The Crafty Raven Game

I love Haba. They produce some of the cutest toys using such wonderful materials. And they also make some great games. Like Orchard. Which was soon renamed The Crafty* Raven in our house. (*Note: that's crafty as in artful and sly, not artsy and creative.)

And every time we played it, I thought how fun it would be to make all the little parts. So for Christmas, my niece got a home-made version of Orchard The Crafty Raven. Oh, what a crafty** bonanza it was for me: (**Now it's crafty as in artsy and creative...)

• weaving little baskets out of felt
• fashioning little fruits out of Sculpey clay, wooden beads (hidden inside the clay), black leather, and clove pieces
• sewing a mini-quilt-type-thing to be the game board. (I pretty much copied the size and layout of the original game, but I have to say it, I love my colors so much better than theirs!)
• formatting a cute little instructions sheet
• cutting a 9-piece raven puzzle out of cardboard, then decorating it with black fabric and yellow puffy paint (Heidi drew the raven for me!)
• decoupaging a dice so it has the appropriate symbols as well as a box to contain everything
  

Could one single project have included more areas of craftiness?!?

And (other than needing more clay), with the leftover supplies, I have enough to make one for us too. Woo hoo! Maybe I can offload the original on ebay then...

A Fort

Today, I'm taking a little detour from the usual crafty-type creations featured on this blog and showing what I made today with the help of my little sidekicks. Because just as I hope my girls will learn sewing and crocheting and woodworking and such, I also hope they will become very adept in the fine art of fort-building.