You know those foam letters for the bath or shower? The ones Bluey and Bingo play with in episode Burger Shop? We used to have a bunch of them, and whilst my daughter bathed, I would spell out funny sentences to leave on the bathroom wall until the following night. The cat kept stealing the foam letters and eating them, so we had to give them away to the op-shop because we were worried for her health, but it was honestly so much fun! I’ve been thinking on how we could go back to doing that, but in a way where the cat’s life isn’t in danger, and I think I’ve come up with a great solution!
What you’ll need:
- 150x90cm or 59in Green felt
- 130x90cm or 51×35.5in worth of felt* in assorted colours
- Scissors
- Markers
- Removable Adhesive Picture Hanging Strips or Dots
- Optional: Small basket or bag and removable adhesive hook to hang letters when they’re not in use
*Note: To clarify what I mean here, that’s the total requirement of felt for all the letters and numbers, but you can choose how you’d like to portion it between your not-green colours of felt. My local craft store only had four colours in stock, apart from the green, so I bought 40x90cm of each of them and will have a little left over for other projects.
This project is really, really simple, but will require some time, so line up something good on TV. My daughter and I are currently watching Star Trek Discovery from the beginning in preparation for the finale, which I haven’t watched yet at her request as she wants to see it with me. This is her first-time watching Discovery, and she’s really enjoying it; I’m so proud of my little Trekkie!
I’m not going to give you a template, because that way it’s customisable how you’d like to style your letters. I went with a simple bubble style that will look cute on the wall and be easy to cut out. The only requirement is that I have allowed 10cm x 10cm (4in x 4in) for each letter in my calculations for fabric requirements. Of course some will be slightly less, some slightly more, but in general, try to keep each of the letters to this size for best results.
In preparation for choosing the letter composition, I immediately thought of a Scrabble set, and upon looking into it, the distribution of letters in a Scrabble set corresponds roughly to the percentage frequency with which each of the letters in the Alphabet appears in the English language! Fascinating! Here’s how many of each letter you’ll need – of course you can make more, but this is the list I went with, and if you do make more, you’ll of course need more felt.
Simply use the marker to draw an outline of your letter onto your felt, then cut it out! I generally tried to cut away the marker lines, but you could leave them on, it’s entirely up to you. It’ll take a long, long, time, to cut all these out. But you might get some feline assistance along the way? Maybe?
Maybe not…
Once you have cut out all of your letters, numbers, and punctuation marks, it’s time to get the green felt up on the wall! Decide where you want to put the green felt up and give your wall a quick clean so it’s ready for the adhesive strips. Measure out the size of your green-felt on the wall, peel the ‘wall’ side of the backing strips off, and stick them about 1cm or ½in from where you want the top of your green felt to be. Go ahead and peel the non-wall side of your adhesive strips, taking care not to peel them off the wall in preparation for hanging up the green felt. Start in the middle and work your way out to the edges so you don’t end up with any baggy bits.
If you’d like to store your letters when they’re not spelling out funny sentences, then you can use a removable adhesive hook to hang them up right beside your felt! I think this looks super cute!
Now you’re ready to have lots of fun leaving messages for each other on your groovy felt letter wall! I love having this up! My daughter and husband both couldn’t wait to start playing with it, and we’ve all taken turns making up sentences. I think it’s such a great educational tool, too! You could put up your child’s weekly spelling words, a word of the day to encourage your child to learn to use a dictionary to look words up, or any number of educational wordplay activities! I really hope you make one of these yourself and have lots of fun with it.
