Letterboxing Kit

One of my friends asked for some suggestions of fun family activities and another friend suggested letterboxing. I might have heard of this briefly before but I researched the idea with Wade recently and it sounds really awesome!

Basically you go to Letterboxing North America and then you go to the map and find your area. Once you do that, you will find a bunch of links to various letterboxes. You will get instructions that resemble a treasure map or scavenger hunt and then you pack of the kids and go off on an adventure! It sounds like an awesome family excursion that wouldn't take the whole day and doesn't cost any money. Sounds perfect to me. All you need is a small journal (or even paper that you can glue into a journal later) and a stamp (you can make it yourself or just grab one from your craft stash, we aren't so skilled with the x-acto knife so I opted for grabbing one from my stash) and an ink pad and out the door you go!

Once you find the letterbox you are looking for, you will see a journal and a stamp. Your children put their stamp in the journal in the box and the boxes stamp in their journal...kinda like a passport. Then you write a little something to remember it in both places and describe the adventure and you go in search of the next one!  There is tons of info on the website but here is how we made our letterboxing kits. 

Click "Read More" to see how we did it!

First I had Avery and Scott paint their books. I just used some dollar store photo albums I had on hand, you can use anything, even paper stapled together. I used tempera paint on theirs (you will see why that ended up being a good idea soon) but I would suggest acrylic paint if you have kids that won't cover them selves in paint.

Yeah, she started out cute like the above picture...but then my artist really got into her work.

For the record I am holding her up in these pictures, she just isn't sitting on the counter by herself ;) you can see my hand slightly in the bottom one. 

Here are all three of them completed.

To label them, I chose rub on letters and placed them as I wanted them before I rubbed them on permanently. 

I cut cardstock to fit in the pages since mine weren't paper. 

The finished journal.

Then grab a stamp and a couple of stamp pads and you are ready to go!! If you don't have stamps, there is always a huge bin of them at Michael's for a dollar or you can carve out a design into an eraser. 

Happy letterboxing!!

Check me out at these parties over the next week!!

On Mondays I party at:

On Tuesdays I party at:

On Wednesdays I party at:

On Thursday's I party at:

Over the weekend I party at:

Piggy Giggles - Crafts for Kids