Brownies Toymaker Badge

At Brownies the girls have been working towards their Toymaker badge. We've had lots of fun working towards this.

The first thing we made was this toy owl. The girls loved making their owls! I cut out all the felt pieces using by Sizzix Big Shot and the Sizzix Bigz Die Owl #2 . This was a great way to cut out all the pieces quickly. The die does cut out circles where the eyes should go and so I had to layer up a few pieces of scrap felt over the die to make sure the big owl shapes didn't have two big holes in the middle.

All the owls were different colours with different colour button eyes. I sat with the girls in small groups (up to 8 girls at a time) to do the sewing. Some hadn't sewn anything before and so it was great to sit with them and encourage them to have a go. This toy also included sewing on buttons, which is a great skill to have.

The next toy we made was this Brownie board game. We found blank board games "paths" from Little Crafty Bugs which the girls customised with instructions. I printed out lots of instructions in squares and then the girls cut them out and stuck them down to make their unique game. The path was stuck down to some card with Brownie pictures around it and then laminated it.

We made our own game spinners with some downloaded hexagon backgrounds (from HERE) and some spinner arrows (from HERE). I also bought a big bag of counters and each game had 4 counters. We've got loads of counters left - perfect for a tiddlywinks championship!

Our last toy the girls made was shadow puppets. These were the easiest toys we made for the badges. I made these ones as examples and then we handed out black card, pencils and scissors and let the girls make whatever animals they liked. We made them around Chinese New Year and so I printed off some pictures of the Chinese Zodiac animals for inspiration. The girls needed a little help cutting out the holes to cover with tissue paper and then again to put in the paper fasteners (brads) so the puppets could move. But they were happy to use sticky tape to stick on their own bamboo skewers.

I made a screen with my silk painting screen and a piece of white polycotton fabric stretched tight across it with a desk lamp behind it.

For the girls who may have missed one of the activities above we also made pom pom rabbits for Easter!