Owen's Felt Checker Board!

After finishing one page for Jack's Quiet Book I got this idea for a felt checker board. I was kind of still working through ideas for Jack's book so I decided to put that off and work on the checker board instead.

My Big Shot and my sewing machine have been getting used A LOT!!! I'm so happy that my friend Kim has the circle die. It was so nice to not have to individually cut out 24 circles for each color for the checker pieces. As it was I still had to sew them together.

Kim also has a flower die that I used to make the crowns...it's just the end of the flower petal cut off. Even with a felt checker board you have to be able to make your piece a king!! I was not going to sew all those little crowns on though so enter the hot glue gun!

Here all all the pieces and the checker board cut to size.

I wanted little pouches to hold the checker pieces so I used Kim's Top Note die and cut two of them in red and two of them in black. Then I cut about a 1/3 off one of them, sewed Velcro on the whole one and then sewed them together to make a pouch.

Completed pouch filled with 12 checker pieces. They barely fit in there!

To cover the area where I sewed the Velcro on I decided to sew on a buttons.

Unfortunately Stampin' Up doesn't have a die for The Big Shot that will cut squares so I had to cut all the red squares by hand. Then I had to pin them to the board. I hate using pins! I just do...first off I always end up getting poked and then it's just another step added to the process. For this though I HAD to do it. There was no way they would have stayed in place while I did all that sewing. I decided to use the zigzag stitch to put the white lines in around the squares. It ended up looking a little wavy, but I really like it.

Before sewing the black board to the red cover I added ribbon straps.

I was kind of done using Velcro so I wanted to do something different for the closure so I used a button and some elastic instead. Then I stitched the black board to the red cover using the zigzag stitch again.

Here's the finished board!!! I started this project on Sunday afternoon and finished it on Monday afternoon. Don't worry I haven't been neglecting my kids they are still getting fed...now my house that's a different story. :)

While at Walmart today I picked up some cool buttons for Jack's Quiet Book so I've got a fire under me to make that now. I'm also planning on making Jack a Tic Tac Toe board. Oh the wonderful things you can do with felt!!!