Reinvent the Blanket Fort With the Fortamajig

Welcome to ZRecs Fort Week! Since it's now officially summer, we thought we'd bring you five days of products and ideas designed to help kids build great forts and to bring out the kid in adults. First up is The Happy Kid Company's Fortamajig, a ZRecs Top Pick.

The Fortamajig is a deceptively simple idea executed in a way that offers a wealth of end-user complexity. Designed by two moms with a clear love of blanket forts, the lightweight, 8x8' nylon ripstop Fortamajig is studded with 24 Velcro loops around its edges and nine Velcro fasteners across its surface. It features a Velcro-lined slit for a door and a mesh window with a camping tent-style shade that can be rolled up and held open with nylon ties. It also has a pocket at each corner that can be weighted with any kid-provided ballast to keep walls stable.

Combined with the handful of additional Velcro strips of varying lengths included in the Fortamajig kit, the loops can be purposed to a surprising variety of fort-building needs.

We have built a few forts with the Fortamajig. Here are two of them.

This fort was built using a couple of convenient fireplace knobs, a chair, Z's Learning Tower, and a child's easel, either or both of which could have been substituted with chairs.

An example of the Fortamajig's flexibility: Here we use one of surface's interior Velcro fasteners (two strands that lock along a roughly six-inch span) by looping two of the kit's free-floating, stretchy straps - one short one, one long one - in a long loop to reach the easel, creating a short wall.

Another view. Note that the window panel has Velcro all along the bottom - if the shade is down, it can be fully fastened in place. A thoughtful detail, but not just that: The entire Fortamajig is designed in this way.

The simple sewn elastic loops are ideal for this application.

And here's fort #2, this one a tall sort of tent that makes use of a couch, the same easel, and a chair. Additional nylon pieces (one each purple, green and red) are from the Cranium Super Fort, which we'll review later this week. They were unnecessary for the construction of the fort but were used to enclose a much-needed nursery under the easel.


The fort's roof owes its steep pitch to one of the exterior elastic loops and to a curtain rod.

Above, the fort's roomy seating area.

The fort's nursery.

The initial inspiration for this fort was the row of tall windows that run along one wall of our living room. I thought it would be cool to create a fort that took advantage of all that natural light to create a well-lit space with a view. Here are shots of the view from inside the fort and from a bay window that is at a right-angle to the window the fort utilizes. If you squint you can see Z's ghostly shape in the exterior view.


Above, another quick "innovation" the Fortamajig's designers were probably well aware of when they developed their fasteners: I attached one of the edge straps to an interior Velcro tie to raise a wall for our impromptu doorway (the provided one is actually positioned at the roof's peak, and thus inoperable due to my hasty orientation of the fabric during the design process).

The Fortamajig folds up into a less than 1' square and comes with a nylon bag to carry it in. You could easily throw it in a suitcase or in the back of your car for impromptu fort-building at any time.

Unlike many toys that attempt to create a commercial solution for what was already a perfectly good homemade invention (the blanket fort), the Fortamajig actually enhances the experience of building a blanket fort, rather than confining it within a narrowed set of options. Building forts with the Fortamajig, my three-year-old daughter Z and I actually had the feeling that we were inventing ways to use it, which is about the best feeling any toy can give.

The Fortamajig is sold in single-layer and reversible models for $70 and $90, respectively. You can read more about it and buy it online at The Happy Kid Company's website.