Tutorial : Quiet Busy Book - Part 4

Lock and Tic Tac Toe

This page is intended to work on fine motor skills (insert and turn key, put lock on ring) and have a fun game!

Materials
felt or interfaced fabric for the back of the page.
interfaced felt for the chest to hold pieces
ribbon for the tic tac toe grid and to hold the lock on the page.
ring for the lock to loop on.
felt pieces for the game.

1) prepare the "Treasure Chest" I interfaced some felt so it had extra strength and then cut it into two pieces, a lid and a body. Cut a hole in the lid suitable for the key ring. Next sew along all edges to provide extra enforcement. Stitch down on the page. Do the bottom first, remember to leave the top open! Then just stitch the top of the lid. Hand sew the ring on.
2) Prepare the lock. Securely attach ribbon to the lock and key. I tied and glued it. Tie knots in the lengths of ribbon remaining to ensure it wont' get tangled our caught.
3) Cut ribbon of suitable lengths for the Tic Tac Toe grid and sew it down.
4) Cut pieces of contrasting felt to use as Tic Tac Toe pieces.
5) When we get to sewing the pages together, don't forget to insert the ends of the lock and key ribbons into the seam of the page!

Magnet Page

This page is intended to explore magnetism and fine motor control.

Materials
felt or interfaced fabric for the back of the page.
Clear plastic table cloth (same stuff as the photo page)
Magnets
Items to go under the plastic. I put metal buttons, a fishing lure and a wooden sheep with a magnet on the back. The sheep seemed to work the best.
Ribbon
Edging material (I chose felt)

1) It is extremely frustrating and moderately ugly to sew directly on to the plastic stuff. I strongly suggest having ribbon or felt or fabric between the presser foot and the plastic.
2) Cut a square of plastic table cloth stuff 10-11 inches square.
3) Cut edging material to go around the full edge of the plastic.
4) Lay it out and sew it down on 3 sides.
5) Sew some ribbon on top of the plastic to provide a bit of a maze. I did it pretty simplistically (just two little lines), but you can be much more elaborate.
6) Insert your items and sew it shut!
7) The magnet wand needs to be made semi child resistant. How you go about doing this will depend on the magnets you choose. I piled the magnets up with glue between each layer and then tied ribbon around the whole works with extra glue. I also chose not to sew this into the page edge and just put it in the ring. That way it can easily be removed if it's damaged or deemed not to be appropriate yet.

I purposely put these pages next to each other to encourage magnet use on things like the lock.

Tutorial : Quiet Busy Book - Part 3

Kitty collar page

This page is intended to work on different buckling techniques.
Materials
Felt for page or interfaced fabric. Approx 13x14 inch.
Fabric for cats. I used fleece.
Collars. One per cat. preferably different ones.
Eyes. Find sew on ones!
Embroidery floss.
Ear fabric.

1) Find a suitable template. I used this cat as my inspiration. Feel free to find a dog or rabbit or anything else!
2) Cut out your critters! Stitch on faces and ears. I just free handed it...
3) Stitch your critters down. Make sure to leave spaces to put the collars through!
4) Put your collars on!

Photo Page

Materials
Felt for page or interfaced fabric. Approx 13x14 inch.
Felt for the house. Wall, roof, something for ground.
Other decorations. I thought flowers or a sun would be cute but didn't do it.
Clear plastic table cloth for 'windows'.
Buttons for 'handles'.
Some photos.

1) Cut out your house shape, including door and windows.
2) overlay it on to the clear table cloth stuff.
3) Stitch around the the doors and windows. This will hold everything in place.
4) time to stitch it onto the background! Stitch the two sides and bottom down. Leave the top open to allow for changing of the pictures. Depending on your tablecloth stuff, you may need to partially stitch around the doors and windows to hold the photos still. Some of it is very static and you won't need to.
5) Stitch the roof down. Just do the top, leave the bottom open so it folds over the house.
6) Stitch the ground down. Cover the bottom of the house.
7) Add any embellishments. A sun, flowers, puppy, whatever you'd like!
8) Stitch the knobs on the windows and doors.
9) Put your photos in!

St Patrick's day buns!

There's a St. Patrick's day potluck coming up and I thought I'd like to try something different! A bun with a surprise!


If you want to try it too, here's the basic steps:
1) after mixing your dough, take 1/3 and color it.
2) allow to rise and beat down as your recipie calls for.

3) when making the buns, divide coloured and plain dough into portions. I made 24, so 24 balls! The plain ones should be bigger than the colored ones.


4) flatten the plain portion, put the green on it and wrap. Repeat over and over...



5) cook and enjoy!


This was an easy project and I will definatly do it again. Just be careful about how thin the outer shell is or there will be a few colored bits showing. Not a big deal in my books though!

Tutorial : Quiet Busy Book - Part 2

I'll do these guides to making quiet book pages two at a time. It will be a quick and easy page and a more time consuming or complex page.

Flower page

This page is intended to work on color matching, buttons, bows and creativity.
Materials:
Felt for page or interfaced fabric. Approx 13x14 inch.
Felt for 5 flowers (10 colors) approx 3 inch square.
Felt for flower pot.
Ribbon for flower stems and pot decoration.
5 buttons to match the felt for flowers.
Thread.

1) Find a suitable flower template. I used one like this
flower template.
2)Cut the flowers out. I made each flower with two similar colors, so my niece could flip the flowers over and see something different. So a light pink and a dark pink, light blue and dark blue.
3) Cut your stem ribbon and insert it into the flower pairs and stitch them together. Cut a button hole and stitch around the hole.
4) Cut out a pot shape. Stitch it together if needed. Add the decorative ribbon. The ribbon on this page can be untied and tied to practice knots and bows.
5) Arrange everything on the page and decide if it's what you like. Remember to leave more room on one side for the binding.
6) Stitch the buttons down. Button the flowers on and stitch the stems where the pot will be. Then stitch the pot down, leaving the top open so it can be used as a pocket.

I did alot of hand stitching on this page. It would be a much faster page if you choose to use a machine to put the flowers together.

Rainbow page

This page is designed to work on colors, counting and fine motor control through sliding objects.
Materials:
Rainbow fabric. I found a fat quarter that worked great!
Interfacing.
Various ribbon colours.
Various bead colours. I found a mixed pack of non toxic wooden beads at the dollar store.

1) Iron the interfacing onto the fabric.
2) Cut the fabric to size.
3) Cut 10 inch pieces of ribbon.
4) Space the ribbon out on the page so it looks good. Remember to leave more room on one side for the binding.
5) Stitch down one side of all ribbons.
6) Add the beads and stitch down the other side.

I'm a nerd, so I decided that I'd arrange the beads in order of what's in the Rainbow. The longer the wavelength, the more beads!
I made this page fairly late in my project, but wish I had done it earlier. Mostly because I discovered that I liked how the interfaced fabric worked compared to the felt. I would have done far more pages this way!

Some inspiration of similar pages (some have button wheels...):
Tidbits
simply complicated
leafy tree top spot

How to : Use Google to find Templates or Patterns

For the Busy/Quiet book Tutorials, there will be instructions to "Google a suitable template" and I thought I should explain my methodology when doing this.

There are a couple ways I find templates. The first (and usually fastest) is with Google Images.
Go to http://www.google.ca/ (or your regional site) in the top, left hand corner is a "Images" link. It will take you to Google Images.
Enter your search terms. I suggest that you do several searches for your desired pattern. for example, if you're looking for a flower template, search each of: flower template, flower pattern, flower silhouette.
Scan through the results and see if something suitable comes up!

The next option is a Google Advanced search . You can access this link from the main Google page, right beside the main text entry field. The reason I suggest trying this is because you can set the File Type to a .pdf, a very common file type for patterns or templates. However, it's not as nice to scan over as the image search and will probably take more slogging through to get the results you want.

The last option is a regular Internet search. Sometimes people don't label images well or they have a great "how-to" but no pictures.

Hopefully this will be helpful to someone!

Tutorial : Quiet Busy Book - Part 1

Lots of my freinds have seen my photos of the Busy/Quiet book I made my neice for Christmas and have asked for tutorials or patterns. I'm hoping to get a group of people together on the Facebook group "Simply Splendid Sew-Along" to make a set of books. Either each person makes a book or each person make several copies of a page or two and shares with the other participants. Whichever, I still need some instructions...

Step one
Decide what activites you want in the book.
Good activities include:
Buttons
Buckles
Matching
zippers
lacing
Counting
Manipulating things
Braiding
Anything you can think of that would keep little hands busy or teach a skill. Preferably QUIET activities... :D

Step two
Brainstorm ideas to accompish the goals and sketch the plans. Keep in mind that what works for one child may not work for another. A girl might like flowers with buttons, but a boy might like vehicle tires to button on and off. One might like cats, the next might like dogs. One would like a shoe for laceing, the next might like a football. Keep your mind open!

Step three
Make a supplies list and find them!
I would suggest making the pages 13x14 inches. This will leave lots of room for gromets and seams and the page. The cover should be a touch bigger.

Step four
Create your beautiful book!

There are LOTS of ideas out there... Just google quiet book template or quiet book ideas and see what comes up. I'll post the general how to for the pages I made along with as much of the source material I can find about where I saw it or where I found the templates in the next few days. Here's my pages as a preview:









Stay tuned!

Tutorial : Scrapbook album recover

I've been looking for the "perfect" album for our wedding pictures for quite some time with no success. So I decided to make one and share the process here!

Materials:

plain album. Cheaper is better.
1 yard fabric. you might be able to get away with a little less.
1 pieces of fleece the size of the album.
cardboard. I used a cereal box. Ensure it is clean!
hot glue gun and lots of glue sticks. I used a low-temp, but I think hot would work better.
embellishments if desired. I used ribbon.

1) Take apart your album.


2) Cut your card board. It should be about 3/4 to 1 inch smaller than the cover.


3) Iron your fabrics and ribbons. Once it's on there it will be too late!

4) cut your fabric. You will need 2 pieces per album. 1 piece should be about 2-3 inches bigger all the way around the album. the other piece should be about 2 inches bigger than the cardboard.


5) Cut your fleece. This will pad the cover and help hide a multitude of sins. It needs to be just barely bigger than the front of the cover.


6) Now we start glueing! Start with the fleece. Trim the corners and pull it snug. run a bead of glue along the spine edge to keep it down.



7) Line up the spine edge. It needs to wrap around once. Trim the outside corners of your fabric. Glue it down on the top and bottom, leaving a little room around the spine side. Tuck the raw edges of the corners under as you glue the outside edge.





8) When doing the spine side, ensure to leave some extra fabric to make it easier to bend the corners. mark the holes for the posts. cut a small X into the fabric where the marks are. put glue around the holes (to help prevent fraying and moving) and press the fabric down. now glue it down the rest of the way. Be VERY careful to minimize the amount of fabric and glue that will be caught in any folds or bends of the cover.




9) Now we attack the piece of cardboard! glue down the top, bottom and outside edge, trimming the corners. Before you glue down the last side, size it. You should find that you need to pull the fabric to the the inside of the album a bit. So, you'll have a bit of fabric without cardboard. Figure out how much and glue it down.



10) Attach any ribbon you want. I did a simple wrap around.

11) Glue the cardboard down on the inside to cover the last of it!


12) Save some fabric to use as binding cover. I'll add some pictures of this when I get new posts, the ones that came with the album were crappy and are alreay stripped...

Yay!! Perfect for my wedding pics!


The #1 thing to be aware of is the bulk in the folds of the album binding. I wasn't and it probably won't close nicely on it's own. I'll probably add ties of some sort so it stays closed.
So, go out and give it a try!