Handmade Color Bags

You are in for a treat today!  No seriously.  You are.

Abbie from Greening Sam and Avery agreed to join us to share a great tutorial for making color bags.  These guys are so cute and fun that I've already started making some for a couple of little guys in my life.  How much fun does it sound to do color hunts?

If you need a tutorial for a drawstring bag, you're in luck!

So, give a warm welcome to Abbie and make sure that you visit her blog for more fun and educational ideas.

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Hello Mandyland Readers! I am so excited to be here today guest blogging for Mandy. What an honor! I am no crafting expert, in fact I wouldn't even say I was good at crafting, but I do have one project with a result that my little girl enjoys. So I thought I would share it!

At two-years-old my daughter had no interest in learning her colors. We read books, played games and talked about colors all the time but she could have cared less. Not wanting her to fall drastically behind the other kids in the sandbox I knew I had to do something to save her educational career. So I came up with the idea of these color bags. The idea is very simple. A cloth, draw-string bag for each color (at least the ones I like and care about!) and then laminated pictures of items representing that color.

For those that have a sewing machine this project would take a few hours. But I don't have a sewing machine, so it took me months of hand stitching those bags before they were all complete. While I was working on the drawstring bags I was also collecting magazines and cutting out objects from the magazines that were one single color. I also looked for patches of solid colors that I could cut shapes out of (an orange star, a green square, etc.). Once the bags were done and I had at least five pictures for each bag I got all the pictures laminated.

So what do we do with the beautiful hand-stitched bags? We do color hunts! I take all the pictures and hide them around a couple of rooms in our house (hiding really means I set them in corners, on windowsills and on shelves, she is only 2.5 years old and sometimes those "hiding" places are a challenge!). Her job is to find the pictures and then put them in the right bag. She knows her colors now so the sorting part is super easy but as she gets older I add more and more pictures and just hide them a bit harder.

This whole project was pretty inexpensive and made a great Christmas present. When both of my girls are past the coloring learning, hiding pictures is fun phase of life I am sure we can find a use for all the color bags!

Thanks so much for letting me share this project with you all!