Family Fun Mag Craft

In the April issue of Family Fun Magazine there was a really fun craft idea for bathtub floaties. They are called Buoyant Buddies and are totally cute and super easy to make. I thought since Nanna still likes to play in her baths and could stand some new tub toys that it might be kind of a fun thing to do together. Thus began our quest for the supplies: corks-the real ones not rubber because they have to float, craft foam, googly eyes, hot glue. The last three were easy to find, the corks on the other hand, were more of an issue than I expected. First I thought for sure that I would be able to find them at good old Wally World, and I knew that they had craft foam there too and googly eyes, so one stop shop..........wrong. No corks to be found and the craft foam only had a selection of red, black and white; we wanted green, blue, yellow, purple, you know the fun colors. So then I thought to try one of the hardware stores.........no luck there either; they used to carry them but have since discontinued them to carry only the rubber ones. The next stop was reliable Kings.......nope, no corks there either, oddly enough. They usually have what you can't find anywhere else. That ended the search for the first day. The next day I had to work at the salon for a couple of hours and I was telling one of my clients our dilema. She suggested all the same places that I tried, then she had the brilliant idea that she could just bring me some of hers. She said she usually saves the corks from their wine bottles because she is going to make a cork serving tray, but she thought she could probably spare a few. She brought them by the shop the next day and left them on my table in a ziplock. They didn't even smell like wine as I anticipated that they would. So after work that day I went back to Kings because I noticed they had a lot more colors of craft foam to choose from and Nanna picked out four colors that she wanted. *The project actually has five patterns that you can do but I was forgetting the fifth.* We also picked up the googly eyes, she picked the med. sized ones. When we got home I got online to the website to print off the templates/patterns; they didn't put the patterns in the mag. you do have to go online to get those, but the instructions are in the mag. or you can get them online too. After dinner I promised her that we could put them together, her patience was wearing thin by that point, she really wanted them for her bath that night.......they weren't done in time. We dug out mom's glue gun and went to work. The patterns were a little smaller than I thought they would be when I printed them, so you might want to enlarge them a little. I could have used my mom's copier but I thought it would be just as easy to to trace around them a little larger. In retrospect, I should have blown them up on the copier because then Nanna could have helped a little more by tracing the patterns herself. She is really good at tracing and cutting. But she helped by choosing which ones were which colors. In the end, once you go on a trek for corks, it was a fun and easy project with cute results. I would suggest that if you have little ones that still like to play in the tub that this would be a fun and inexpensive thing to make. Just track down the corks before you buy the rest of the supplies. Here is the link: http://jas.familyfun.go.com/crafts?page=CraftDisplay&craftid=11960 I hope that works, let me know if it doesn't. Here is a picture of the finished product, waiting for the next bath.

Just in case you can't tell: yellow-dolphin, blue-frog, pink-crab, purple-octopus, and the one that I was forgetting is a starfish.

Have fun!!