Travel Kits

I've been gathering and planning and perusing and thinking of stuff for travel kits for many months.  I think they will be helpful for all of our summer travels, and I have finally finished...or at least got a good start on it.

I found cute stripey booklet templates at Jones Design Company.  The booklets call for alphabet stamps, but I just pulled them into Photoshop and added a stamp-ish type font...cuz I'm lazy and don't own myself a set of alphabet stamps...as of yet. I also changed the colors a bit.  One blue, one turquoise, one a reddish orange, etc.  The tutorial says to sew the pages together with your sewing machine, which I did...but I was afraid they would tear apart with use after all the needle holes perforated the binding so nicely... and so I added ribbon, bias tape, ric rac etc to sturdy up the bindings.  The inside is full of blank pages for notes, drawings, journaling, etc.

I've been watching for good, cheap little tins and there are scads of mint tins but then I stumbled upon these gift card holders at Michaels for a buck.  And they're bigger than mint tins.  Sweet.  The blue one used to be patterned, but I just spray painted it since I didn't care for the particular pattern and there were no more options I liked.  I also roughed it up a bit for fun.  Then I googled magnetic poetry words and found several people who had already created full sheets of tons and tons of random words to print out and stick to magnetic sheets.  All that was left to do was sit down and cut out minuscule words for hours.  Or make my kids do it.   Or both.   Anyway, now I have awesome poetry making tins. Perfect for on the go.  And I made little name magnets that go on the front.  Personalized in a snap, just like that.

I also found this cool car bingo template from Martha.   I don't own a laminating machine, so I just bought the self laminating sheets and stuck two bingo cards back to back so each card has two different card options.  Then I trimmed the excess.  And now they are dry erase ready!

I did come upon a mint tin that didn't have a raised design and so for Q I thought I would spray it with chalkboard paint (from the spray paint cupboard in the garage) on the top and bottom.  I also drew some shapes and put them on magnetic sheets so he could stick them in patterns on his tin.  He is really into shapes right now...and he can't read...although I could add the alphabet.

After that, I gathered clear plastic totes with lids (the shoe box size) for each of them and filled them with the poetry tins, the bingo game, a dry erase marker, the booklet, and then started filling with other random things I've been collecting...like markers, pencils, tic tac toe games, mini activity books and travel games, some stickers and tiny coloring books, etc.  I also plan on filling some snack bags with goodies and adding those.

Hopefully that will keep them occupied for awhile... but for now the kids are DYING to see what I have up my sleeve...