Quiet Books!

My phone has alerted me that I have almost no room left on it, once again. Could it be the 3000 pictures I have taken in the last year? Or the 893 recipes for all things yummy I have pinned and not yet made? Couldn’t be the boards labeled “Crafty” “Sew Buttons” or “Lilypad”, could it? Ugh. The life of a modern day woman. It’s that time again. Re-organizing my boards! Those without a Pinterest account, consider yourself lucky. It’s like going through your recipe books and deciding if you should keep or trash. Or looking at your DIY to do list (please tell me I am not the only one with one of those) and narrowing down the projects you want to do or have done. Or organzing old photographs back from a time when you actually sent them away to be printed out. What usually happens is I start going through and reorganizing, then I get excited and find something I want to do and BAM. New project started and the others are brushed to the side. 

I opened the Lilypad board and began to delete things I have done with her, to her, and for her. I stumbled across a pin about Quiet Books. How I haven’t at least started one of these yet is beyond me! After researching what materials worked best for different people, I decided on felt, stiff and regular. I like the look of the books on fabric, but I have a feeling my darling daughter would wreck some havoc on those at this age. I have scraps from previous sewing projects and things like buttons and snaps not being used. I want to have some pages that use magnets, some with Velcro, and whatever mixed media I can find! I made a list of all the ideas I saw, adding my own twists. Then I sketched out ten or so pages I wanted to try in my handy dandy notebook. 

My wonderful pretty much sister in law Becky gave me a Michael’s gift card for my birthday this year and I figured this would be a great way to use it! I took both babies on an adventure, very well knowing I could not spend all day wandering the aisles as I usually could do. We headed right to the felt aisle and there I spent almost the whole $25 card on felt. Sorry to the girl who had to ring me up! 


The first page I attempted was a simple tree made from felt on a blue background. I decided to attach apples to the tree with Velcro and a basket to the ground to keep the apples in. I used the circular pieces of Velcro and reinforced them with a few stitches. I glues the background down and then decided to stitch everything to the felt, just to be sure. For a second page, I made a beehive with three flowers as the background, and using yarn, I attached three bees with pipe cleaner wings. Once again I glued everything down, then reinforced with some stitches. I originally bought the rainbow in thread, but realized I don’t have enough bobbins that fit into my machine to be able to switch them out. So the bobbin stayed white while the thread changed. Hopefully Lily doesn’t mind too much.

I am not the best artist, and I tend to free hand cut, but I like the way my first two pages turned out! I have a lot more up my sleeve and I can’t wait to work on them! Drawing out the story board then cutting out the fabric are things that keep my hands busy during nap and then I can usually sneak away to glue and sew after dinner!

Now that I'm writing about these pages, I am ready to prep a few more! Since it's a rainy Friday, I am hoping the bambinos will nestle in for a little bit longer so I can cut and plan a little more! 

...cue one child crying.

HAPPY FRIDAY!