Fabric numbers

One of the Montessori activities I created this week were Fabric numbers.  This was another of the activities from Counting Coconuts.  The tutorial for these can be found here.

This was a great way to use up some of my fabric scraps.  I had a wonderful red glittery fabric that I didn't know what to do with, and it was perfect for this project.  However, I didn't really think about the fact that the back and fronts of the numbers would be important, so all but one of the numbers has the red sparkly fabric on the front.  Its the 9 that has the wrong front, and P insists that it should be the other way around so that it matches the rest of the numbers.  I'm sure she'll end up writing 9s back to front because of it.

The tutorial calls for cotton batting or interfacing to make the numbers a bit sturdier.  I didn't have any of these on hand, so I decided to stuff the numbers instead.  I made the numbers over the course of a day with much help from P and J, but if you didn't have any children around, it could easily be done in an evening.  Because I had stuffed the numbers, I didn't wash them to make them all raggedy (and also because P insisted on playing with them as soon as I had made them).

I had an "I wish I had done this when the girls were in bed" moment while sewing these, both P and J wanted to sit on my lap while I sewed, so we went and stuffed the letters together.  J had great fun using the stuffing to stuff her teapot, and P was very helpful in passing the stuffing to me.  She also created a snow storm of stuffing.  The girls had a fantastic time making these numbers, and I was glad that we had done it all together.  (We solved the sitting on the knee while sewing issue by letting P sit on a chair right next to me, while J sat on the knee furtherest away from the sewing machine).