quiet book.. shhhhhh I'm sewing!

 This is the project I have most recently been working on. On of the crafty girls at my church designed it and offered to help a bunch of us make our own; so for the last month, eeeevery tuesday, we've been working on our oh so adorable, but slightly complex for non-sewers, Quiet Books.

Never heard of a quiet book? Well, they are fairly self explanatory but I will indulge those whose children are always quiet and would never require such an item.

A quiet book is designed so that each page has some fun activity or works on a motor skill. All the pages are made of felt and all the activities are supposed to be "quiet" so that when my angelic child gets rowdy sitting in sacrament meeting at church, I can hand him this book for some quiet entertainment.

So this is the monster page. He can arrange the monster eyes, mouth and ears to make silly faces. This page wasn't included in all the other books, but I made this page so we could work on eyes and ears and mouth... we are having issues knowing the difference.There is a little pocket on the left to hold all the pieces. (I couldn't figure out how to make the monster a pocket itself, see, really I am not that smart.)

These next two pages are similar. On the left is a boat with water, and there are fish that we can practice counting and colors with. They can go in and out of the boat and water.

The right page is a button flower garden. Each flower is held on with a button so he can practice doing buttons. This is a little advanced for him now, but it will be fun in the future.

 These are my fave pages! Kyli, the girl who designed the books, seriously came up with a shoe!! And you can lace it and everything!! It is so cute. She also did a pencil and notebook page, but I made mine really wide so I could put in the little magnetic sketching pad, paper, aaand crayons. (It totally makes the whole book really fat, but that is okay, it is still cute.)

Bradley's fave page is the lady bug! It has a zipper down the middle that he loves to work on, and he loves taking the spots in and out and putting them on the lady bug! Maybe I should put some numbers on them so we can count. Maybe.

This project was surprisingly hard for me, and really forced me to get friendly with my sewing machine. I am not a sewer! But I can do straight lines, and if I go reeeeeeeealy slow I can do all those little curves. If you look at the front page you can easily see my skills are sub par. But it was really fun! And of course it was so fun to craft in a group together.

I firmly believe all crafting should be done this way.

Want to see more photos of the other pages? Click Here!! (Takes you to our picassa web album. I feel bad posting a million pics, but I know the crafty types like getting closeups for ideas!)