Feltboard Fun

A felt board (also known as a flannel board) is simply a board covered with felt on which a child or an adult can place felt pieces to make pictures or tell stories. Felt boards are available to buy in a variety of sizes. Small boards are ideal for play alone activities (fuzzy felt boards for example) and larger boards are designed for teaching and storytelling. My children enjoyed listening, participating and telling their own stories using a felt board.

Here is my daughter, aged three with her version of "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".

I made my own large storytelling felt board using stiff cardboard which I covered with green furry sticky back plastic (bought in Focus Do It All). I sized the board to fit on my children's art easel (Early Learning Centre). The giant felt pieces were made with the help of my computer and the following:

• T-shirt transfer paper
• Thin white felt
• Graphics application (MS Paint will do)
• Scanner (optional)
• Iron

The basic technique involves printing a set of images onto T-shirt transfer paper and then transferring the images onto the felt using a hot iron. Once cooled, the backing paper is removed and the individual images are cut out.

First prepare the images you wish to use as felt pieces. For this you will need a graphics application such as MS Paint or GIMP. Images can be sourced from the internet (clipart for example) or can be scanned in (images from story books for example). However the images are generated they all require the same treatment.

First consider the size of the images. If using them for storytelling then the larger the better up to a maximum size of about 15cm square (any larger and you may find them difficult to keep on the board). For table top felt boards smaller pieces work better.

The next thing to consider is how they will be cut out. Intricate shapes are extremely difficult to cut accurately and may be best left with a border of about 2mm. For this to work, it is necessary to crop the image carefully in the graphic application so that the finished felt piece has a white border around it. Shapes that can be cut accurately from the felt do not need such careful cropping in the image editor as the real scissors will do this for you; so don't waste time picking the image out in the graphics application.

Once you are happy with the images you wish to use, squeeze as many of them as you can into a single image the size of the transfer paper. This will minimize paper wastage. Print a low resolution test page on ordinary paper to check all is as expected. If the test page is okay then load the transfer paper, adjust the printer settings for T-shirt transfer paper and print.

Hints:

The transfer method results in a mirror image of your artwork so make sure anything that is reflection sensitive (in particular text) is reversed before printing.

I have found no problem with roughly cutting the images to size from the transfer paper and then individually ironing them onto the felt; removing the backing paper is a little tricky.

The surface of the felt pieces will be shiny and so trying to stick felt pieces on top of each other will not work.