This craft can be useful for playtime as well as eye training
Many children have one lazy eye, so we discovered. I personally never had this issue, neither did my boyfriend, but we are blessed with a daughter thas has a lazy eye. She has been checked several times by eye doctors and nothing came to the surface to worry about. The advise was given to use eye patch stickers and train her eye to get this right.
The patch challenge
Now I don't know if you ever tried to place an eye patch sticker on a 1-4 year old, but let me tell you, with our little lady it was a horrible experience. I tried all the tricks in the books, decorating the thing, rewarding her, you name it, it was a problem every single time. I do think it helped, because after some time, the eye seemed more in the right position and therefore I got lazy with the patches. Then corona came, hospitals didn't see people without urgent complaints and before you know, we're where we're at now. Time to be more pro-active and start the eye training again!
None seem to fit well
I remember the most annoying thing was these eye patches never really seem to fit well, and often also don't stick enough to stay in place. Although they aren't too expensive, I got pretty annoyed by the fact that I was buying these patches without them sticking long enough for the training. I don't have a sewing machine, so I thought about another solution: make one from felt. Felt is my go-to with so many crafts and if you think about it, it's soft on the skin so she'll probably be more content wearing that. Especially if I let her be a little pirate!
Tools and supplies needed
Above you can see the supplies I was planning on using, but I decided to not go ahead with the needle and thread part of the project, I can imagine you decide otherwise, so I'd say make sure you have them ready and decide while creating the patch!
- 2 colors felt, I used one thicker felt and a thinner one
- pencil
- foam for the template
- scissors
- elastic
- glue gun
- if you prefer: a needle and thread
Not too many items needed and creating this patch doesn't cost the world either. I had all the items in the house already but if you would need to buy the felt, it would still be a cheap project. You can of course choose to pimp the patch as well and make it as fancy as you like!
The process
Below I will describe the steps:
This one speaks for itself, use the foam and a pencil to draw the eye patch. I used a part of the foam that was already useless due to an old drawing on it, as that's no problem for the template.
You can fit the size of the template on your child's eye and see if you need to adapt the size a bit or not. I decided not to give any directions in size, because that's depending on your child's age and every child is different.
Once it's the right size, use the template to draw the shape on the felt as well. Repeat 2x for both colors.
Make a cut as shown in the images above, repeat for all 4 felt patches. Now it's time to decide if you are going to use the glue gun or needle and thread. My patch turned out a bit more firm than expected, therefore the glue made more sense. If you use 3 patches or maybe not the thick felt, I'd probably chose sewing as you can create a cool pattern with white thread to make the patch look more fancy.
In the images you can see how I attached the patches to the elastic headband. It's quite simple, and speaks for itself when looking at the pictures.
That's it! The little pirate is ready to go!
The end result
Although it turned out a little different than I originally planned, I'm quite happy with the result. Sometimes you have to adapt your plan along the way, to create something even better, right? The most important thing is that my daughter is a happy little pirate! She said thank you at least 10 times after finding this on her table when she got home from the kindergarten. <3
Thank you for stopping by, leaving a comment is always appreciated!
This was so satisfying to read. Your daughter must have been really happy thats for sure. The eye patch is so cool. Arrrg
Ah, what a nice comment, thank you @stevenson7 :)
Oh beautiful pirate patch. No wonder your little girl loved it. My eldest was also diagnosed with lazy eye when he was 5 years old and we had to also put patches to train it. I did not have your creativity at that time and just bought a black patch instead. Sometimes I just taped cotton patch over his eye. Yeah I know, what a savage mother i was. Lol.
haha thank you @arrliinn for making me laugh out loud :)
Trust me when I say this has been such a struggle for several years already, to the point that this savage mother even said: forget about the stupid patch, we'll deal with that later. It was not worth the headaches lol.
Now she's very sensitive for these crafty items so I'm finally making her wear it again. Only at home btw, I'm not going to send her to school with it (unless at one point she'd have to of course).
I think this is such a thing that is hard to deal with when a child is very small or toddler aged. They have their own will lol. Was your daughter's eye corrected in the end? Did it take long?
It's been 6 years since that time and it got corrected after around 4 months of wearing it for around 2-3hours per day but only when reading or writing (basically close range). He still wears glasses now because he of high astigmatism though.
oh I'm sorry @arrliinn I don't know why I assumed you were talking about a girl, lol. :)
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