Handcrafted Farm Scenery Playmat – Unique Gift for Toddler

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My little 3-year-old nephew is crazy about John Deere tractors and farm life. Last birthday I made him this adorable quiet book, which was one of my firsts. Farm scenery playmat seemed as a fun addition and next step on his imaginative play journey.

Handcrafted Farm Scenery Playmat – unique gift for a 3-year old

I made sketch in a real size. Put everything I wanted to be there: road, river, bridge, fields, meadows, lake, house, pond and big garden. It did not take long, with few adjustments I had it just the way I imagined.

I took big piece (1.2 x 1.2 meters) of green cotton fabric and start playing. I made a road of grey upholstery fabric and river out of blue shiny scarf. That is how I started..

Added lake and meadows around road. For fields I took different brown fabrics and even knitted one yellow. Yellow is to be hay-field, also planned to make some felted yellow squares for hay bales, but in the end I didn’t have enough time.

I cut fabric to fit one by other to make fields and sew it together on mat. I definitely wanted some trees, had some ideas but got inspired in these 3D felt trees from Woolffoodmama… Hm… now that I had 3D trees, which looked fantastic btw, I wanted to add mountain. So I cut three pieces directly out of felt and hand stitched together, had to cut a little to match shapes.

Little felt house was pretty much time-consuming. I am not master of the measurements so roof ended with different angles on each side, looks little bit wobbly, but still, with rocks (for wich I used felt glue) and little pond near house it looks too cute.

Big garden across river, with bridge is my favourite scenery on this playmat. I enjoyed every single creation of veggies. There is little lettuce, hand stitched on knitted ‘soil’, cabbage, tomatoes and baby spinach… but also it can be whatever kid wants. That is the best part, he will be able to imagine and play so many different scenarios on this farm and fields playmat.

To make this play more interested and complete I got some farm animals to add and purchased John Deere 70 Piece Set set from Amazon.

This John Deere playset is awesome, seems to have everything for little farm play. It has huge shed and fence, as well as horses and cows. My husband and I almost opened it when arrived as we wanted to play too 🙂 It made us feel like kids again.

When everything was set and stitched securely I sewed another piece of fabric as a back side. Unfortunately I didn’t took picture of that. It is easy to fold it, even with a felt house and mountains. After unfolding it is necessary to set everything straight and it looks great.

What I love with this mat, it is unbreakable. Even if any piece comes of, it is just a few minutes to stitch it back, and it will last for very long time.

If you are not in to making your own play mat, Etsy.com has wonderful little theme worlds that you can order. Here are just few of them: