Wonderland Checkers

Hi, hi, hi!  I'm kind of excited to share my project today.  Hehe.  I've been wanting to make something like this for a while now and finally completed it yesterday.  I started the project but got kind of stuck and had to rethink some parts.  Then got like an a-ha! moment yesterday which really pushed me through to finishing.  But first let's mention the challenges that inspired this:

TGF's Farm Fresh Challenge Retro-Fresh Blue/berry  Thank goodness this is a month long challenge cause I needed all that time since I got stuck in the process.

Wee Memories Challenge 78--Free for All

and Young Crafters Unite--use dies.

Here is my project.

I made a checkers board game using TGF's Wonderland digi set.  Digital stamps are great for this kind of project.  I thought the blue/berry colors would make a fun board game.  The board itself measures 12 by 12 inches.  I just cut the berry squares and glued them onto the blue cardstock.

I made a little pizza box (measures about 4 by 5.5 inches) to hold the checkers pieces.  The letters were made with PTI's alphabet die set  The digis are relatively small so I had to color carefully.

Inside of the box.  There are 24 pieces, 12 blue and 12 berry.  And yes, small rabbits to color as well.  But with digis it was easy to shrink them down to the size I needed. 

The pieces were made from the smallest Spellbinders lacey circles die.  I had thought about what to make the pieces from and at first I had planned to cut out lots of chipboard and layer them.  Yeah, sound crazy?  I've done crazy kind of cutting before but this time I really just did not feel like cutting out a gazillion little pieces so that's where I got kind of stuck.  So I pushed this project aside and thought I wouldn't get to finish it.  But the other day after I had made my tree stamp out of thick fun foam, I thought, hey, I should use FUN FOAM!  Yay, for FUN FOAM!  Even though the fun foam is thick (6 mm) it is still really easy to cut through in the Big Shot.  So I just had to cut 24 pieces out of fun foam.  Doable, yes!  And they are really light and still stackable if you want to king your pieces.

My game board was also glued on a piece of foam board that I had around the house.  I just traced my cardstock and used a metal ruler and blade to cut through the board.  It's light but sturdy.  You could make this more durable with lamination and even magnetic!  I thought about making the board and pieces magnetic--wouldn't that be fun?  But in the end I went with simple and preserving my sanity. 

Here are the pieces out on the board. 

I even thought about making a chess set.  Wouldn't that be neat too?  Like a Twilight chess set using all the Twilight inspired digis from TGF.  But who/what would all the pawns be?  That would take some thinking. 

Thanks so much for reading!