Open Color Play "Apple Buckets"

A few months ago, I saw the cutest post on Pinterest with two little girls playing with colorful stained, wooden mini-buckets and matching "apples". I was sure Sam would love the game of matching colors and picking the "apples. He's all about object identifiers right now as he's learning the world around him AND he seems to share my attraction to all things miniature (yay!). I logged onto the store listed in the Pinterest post to investigate how to order the buckets for him and discovered that they were $48. Holy F, are you kidding me?!? $48 for six 2 1/2" little buckets and two matching wooden ball "apples" for each bucket. No thank you very much. I can make it!

 

I ordered six 2 1/16 inch buckets from a site I love called craftparts.com. They were $1.35 each with what could have been an unfortunate $8.95 cent shipping cost. I just used that as an excuse to add some other supplies I needed like wooden peg people and holiday cutouts, in shapes I couldn't find locally, to the cart to make it worth while. I purchased a package of thirty-five 3/4" birch balls from Hobby Lobby for $4.70 but with my ever present coupon was closer to $4. Plus I only needed twelve of them so I've got 23 remaining for another project. I already had umpteen colors of Rit dye which works really well on this type of raw wood. It works so well in fact, that I don't usually seal these types of product as the wood really absorbs the Rit dye. If you wanted to, you could spritz them with a polyurethane sealer after you stain. I really like the rustic look of them.

 

Color Match Open Play Buckets And "Apples"

 

I've set them up in all of the above configurations for open play. I've also just laid the box out and let Sam get them out as he likes. So far he's had a ball  figuring out which "apples" go with which buckets, putting the "apples" in the buckets, and dumping them out, over, and over, and over, and over, and over................... Our only problem so far has been a little disagreement over putting water in the buckets. Hard to explain to a 2 1/2 year old that they're not really meant for water.

 

Total project cost = Approximately $12.50. That's almost a 75% savings over the set I saw on the original site. Whoa!