Quiet Down!

When last we left the quiet book saga, the pages were done and only the cover remained.  Did I say "only"?  Dun dun DUNNNNNNNNN.  So.  The saga continued at Hobby Lobby...

I bought denim for the outer cover--but not enough to make it from one piece.  So the cover was three pieces sewed together.  The inside cover was a green gingham that frayed like crazy.  

I spent a LONG time making the inside pocket.  I spent another LONG time doing the inside spine piece because it required grommets for the binder rings to go through.  (The pages I sewed together with small loops of ribbon to hook onto the rings.)

I put it all together, sewing the wrong sides together first, leaving a gap.  Then I flipped it and zigzagged around it again.  Lastly I sewed the button on.  Hurray!

Well, it was okay.  The cover was so floppy and too big.  But it was OKAY and we took it on our trip and Boo Boo liked it, floppy cover and all.  

After we got home I decided I needed to pull it apart and add some interfacing to the denim to stiffen it up.  Long story short, everything went wrong.  The gingham was fraying like mad, making it hard to sew with a necessarily narrow seam allowance, the interfacing wasn't sticking...it just looked sad.  Look at it, poor savaged thing:

 

 
So.  I went back to Hobby Lobby.  I got more interfacing, the correct amount of denim and started over.  It still took a long time, but I was able to fix some things that had bothered me, like the pocket construction.  I used a different fabric for the inside (extra from Boo Boo's quilt) and I used a button on the pocket instead of velcro.  I also used smaller binder rings and just folded the fabric edges under, rather than the sew-flip-sew again method.  And guess what, it's so much better!  Easier to hold, easier to look through, easier to put in my bag.  I'm glad I redid it, but I'm even more glad it's done.  Let us examine:

(You can see the grommets here)

It's hard to show much nicer the cover is with the interfacing.  It makes it easier to hold open and look through, plus it just feels so much sturdier. 

(I used two leftover quilt squares for the pocket.  The buttons are extras that came with my white coat [thanks, Nordstrom!])

Saurs!  Sometimes the game is to put them all down my shirt.

So now that it is all said and done, how is it working out?  Well, I won't say that Mister adores every page and plays with them all.  Some are still beyond on him, as I knew they would be (like the ribbon tying page).  But he loves pulling the zippers, playing with the ocean page and finding the apples in the pie.  The crayons, animal tails and button flowers are also popular, but the truth is that he probably loves the dinosaurs in the back pocket best of all...

But he DOES like it and I think he loves the new fishy inside cover.  I think he will continue to like it more as he gets older.  I have a few more pages I'd like to add at some point, maybe for his birthday (dinosaur themed of course), but for right now, I'm happy with where it's at and how it turned out.  It got me to try some new sewing things and hey, I don't even really fear buttonholes anymore.  Plus I never have to make another cover.

Just for easy reference, here are the blog posts for all the individual pages:
Ribbon Lion
Animal Tails
Zipper and Clock 
Pie Weaving and Ribbon Tying  
Ocean and Textures
Alphabet, Button Flowers, Crayon Box and Tiger Tails

Flowering Crayon Tiger Tails x2, or, More Quiet Book Pages

Last November we had travel plans for Thanksgiving and I thought it would be good to have the quiet book for the airplane (spoiler: I never even took it out for any flight).  Since I still had a lot of pages to do, it was a bit of a marathon to finish the pages and make the cover before we left.  But I did it!  Sort of.  But we'll get to that later.  

Unfortunately our camera is out of batteries right now so I just have so-so phone pictures, but you'll get the idea. 

This first page has its origin in the year I spent studying illustration in college.  We had an assignment to make our own font, and I made one with tiger tails.  Seriously, it was my one and only idea.  Anyway, I still had it so I pulled it out and made it into an alphabet page:

I traced the letters onto the page, colored them with a fabric marker and then went over the edges with puff paint, just for some texture.  I think it's cute.

Then I did the standard button flowers page, like we had in the book my mom made.  These are the most perfect buttonholes I've ever done.  Though you can't really tell because they have been--ahem--a little stretched out with aggressive unbuttoning.

This next one was an undertaking.  I wanted to do something about colors, and Drew came up with the idea of doing a crayon box.  Let me tell you, I had some sore fingertips by the time I finished sewing all the crayons (they were made of a layer of interfacing sandwiched between felt).

It was a lot of steps to make this one, but it turned out well in the end.  

The last page is pretty obvious--just some super cute fuzzy tigers and a little rhyme. 

These pages were sponsored by my sister-in-law Sarah, who gave me this shirt many moons ago because I love those tigers so much.  Seriously, look at their little faces...come on!  Anyway, I couldn't really see a day when it would fit me again so I decided to recycle it.  Upcycle it?  Whatever.

And that was the end of the pages!  Of course, little did I know the hardest part was yet to come...and come again a second time.  But the cover is a story for another blog post...

Feel the Ocean

More quiet book pages!  I think I'm going to take some time off from it for a while.  I might work on the cover and put together what I have so far, we'll see.  So far the finer points of each page kind of escape Boo Boo's interest so I've got some time.  

When I started gathering ideas, I had the thought of making an ocean page that would feature the characters from his mobile.  It's just a page for fun, nothing particularly educational about it, but I think it turned out pretty cute:

  

The floaty fish are on elastic so they can be pulled hither and thither and I did the faces with puff paint.  The creatures are double layers of felt and I put cardboard from a cereal box between the layers to make them sturdier (resulting in this kind of situation, ha).  I put off making this page for a long time because I thought it would be so labor intensive, but once I got all the pieces cut out it came together fairly quickly.

The last page is just a mix of textures for the feeling.  Nothing too fancy going on:

I used my orange fabric for smooth, a washcloth for fuzzy and part of a burlap shopping bag from Tesco for rough.  Was it a wrench cutting up that bag?  Yes but it did already have a big hole in it.  Still!  Wrench.

I plan to make at least a few more pages.  I want something about colors, counting, shapes and maybe the alphabet so we'll see what happens there.  Drewbles has said a few times I should sell quiet books on Etsy but I don't want to spend all this time for OTHER people, even for money (plus I know I would obsess over the quality).  But while I was working on the ocean page, I thought maybe I could put together patterns/templates for things like that page or the animals and tails and sell those.  I don't know, I have no idea what kind of demand there is for that sort of thing...there's a lot of free stuff online but I wouldn't charge much.  I dunno, might be fun.  Thoughts, internet?

Tie Up Your Pie

Quiet book update!

This first page is one I've been especially excited to make.  I was originally going to do a straight forward weaving page with just two pages of felt, but when I saw this book I knew I wanted to do a pie page.  

I liked how it turned out!  My mom has had this apple fabric for YEARS and I knew it would work perfectly.  I like it when a page turns out AND is cheap!  Win-win.  Baby also wins because he will be a pro at doing a lattice topped pies.  Mmm, flower and apple pie.

I also knew I wanted to do a page for tying bows, for future shoelace practice.  What I didn't want to do was make a page with a shoe on it and grommets and everything for the shoelace.  I can't explain this, I just didn't want to do it.  So I went simple:

Three times the practice, almost no work for me to make.  Now, you might be wondering where the holes are going to go to put this in the actual book.  I wondered this myself--after I finished.  So...we'll see what happens.  

Zip Your Clock

And so work on the quiet book continues.  I am trying to do about a page a week, until I run out of ideas and/or steam and then I'll take a break.  Anyway, I did two pretty simple pages in these last two weeks.  First, the clock:

This is another idea I took from the book my mama made.  I used a button instead of a brad and I put interfacing behind the clock hands to make them sturdier.  The numbers I did with puff paint.  Can you tell I freehanded them??  Ha.

I also did this zipper page:

I got the idea from this book of quiet book ideas.  I made a point of getting zippers with big pulls, which limited my selection but I like how coordinated it turned out.  I put fabric behind them, just to give it some pizzazz.  But did I succeed in sewing all the fabric down under the zipper?  Well...no.  So I have to fix that later.  This was my first time doing zippers...

...and luckily no one will see the backside when the book is done.

Bums and Tails

I finished the second page for the quiet book!  The idea for this one came from the book my mom made for us, lo, those many moons ago.  It's a page of animals with their different tails that fix on with velcro.

(As you can see, most of the animals are tailless these days.)  

Anyway, I wanted to replicate that page for my book so I drew out some animals and put it together using felt and sewing on the velcro (a first for me).  My original plan was to do a pom pom for the rabbit tail, but that was before I tried sewing velcro to a pom pom.  Altogether it took a lot longer than my first page, but I think it turned out pretty cute.

I look forward to seeing Babycakes put all the wrong tails on the animals, after he moves on from trying to eat the tails.

Shhhhh

One of my goals for the year is to make a quiet book for Boo Boo.  I just like making things, what can I say?  After several weeks of procrastinatory planning, I made a page today.  I got the idea for it from this website and then adapted it to what I wanted and what I had on hand.  Thanks to my obsessive need to save every piece of ribbon I've ever acquired, all I had to buy was the heavy-duty interfacing and a 10 cent page of felt.  

(Does that red rick rack look familiar, Sarah?)

I think it turned out cute!  YES, there are blue-eyed lions found in nature. (Okay, I said that as a joke, but it's actually true!  Go me.)  I have a sneaking suspicion Boo Boo would have more fun with just a long piece of ribbon, but that's just TOO BAD.  Because I put the leftover ribbon away.

This is how I made this page:

With two big messes.