One of the things we love in this house is Mayana’s little playroom nook. We have been honing it and refining it since we moved in, and we think we finally have it how we want it.
It was important to me to have a space for imaginative play for Maysi. My sister got her a small plastic play kitchen for her birthday, and that brought her a lot of fun times, but she was quickly outgrowing it, as were her collection of kitchen utensils and toy food. So Peter got onto the job, and has built her the cutest play wooden play kitchen ever. I’m seriously impressed by the fantastic job he’s done, and we’ve already got friends wanting to put their orders in!
The other thing we wanted to incorporate into Mayana’ play space was somewhere to make things. Mayana is obsessed with the show Mr Maker at the moment, and is constantly going off to, “make ‘tuff!”, whether it’s drawing, painting, gluing, snipping… any chance she gets she’s creating (can’t imagine where she gets that from, can you?). So rather than having piles of cardboard boxes and tubes and glitter and pens and glue and paper and pipe-cleaners and googly eyes all over our house, we thought we would assign a specific Making Spot.
So… without any further ado… here it is: The Playroom.
To the right is Mayana’s awesome kitchen, the Making Spot is at the back of the room where she is playing, and her book shelf is on the left. The town map mat is from Ikea, and is lots of fun. We also strung up some lines to hang Mayana’s many art works.
A closer shot of Mayana’s making spot. The easel and her table and stool are from Ikea (love that place!!). The filing cabinet (otherwise known as The Making Drawers) is a seconds product from my dad’s work. Thank you to whoever dented the back of it! My favourite thing about it is that it’s lockable, so Mayana doesn’t have easy access to the things that make major mess (like paint). Mayana’s rice (which she still loves)lives under her easel, and makes a great step which allows her to reach every square inch of the paper on her easel.
We’ve been brave enough to let Mayana draw with marker pens lately. She finds them so much more satisfying, because she doesn’t have to press hard to get a bright colour, and there is something about using them that really thrills her (although there are hazards… like the time she decided to paint her face with them. You can read about that here, on Pete’s blog Thank the Lord for washable markers is all I can say). We made this special pot for her pens. I bought some plaster of paris from Bunnings, and Mayana and I made it up together. We poured it into this pot, and when it started to set, we poked the pens (lid-side-down) into the pot. This way we don’t lose any lids.. Mayana pokes the pens back into her pots as soon as she’s done drawing with them. Plus, the pens will last longer because they’re standing nib-side-down.
The jars on Mayana’s making drawers are full of collage materials.. shells which she has collected from the beach, coloured matchsticks, stickers, pompoms, googly eyes and mini pegs. She also has a love affair with sticky tape at the moment, so I’ve given her her own roll so she leaves ours alone (or that’s the plan anyway!). Inside the drawers are pencils, more crayons, paper, paints, and of course her collection of cardboard boxes and tubes and whatever recyclables she deems needed for making ‘tuff.
And now The Kitchen (Boy I’m proud of my hubby for making this!):
Mayana’s kitchen consists of a sink and a stove. Pete calculated that we spent about $80 on materials (mostly from Bunnings, and some stuff we picked up from opp-shops). My contribution to the making of it was painting the cabinets and sewing the curtain (with super-cute fabric from Ikea).
I crocheted a little handtowel for Maysi’s kitchen, and an old hot-chocolate tin screwed to the side of the sink unit holds all of her cutlery.
The glass for the stove door is the glass out of a photo frame we bought from a discount store. My Pop gave us an old faucet to use for the tap. Mayana’s toy food is a mix of plastic and felt foods… the felt food are fruit and veg from Ikea and are super cute.
The sink itself is a silver mixing bowl from a discount store, and most of the utensils, and the cute mini-saucepan are from an opp-shop. Also from the opp shop is the ‘dish-rack’, which in a former life was a toast caddy. For the hotplates on the kitchen, we painted four cork drink coasters.
So there you have it! Mayana’s super-awesome playroom. Doesn’t it make you want to be a kid again!?
