Making clues for a treasure hunt

by: Chica

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As I mentioned in my pirate party favor post the other day, Jo and I are organizing a treasure hunt for the kids while we're on vacation at the beach next week. No treasure hunt would be complete without clues, of course, so I got right on it.

Writing the clues was really fun. We started by coming up with locations that we could lead the kids to, and where we could easily hide the next clue. For each one, I wrote a four-line clue that rhymed, and that told the kids where to find the next clue. I made four clues and a treasure map (which they'll get last) which shows them where to find the buried treasure!

Your clues will vary depending on where you're having your hunt, but here's a sample of one of our clues:

Any good pirate can do cannon balls.
The best place to practice is blocked by white walls.
After lots of good practice, you'll surely be beat
so look for your clue under a big, white seat.

Not sure of the answer? Well, cannon balls are the kids' favorite things to do in the swimming pool, and the pool at the place we're staying is surrounded by a white fence. There are also dozens of big, white lounge chairs along the poolside, and we'll be hiding the next clue under one of those.

It was so fun to come up with these clues, and I can't wait for the kids to decipher them!

Once the clues were all written and printed out, the next step was to distress them to make them look like old pages that pirates might have left behind. To do this, I followed the same steps we showed you before in our post about making pirate party invitations.

You can read more details on how to do this in our original post, but here's a summary: tear the edges, crumple it up, ink it with Distress Ink, and spray it with water.

Aren't the results cool? I especially like the hole in the middle of the map, which I think makes it look more authentic.

Then I rolled the clues and maps up and stuck them into glass bottles that I distressed with a technique I also talked about in our pirate party invitation post. Again, you can read the details there, but the technique involved covering the bottles with bits of masking tape and then inking it to distress it. I drew numbers on each bottle to mark the clues, and they were ready to go.