I’m not sure that I was even thinking about having kids when I first fell in love with this cool idea for fabric alphabet magnets. When I joined Pinterest, the idea resurfaced as I transferred all my bookmarks onto pinboards (my pin is here). Last spring, when my little girl was about 5 months old, I decided to jump in and try it. I decided that surely I would finish the project with plenty of time before she became interested in her letters! Little did I know that not only would it be a project that would get pushed aside over and over again, but also that my little girl would be a devourer of books and be interested in her letters even before she turned one-and-a-half! So earlier this spring (and especially this month), I decided to put a priority on the fabric alphabet. Now, over a year later, my daughter finally has a finished set!
Last April, my mom was visiting for a few days and we pooled our cotton scraps to make a 26-fabric spectrum for the letters. I decided to start with blues at the beginning of the alphabet for two reasons: 1) It allowed for smaller chunks of fabric to be assigned to lower-frequency-use letters, and 2) All my life, A has equaled red in my mind because of alphabet toys I had when I was little. I felt like changing things up 🙂
I followed the tutorial pretty much exactly, except for the font that I used for the templates. Thankfully I had the presence of mind to see if the magnets I had would fit inside the font recommended in the tutorial–before I traced the letters onto the fabrics–and my magnets (1/2″ disks) were too big. So I used Arial Black in 250 pt for my stencils. Even with the enlargement, some of the letters were tight fits for the magnets.
As a kid (and now as a scrapbooker who uses alpha stickers, haha!), something that always bothered me was not having enough letters to make the words I wanted to spell. I wanted to make sure that I had enough letters for our daughter to spell her full name, so I made plenty of “V”s (her middle name also contains a “V”). Only when I started spelling words for her (after I’d taken the photos and declared the project “finished”) did I realize that I’d miscounted the necessary number of “N”s. Phooey. I also only have two “E”s, which I think is the result of an early-in-the-project panic that I’d never finish, and so I’d come back to “E” later. (There are only two “I”s, but that is because I only had the tiniest scrap of that lovely grass print fabric.) Even though I’ve declared the project officially finished, I do plan to make some more letters. I’m keeping a list (does that surprise anyone?). 🙂
The best part of this project is that my little girl loves the magnets. She plays with them every day, and hope that they will be an integral part of her learning to read and spell.
Love, Love, Love these!!! Fantastic!
these are so lovely! and the addition of multiples of a single letter is brilliant! thanks for sharing it with me.
This is so cool! And yay for finally finishing the project!
Thank you, Holly!
Thanks for stopping by, and again for the great tutorial. 🙂
[…] the fabric alphabet magnets for Vivian. DONE! (6/6/2013: I even made some extra letters, including two more “E”s, […]