It was pretty special to see the wheels turning in his creative mind. Maybe he will take after me, who knows… The only thing that is certain on that front is that Passport to Imagination takes kids on an imaginary seven-week summer road trip from the beach to the country fair and more! The Michaels classroom will teach different crafts each session and next week your kiddos will be heading to the fairgrounds too, so get your engines ready racers and put this on your calendar! The crafts are adorable so if you need something fun to keep your kiddos busy, this is perfect!

My boys have a need for speed, so they wanted to create race cars and go karts, but I couldn’t help myself from trying to tempt them with sweet treats and candy… you know, of the pretend kind. When I think of the fair, my mind takes me there, but for them it’s all about the rides and the car rides are their faves.

To make this craft all you really need are a supply of Perler beads, a pegboard to create your designs on, some ironing papers and a household iron. They sell some adorable pattern books to help guide you or give you design ideas and several specialty packages and themed activity kits. We did indeed make it home with a few different options to work with, but aside from our basic supplies the one they actually used for this project was a package that happened to have a couple of car shaped trays. Naturally when I say that we used the car trays, I mainly mean that Penn played with the car trays as if they were literal toy cars, while Blake made a few of the race cars on square trays. It goes to show that you can create your own race cars or go carts by using basic supplies and the ready made package isn’t necessary. He did find it helpful when he made his first race car, since it gave him an example to look at and a shape to work from. They nearly an entire aisle just for these crafts and we went more than a little crazy on the supply side, but I knew this would be a huge hit in my house!

Making the designs is relatively simple and there are dozens of patterns to give you inspiration. If you are attempting to recreate a specific design with specific colors (like ours), I recommend counting the beads, it makes the job so much easier! Blake placed the beads in a variety of shapes, with different colors and even added little men inside the cars. Once you have a design you like, it's time for the kiddos to let an adult take over and put that iron to good use. My iron got more of a workout with this craft project than it has ever seen… ever.

While your kiddos are trying to do circus tricks on their scooters, you are going to cover their designs with the special ironing papers and with your iron on a medium setting, carefully solidify the designs by running your iron in a circular motion for about 20 seconds. You can generally tell when you are done if you can see each bead touching the ironing sheet. This sounds funny, but when you are making your go karts or ice cream cone designs, you will see what I mean as you heat them up.

Once you iron on one side, let it cool, then flip that baby over and iron in just the same way on the other side. Once it has cooled, it is ready for fun! My boys particularly enjoyed pretending theirs were bumper cars – because they are boys and apparently that is how they roll!