Clayton's Felt Flannel Board.

I just completed a bunch of shapes for a flannel board for Clayton. How did I do it?

Materials: piece of thin wood, duct tape, Microsoft WORD, piece of flannel material,
interesting fonts in shapes, felt sheets and scraps, scissors, a printer, ironing board, iron, white printer paper, freezer paper (has a shiny coating on the back)

I had an old frame backing board. I duct-taped the flannel tightly on the back of the board. I got on Microsoft Word and used my dingbats and cute fonts to type out the alphabet, numbers and punctuation . I copied the whole line. Pasted it down, selected it, went to FORMAT, selected CHANGE CASE, and changed that line to capitals. I copied and pasted the lower and upper case a bunch more times and changed their fonts to the shapes Clayton would enjoy. (There are lots of FREE FONT websites. You go there and download the ones you like. Then, when you extract them, you put them in the FONTS folder, which is in your MY COMPUTER folder, in the LOCAL DISK (C) drive, in the WINDOWS folder. Open WORD and you will be able to use them). Not all of the fonts have a picture for each letter, number or punctuation, but you will delete the ones you don't want. I selected the ones I wanted, enlarged them and tried to fit as many as I could to a page. I had to make a few text boxes that to fit more to a page. That was time consuming. So then, I organized each page into shapes I wanted per color of felt. I cut freezer paper into the standard 8 1/2" X 11" and put them in my laser printer. (which is now not working because two sheets are stuck in there. I had printed probably 9 pages in a few hours, but maybe the shiny side finally got too hot. The machine may be worthless now, but I hope not. ) Using this method saved me a lot of time. I certainly can draw and the next step is awesome. I roughly cut out the shapes and ironed them onto my felt sheets and scraps using a press cloth (actually a blank piece of paper). Then, I cut the shapes out. If the limbs or features seemed too skinny to work for a toddler, I simply cut that area out wider. I pulled off the paper and stuck them to the board.
LINK to images in psd. and jpg. format.
This craft tutorial was published at Cut Out and Keep! Pretty neat. See it here. The original post is here on this blog (Clayton's Flannel Board). It was also highlighted at Craft Tutorials.