Quiet Book #33: Quiet Book Covers

If you haven't already seen my posts on our quiet books then you need to check it out!  Because once you make all those wonderful pages you're going to wonder how to bind them together in a way that's easy and practical and is expandable to your children's ages and skill level.

I thought about the best way to make a quiet book cover for weeks.  Did I want to just go ahead and sew it together? Then it's permanent! Did I want the pages to be removeable? Am I going to have to make two of every page to let the girls each have their own book or...ugh! What was the best solution?  Well...this is the best solution I have found for us!  I'm excited to show you!

These are Emma's Quiet book page covers. The front and back are separate.  Keep in mind that these pictures were right after I made it and I haven't added the grommets at the bottom yet, but at least you get the idea of it.
 

I chose to NOT sew my pages together.  I decided that it makes it so much more versatile having the ability to swap out pages between my girls' books, so I don't have to make doubles of each page. I can also out pages as they get too easy or add more challenging ones in as needed.  During the holidays I can add in pages that pertain to Halloween, or Christmas, etc. This way has really worked out well for us. 

These ones are of Kara's and you can see how it will look when you add the grommets at the bottom.  I just use the metal rings from the office store to keep them together.  Each page that I make I add grommets to. You will also note that our book covers have the handles on them making it easy for the girls to carry their own books around.  The book also latches on the front side with a button to keep it from opening up all the time.

A couple things I made sure of when I was making the covers was to make sure my grommets lined up with the pages, and to make the cover large enough I wasn't going to have any pages sticking out around the edges. I wanted these to be clean, nice looking covers and I think they turned out perfect.  The girls love that their names are on them and it keeps the confusion down of who's who's. 

I hope these covers inspire you to come up with a creative way to mount all of those wonderful quiet book pages together that you've been working on!

Thanks for looking and Happy Sewing!

God Bless!

Heather Joy

Quiet Book #32: Space Rocket

Here is our outer space rocket page. This one is also intended to be an easy toddler page or baby book page. I just glued on numbers so they can count down the blast off. I also glued on some gray buttons on our gray moon. 

I made the rocket out of fabric and tiny ric-rac flames.  I added a piece of felt glued on the back side for the ribbon to run through.  Super easy and simple.  But it's great for any age.  My four year old is still enjoying it and we practice counting down from 10 to make it a bit more challenging.
 

God Bless!

Heather Joy

Quiet Book #31: Baby Book

This was a quick sewing project for me. I wanted to make a small book that would travel easily and not have a lot of pieces that could be easily lost. Then we could use for church and road trips.

The book includes a baby on the first page attached with a string and a closet that opens so they can pretend to get their baby dressed in the morning. I still want to find some way to make cute clothes for the baby but have yet to come up with a good way to do that.  But until then my girls haven't minded using their imaginations.

The next page is where you put the baby in the stroller and take her for a walk. Then after your morning walk you can put the baby in her high chair for a meal.

Then you can, of course, give your baby a bath after she gets messy from her meal. And then when your baby's all squeaky clean you can lay them down in the crib for bed.

My girls love this book! It was simple enough to make and and leaves lots of room for their imaginations. Plus, what could be better for a little girl then practicing being a good mama. 

Hope you enjoyed our Baby Book. 

God bless and happy sewing!

Heather Joy

Quiet Book #30: Bubble Gum Machine

Here's another quick quiet book page for your toddler book.  This bubble gum is for practicing matching skills.  The top of the gumball machine opens and the gumballs are stuffed inside.  They take them out and match them onto the already visible gumballs.

This page is super easy.  Just sew your circles on top of each other.

Make your bottom shape resemble the machine. 

Next, cut out three of each colored gumball you want.  I used 8 total. Make sure to make sure they actually fit inside of your gumball machine before you glue anything!

Then glue together two of the circles of each color.  This thicker one will be the one that gets stuffed inside the pocket.  It will hold up better to being played with.

Then just set out all the gumballs on top of your white circle and use felt glue to glue them on.  Don't sew here! Otherwise, you want have room behind your circle for a pocket to hold the gumballs.

Then sew on your pieces to your page.  Make sure to leave a gap on the top for your opening to store your gumballs!!  I forgot and had to seam rip one of mine...the next two I made I remembered. :)

Happy Crafting and God Bless!

Heather Joy

Quiet Book #29: Camping Tent

Here's a quick quiet book page for you.  I didn't really take pictures on this one.  This camping page is part of the camping & s'mores pages that go together.  Check out the previous post about it here.

Here is are my quick sketches for the page:

I thought about having a picture of our family inside somehow, or people she could take out and play with, but I thought that zipper itself was a great fine motor skill, so I chose just an quick and easy iron on.  I found some owl ones at Hobby Lobby.

Here are the pieces you'll need:

-Moon

-Tent Shape

-Windows for tent

-Zipper

-Iron On Animal or something else to put inside the tent

Here are the felt pieces I needed for both of my camping pages. Ready to go!

So, like I said before, I didn't take any pictures along the way.  This page is obviously pretty self explanatory.  

1. First, cut up the middle of the tent and cut away any excess.  This will make room for zipper. 

You will probably want to pin the zipper in as you do this, at least temporarily. 

2.Then sew on the windows onto the tent.

3. Stitch on or sew on the zipper.  I don't have a zipper foot for my sewing machine so I just hand stitched it on.

4. Then sew on the whole tent.

5.  Sew on the moon.

6.  Lastly, you can unzip and iron on your animal or person or whatever you chose

 to hide inside your tent.

Here's the finished product again:

Here it is alongside the s'mores page.  I love this page for Summer!  

Camping trips are always on our Summer bucket list!

Well, hope that was easy enough for you!  Happy Crafting and God Bless!

Heather Joy

Quiet Book #28: The Zoo

Here's another fun page for you to add to your quiet book collection.  This was an original idea by yours truly.  Usually most of the pages I see ideas elsewhere and then adapt them.  This I hadn't seen anywhere and just made it happen.  It's pretty cute though.  It's a zoo with cages and animals to change in and out of the cages.  I've also thought about making a zoo keeper and maybe adding some water and food elements to it as well, but that can wait until later.  First, let me show you how I made this page.

What you'll need:

-5 cages

- 1 page protector

- a few green bushes 

- a tree

- zoo entrance sign

- pocket flap

- animals

The first and hardest part of this was creating the cages.  After you have cut endless amounts of them (I cut 15 because I always make 3 sets of any page to sell to cover my costs later.), then you need to put them together like the picture shows below:

-a piece of paper

-a cut piece of your page protector, large enough for it to generously go around your cage

-on top is your cage

Then you'll take that sandwich of materials and with the cage on top you will sew along each edge of the cage.  You may have to backstitch on some parts to make sure you get the whole thing sewn down.  Take it off the sewing machine and carefully rip the paper away off of the back.  Having the paper on the back helps give the sewing machine a little more structure to stitch through and helps prevent anything from sticking with the plastic.

When your cages are done they should look like this:

Next, you'll want to lay out your stuff in a general layout, so everything fits.  This is how I have it set up:

Then you will need to cut out a strip of the back page to make a pocket for your animals.  You can see how large my strip is here.

  

See how the animals will fit in:

Next,  I went ahead and stiched on all the parts for this half of the page.  I sewed on the cages, making sure to leave the tops open and making sure to backstitch a couple times on each of the top edges to make sure it will hold up to the animals be shoved in and out of them. Sew on the tree and bush.  And I glued on our little saying, 'Don't Feed The Animals'.

Once you've gotten that figured out you will need to sew or glue on the top flap to cover your pocket opening. 

Pin it. (I chose to have the opening at the top because I wanted to prevent any of the animals from accidentally falling out.

Add glue if you're lazy like me, or you can stitch it down.

Hold it down for a few seconds and let dry.

Now to actually add the pocket on back.  You can see I just used a scrap piece of felt.  This one happened to be green, another page, as you'll see, I used dark gray.  Figure out what size you want your pocket to be- make sure all your animals fit.

Here you have to glue!  Because you don't want your stitching to show on the front of the page!  Just glue around all the sides and let dry.

 Now, for the other half of the page.  This side you need to also sew on the cages and bushes, like the previous side.  Here's the layout.  Make sure you leave room for the arch.

Cut the extra off and sew it on.

 

Then you need to make your sign.  You can choose to use puff paints to write out 'ZOO' or you can attempt to embroider the letters on your sign.  Not to shabby for my first attempts at stitching letter, I have to say.

Once you sew your sign on. All you have to do now is make your animals to fill up your zoo.

This is the best secret to making your quiet book pages look more professional and saving you tons of time of creating all these animals by hand.  To see how I made these zoo animals along with a lot of other figures see my tutorial here. 

Then fill up your zoo and let your kids have a blast!  Why not follow it up with a trip to the zoo?!

 Happy Crafting and God Bless!

Heather Joy

Quiet Book #27: Spider Web Halloween Page

Well, my attempt in this quiet book page was to have a Halloween themed page that wasn't spooky or scary, since we don't celebrate Halloween with all that gory stuff. Spiders are not 'scary' to us because I don't want to instill a spirit of fear in my children, rather they are 'creepy'. I'm always careful to not say any things scary and always tell them that "The Lord hath not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind" 2 Timothy 1:7. Anyways, on to our 'creepy' spiderweb page.

Start by making the spider out of two circles of black felt and small Rick rac for the legs. Glue on the legs and ribbon the spider will hang from. Sew together and stuff it just before closing it up all the way to give it a little bit of dimension.

Next, you need to work on the web. Start with a lacing string. Make a spiral around the page. Then cut long rectangles which will be where the web gets weaves into. It will also help give it points to make sure it looks web like.

Pin in between the lacing string and sew down.

Here's what the web supports should look like all sewn down.

Here's what it looks like when you weave the 'web':

Then just sew on the spider at the top of the page and here's the final result, just in time for Halloween!

Quiet Book #26: Smores & Campfire

 

Here is another quiet book installment for you. This is the S'mores part of our camping pages. You can see it goes along with the camping tent page, which I will post later.  This is a fun page because you can really toast the marshmallow over a standing up fire. 

And then make a delicious s'mores with it.

 

 

Here were the plans I started making along the way. I originally wanted to make a tent and sleeping bag on the same page as the fire but things always seem to change as I start going along.

Here's most of the items you'll need:
-brown felt (for chocolate and stick)
-red felt for s'mores box
-yellow and orange colors for fire
-tan for firewood, graham crackers and toasted part on marshmallow
-white for marshmallow

Start by gluing all the tedious rectangles on your bar of chocolate and the flames for your fire.

Here I sewed together the tan graham crackers as well as the toasted part on the marshmallow.

Make sure to leave the other side of the marshmallow white ( I actually forgot to switch my bobbin and so the thread is tan on the back. oops, showing a little bit of my laziness to switch out my bobbin). But the point is you want one side white and one side toasted so after you put it on the fire you can switch it.

Next, start on the stick. I found a nice shape and then I traced it onto cardboard from an old cereal pizza box. You don't want it too flimsy.

Trace the same shape onto the brown felt, twice. Grab out your glue again and glue it together with a felt piece on the front as well as the back.

Then start working on the bag for your s'mores stuff by cutting out the rectangle to size and I added a triangle piece on each size so that way it would have more depth to hold all the fixings inside:

A couple pictures of me making it along the way:

 

I sewed the triangle sides onto what will be the front of the bag.

Then I just pinned that down as straight as I could before sewing it down onto the page.

 

 Here's a picture of how much space that added to my bag. You don't have to choose to do this you could always come up with a zipper pouch or something else to store your s'mores fixings into.

 

Then add the handle underneath the top edge of the bag.

I'm missing some pictures of the rest but you'll need to:

-add a pocket for the stick
-stitch down some firewood pieces
-sew down just the bottom edge of each flame so they can stand up like a real fire, like so:

-add velcro to the marshmallows on both sides so you can flip back and forth. You can see it a little in this picture on one side of the marshmallow

And once you've spent about forever making all this happen you will be super excited to show your kiddos all your hard work, and maybe even plan a family camping trip to reveal this page on your trip.

Happy crafting and God Bless!

Heather Joy