felt, glue, ouch, repeat

Okay, let's try this again Blogger. And try not to eat my pictures, mmkay??

Here are the finished products for my kids' Christmas presents this year. Alex got a car mat and Claire got a pony mat. So far, Alex doesn't really get the car mat, but it has been in Claire's room since Christmas. She loves it. She also really likes her pony mat. Let's talk about that first.
The pony mat is made out of felt that is hot glued together. In order to make it, I looked at the animated version of the house I wanted to create, then drew it out, then cut it out of felt, then glued it together. It was quite the process, but luckily, the ones I really dreaded ended up not being so hard. For my inspiration pieces, check out my pinterest board.

The entire mat. Sorry it's sideways. Serious blogger issues here. I'll explain each section below.

From left (and upside down to boot!): the "ever-free forest", Fluttershy's house, Rarity's dress boutique/house.

Apple Jack's house and orchard.

The pink house is Sugar Cube Corner. It's a bakeshop and Pinkie Pie lives upstairs. The tree is Twilight's library. The other building is the Town Hall. The big whitish rectangle is the town square, with the fountain, apple cart, food cart, and flower cart. You can see them better down below. MY favorite is the soap box. =)

To the right is the rest of Apple Jack's farm. The pink building with the bathtub is supposed to be the spa, and the green building with the "what the heck is that?" sign (thanks Alann!) is the restaurant. That's supposed to be a clover. You try cutting a clover out of less than 1 sq inch of felt. The food cart has carrots, hay, and oats. The flower cart just has random flower shapes. I think the little green one is a cactus.

This is Rainbow Dash's house. It's one of my favorites. I was a little concerned about trying to make it because of the rainbow, but then I remembered I had pipe cleaners in the colors of the rainbows. So the big rainbow is actually pipe cleaners.

This is Canterlot. It's very simplified, but it was small and supposedly far away, so I did what I could.

And now for Alex's Mat.  His was finished back in October actually. It was a lot easier than Claire's because the shapes are much simpler, and I had a lot of inspiration to follow.

The whole mat. I realized I cut off the train track at the bottom of the mat.

Here you can kind of see the train track. (That blob in the corner is Claire's dress. She was "helping". There will be more of that.) From left bottom: the red building is a warehouse, above that is a gas station. The blue building is a school (see the bell?) and the apple building is a grocery store. The white/blue building with the clock is the town hall.

The town hall again, the fire station (I still need to color in the dog's spots) and the brown church.

Here's the farm (and Claire's dress again). The bottom is fruit trees, then carrots, tomatoes, and corn, and on top is a chicken and her chicks.

The purple one is the library. Look at it upside down. The orange building is the ice cream shop and hamburger place. A swimming pool and the temple on the top corner. Next to the temple is a slide and swing set. they didn't come through very well. Then a blue house.

The green and cream house is one of my favorites. Another purple house. The construction site was pretty fun to build. The pink one is a hospital and the blue one is the police station. And the wrench is the mechanics. In the corner is the center fountain.

So those are all my interpretations of the buildings as I was making them. I'm sure Alex will come up with new uses for some of them as he plays with the mat and the cars. I am overall very pleased with how they all came out.