School Party - Treasure Hunt

With each new party I organize and run, I learn valuable lessons in what does and doesn't work for groups of kids of different ages and numbers. The activities that were hits, we kept and used, in different forms, for subsequent parties. Any game, no matter how beautifully designed, that involved waiting in line for a turn was immediately vetoed early in the planning stage. 

The treasure hunts we had in previous years were always something the kids enjoyed. Nobody had to wait their turn, everyone got excited, whomever needed help could get an Adult Helper, there was no time limit, and there were goodies to keep. Plus, we've since decided that if the kids were going to have souvenirs in their goodie bags, they might as well hunt for them as be handed them. 

This year's school party involved hunting for school supply-type loot, but we were careful to pick things that were usually not on real school supply lists, given that our party was just a week after everyone started school for real in the fall. Here's what we had the kids hunt for in our yard.

Cardboard Pencils:

There are so many variations of this craft on the internet - this is how we made ours.

We used

• Cardboard tube (we cut up a wrapping paper inner tube)
• Grey/silver duct tape
• Piece of wrapping paper to wrap around tube
• Circle of pink construction paper, whose diameter is about 2 to 3 times that of the tube. We made radial cuts along its edge, leaving the centre (about the size of the tube's diameter) uncut.
• Segment of tan construction paper, to make a cone slightly larger in diameter than the tube's.
• Black marker
• Glue

First we rolled the tan segment and glued it into a cone.

We snipped the circumference so that it hugged the opening of the tube, and glued it around the edge of one end of the tube.

We colored on a lead tip.

Then we wrapped the body of the pencil.

You don't need as much glue as Kate used, by the way.

We filled it,

wrapped the remaining open end with the snipped pink circle, folding down the snipped flaps, and securing it around the tube with a narrow strip of duct tape. To open the pencil later, simply unwrap the duct tape or puncture the pink eraser end with your finger.

Finished pencil filled with goodies!

We made more -

and everyone helped.

Notebooks:

We cut card stock and regular printer paper in half, stacked them together (the card stock is the cover) and sewed along the spine. 

We glued on random bits of old scrapbook paper, and stenciled on the dashed outline of a name plate.

Pencil Flowers

We made paper flowers just like these

and stuck the chenille stems in a bunch of new pencils, tied together with a rubber band.

We could have just hidden the bare pencils, but it was so much more fun to disguise them as flowers and "plant" them in our backyard to be picked!

Apples

These we bought here. They are bobbing apples, but Emily opted for a no-water party. They come already filled with a sticker and a plastic bug (fortunately not caterpillar) and we added a little packet of those immensely popular crazy bands.

Finally, Emily made a little treasure map/list for the guests, which we scanned, resized and printed out for everyone. 

And on the day of the party, we sent everyone off with their maps to find one of each item.

A large part of the preparation for this treasure hunt was done by Emily. Being able to put together the supplies for her own party kept her busy and out of my hair. More fun for her, and less work for me - I call that a pretty good arrangement!

And that brings us to the end of Behind The Scenes at Emily's School Party! I've updated the original party post with links to all these different elements, and added this party to the rest of our parties - click on the Parties tab below the blog banner to see them.

And now the planning must begin for Jenna's party in November. More cardboarding! Yes! Time for another trip to Ikea's loading bay!

School Party - Satchels

Alright, so they're more popularly known as messenger bags but I grew up calling them satchels. Unlike traditional satchels, however, these aren't leather. They also have no buckles because I was mass-producing them for kids - I wanted to save time and wasn't convinced that kids were going to actually use the buckles. 

There is absolutely nothing original or creative about the basic design of satchels. Everyone is making them. They're rectangular pouches with narrow gussets and a flap that overhangs the front. Or, instead of gussets, they might have pinched corners. They have long straps that cross diagonally on the body to suspend the bag. Sometimes they have pockets and buckles. Whatever the variation, they are fun to carry, easy to make because they are rectangles and can be floppy and therefore don't require interfacing.

I made my satchels as goodie bags for Emily's party. Guests often decorate goodie bags, right? So we decided they should also decorate these satchels. The fabric for the front flaps are from the Color Me line sold in many stores. Rather than plain canvas satchels for the kids to draw random art on (also a nice possibility, but maybe for older kids), these fabrics have little printed motifs so all the kids need to do is color.

The Color Me fabrics are very thin - lighter weight even than quilting cotton so I had to interface them with fusible craft-weight interfacing to make them sturdy enough for the kids to color on. Fortunately that was the only part of the bag that needed stabilizing - the other fabrics are duck cloth and canvas for the outer layer, and twill for the inner layer. Very robust, overall.

The strap is nylon webbing. It's adjustable with a plastic slide, so the kids can wear the bag in whatever way and at whatever height they like.

You can find messenger bag tutorials everywhere on the internet, so I'm not going to do a step-by-step. I don't have a pattern because, for heaven's sake, it's all rectangles. You can have my cutting plan, though:

Click on the diagram above to download the instruction sheet. All the dimensions include seam allowances, and wherever you see rounded corners, just cut the rectangles to size and round off their corners, okay? I repeat, I DO NOT HAVE A PATTERN for the rounded corners. 

Here are some behind-the-scenes photos.

Working with just the outer fabric(s) layer, the first thing I did was to sew the flap to the back of the bag to make a continuous flap+top+back piece. Then I sewed one edge of the gusset to the front of the bag, and then the other edge of the gusset to the back of the bag.

Here is a close-up shot of how I attached the gusset around the rounded corners. This is the wrong side

and this is the right side.

I now had a complete bag, made out of the outer fabric(s).

Then I made the lining of the bag in exactly the same way. So now I had two bags - one in outer fabrics, and one in lining fabric. 

I turned the outer bag right side out

and fitted it into the lining (which was still wrong-side-out).

Then I sewed all around the free/unattached edges to attach the two bag layers to each other. I left an opening in the lining to turn everything right side out eventually, though. Here is an overexposed shot showing how I sewed that funny corner where the gusset intersects with the top+flap of the bag.

And here is that corner again, with lurid red thread showing the stitching line.

Then I snipped that corner, turned the entire bag right side out through the opening in the lining and top-stitched all around the edge of the bag.

The completed bag, inside out:

Then I made the strap system. If you want to further simplify it, omit the buckles. Just make a strap of a fixed length and sew both ends to the corresponding sides of the bag. For clarity, I sewed on a strip of fabric to distinguish the right side of the strap from the wrong side.

The short 4" piece of strap goes with the rectangular loop buckle and the long 45" piece of strap goes with the one-bar slide buckle.

This is how the loop-and-short-strap are attached to the side of the bag. I tucked the fraying edges of the strap between the webbing and the gusset.

This is how the slide buckle and the long strap go together. Sew the strap around the middle bar of the buckle.

Then slide the free end of that long strap through the loop buckle and thread it through its own slide buckle

and sew that free end to the other side of the bag gusset.

This is what the strap-and-buckle system looks like.

And this is what the inside of the bag looks like.

And then I made thirteen more, one of which was sized down a little (and with a narrower strap), for Kate.

These other thirteen all have plain straps. I trimmed just that one fancy strap for Emily, being the birthday girl. I'd have liked to trim them all because it's such a pretty detail, but I didn't want to take the extra time. Actually, if I weren't mass-producing them, I'd have done them quite differently, and added piping and more rugged top-stitching and front buckles and inner pockets and outer pockets for iPhones and water bottles and hidden panels and whatnot. But for fourteen, I went with classic and simple. 

At the party, the guests were provided with fabric markers

and everyone picked a bag and colored away. Even the grandma and moms (and a dad) helped.

Here are some of the decorated bags. I wish we had gotten photos of the striped bags - they were particularly spectacular.

The girls use them to cart around their art supplies and coloring books, and they love how the diagonal strap leaves their hands free!

As a result of all the bulk-sewing, I have two bags to put in the shop! 

These are both in the versatile and classic polka-dot design, which, if you wanted, you could transform into flowers by drawing petals around some of the circles. All you need is fabric markers! 

So if anyone wants a limited edition kid-sized decorate-able messenger bag, but doesn't want to make them, you can now buy them! Not quite in time for the start of school, but never to early for holiday shopping, right? 

School Party - Chalkboard/Whiteboard Easels

Remember that stack of cardboard cutouts from that goliath of a box?

It became this tower of pizza boxes.

See?

Interesting, huh?

But wait - they open out to this

which becomes this:

which, upon adding the right sort of stationery

provides hours of silly fun.

We even made erasers

that really work!

And everything folds up and gets stored away when you're done.

We thought they would fit right in at our school party.

So we had the guests make their own easels to take home.

They were given one of those bare modified-pizza-boxes,  

and a handful of other things, and they put theirs together in minutes. 

I've wandered over to Whip Up today- visit me there for the tutorial!

Updated May 15 2022: The link to Whip Up is defunct, so I've brought the tutorial home here on ikatbag.