Hello Agents! Silver Puffin here at Beagle HQ.
How’s your training going? We hope you’ve set up your HQ and worked out your agent name. Have you designed your Secret Agent ID card yet?
Today we’d like to show you how to make your wrist communicator. Secret Agents need to keep in contact with fellow Agents and also their team at HQ, so let’s design yours so you can start going on missions!
Making the wrist communicators uses a number of key skills children need to learn, including micro hand movements, sewing and more. It also encourages imaginary play, perfect for helping deal with lockdown blues.
Instructions
To make your wrist communicator, you’ll need some thread and a needle or glue. You might also like to have some pens, buttons or anything else to decorate your wrist communicator.
- Lay out your materials. Each kit comes with a blue wrist band, white ‘screen’ and some sequins and foam. I find laying them out allow you to start thinking about how you’d like your communicator to look.
- I chose to draw on the white ‘screen’ as if I had received a mission, but you might like to draw a character, some symbols, numbers or anything you like. I used a ball-point pen to avoid the ink blurring but you can use felt-tips, or paint, just remember the colours may blur on the felt.
- Once your screen is decorated, you can place it in the middle of your wrist communicator.
- Decide where you’d like to put your sequins, foam pieces or any other bits you’d like on your communicator. Move them around and think about how you’re going to use your communicator – do you want all the ‘buttons’ on one side, in a line or all over the place? If you want to, you can use some of your stickers too!
- Once you’ve decided where you want your pieces, you can either stick them down using glue or sew them on. Check out my post from our 12 Days of Craftmas which shows how to do a running stitch.
- Once your screen and buttons are all in place, flip your communicator over. This section gets a little tricky so you might need a bit of help from a fellow agent. Measure how big you need your communicator by wrapping it around your wrist. Remember, it needs to be wide enough to slip it on and off your wrist, so you may need to leave a gap at one end (or not if you make a slightly bigger wrist communicator). You can carefully sew or glue the felt to keep it together.
- Slip on your wrist communicator. Key in your message to HQ and head out on your first secret mission!
Make sure you tag us in any photos as we always love seeing your makes.
If you would like to order one of our boxes, you can via our online shop or Etsy. You can also order additional sticker sets and even a personalised birthday card!
Also, be sure to pop back during the February half-term as we’ll be posting a special coded message each day for your Secret Agent to decode.