)! As long as the mechanics are connected properly for the computer to function, the sky is the limit when it comes to design!

Whenever we build creations that have lots of little parts, we always get ourselves set up first. To start, we dump the large pieces in a tray (this time we used a big cookie sheet) and the small pieces go in separate small bowls. That helps prevent the “mom, I can’t find this piece!” mantra. And then I like to lay a fleece blanket on the floor under where we are sitting. This trick helps prevent dropped pieces from bouncing away from you. There is nothing worse than coming to the end of a build and not having all of the pieces!

We broke up our build into a few sessions one the weekend. We kept the components guide handy so we made sure we were selecting the right pieces for the right spots. And once we were done and connected to bluetooth, we were blown away at how the FireBot came to life!

The JIMU FireBot has you build, then code, and then play, igniting your child’s curiosity about STEM learning from beginning to end. You can code the LED light to glow fiery red as the jaw opens and closes, and make the FireBot drive smoothly around the house, flapping its wings.

I’m excited to continue to watch Oliver explore both his imagination and his coding skills!

The JIMU FireBot kit is available in store at Target, and from the following online retailers: Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, Kohls,com, Samsclub.com, Target.com, Walmart.com and ubtrobot.com.