Welcome to a week of Quiet Books!
As I started compiling a post about the quiet books I made my kiddos for Christmas it was obvious there was way too much for just one post, so I decided to break it up and spread it over a week of posts.
I remember being a little girl at church and seeing the family down the bench from me pull out a fabric quiet book full of fun activities with buttons, zippers, snaps, and much more. I thought it was the neatest thing and would have given anything to have one of my own! That memory stuck with me over the years and when I started having kids of my own I desperately wanted a quiet book. I looked everywhere and it soon became apparent that the only way to get my hands on the type of book I wanted was to make one myself. Me being nothing more than a basic sewer (and the fact I use a word like sewer that I'm pretty sure is not a word at all) I was too intimidated. Then my sister-in-law, Jenna, introduced me to the idea of a quiet book group. This is where you get a group of about 8 people together and you each make 2 pages (either a 2 page spread or 2 separate pages) eight times and then get together and swap pages and viola ..you have yourself a quiet book. Doing it this way saves a lot of time and money. It is way easier to make the same page eight times over rather than try to figure out how to make all the different pages yourself. It is also generally cheaper to buy the supplies in bulk.
So I reached out to my fellow BYU MBASA girls to see if anyone was interested. I got such a great response I ended up making two groups with 10 and 11 people in them. (In retrospect that was too many people per group and we should have divided up into 3 groups).
I sent out a spreadsheet where everyone signed up for what pages they wanted to make. The instructions were to choose a page that had a theme or skill (i.e. buttons, zipper, snaps, magnets, matching, shapes, colors, counting, etc.) that hadn't been chosen yet. You can find endless ideas and even patterns for pages on pinterest.
The only guidelines given were to make each page on a 12x12 piece of cotton fabric of your choice, use any material for the pieces on the page, leave a 1" border around the edges of the page empty to allow enough room to sew the pages together without the pieces running off the page, and try to keep it gender neutral. If I did it again I would probably set a few more expectations such as all pieces sewn not glued or other things to make sure the pages everyone creates are durable enough to withstand a lot of little hands playing with them, because believe me, with all the time and energy you will put into this book you are going to cry if it starts to fall apart in the first month. We set a date for our page swap before we started so we had a hard deadline. We gave ourselves 2 months to complete the pages. I wouldn't do any less than that. Once the pages were swapped it was up to each person to decide how they wanted to sew their pages together and assemble their book on their own. I will include a post on how I finished my pages and covers later this week.
Once it was all organized it was time to dive in and get to work sewing my pages.
I'm going to start off today by showing all of the pages that I personally made and over the next few days I will show the completed books and all of the pages within them.
*Warning: This is a time consuming project! Do not commit to a group unless you have time to dedicate to it.*
Group 1 pages
Mailbox Page
I did a little product research by making some trial envelopes for Brynn and Mason to play with. They did not like having velcro on the envelopes and it was hard for them to get the felt letters in and out of the envelopes. So I left the velcro off and printed out some letters on card stock and laminated them. I liked how they turned out and they got the kiddos stamp of approval, pun intended.
Braiding Page
I really loved the idea of a braiding page. Some might feel this page is too girly, but it is one that Mason asked me specifically to make. Not only does it help the kiddos learn how to braid, but also how to wrap an elastic around things. I plan on gathering a few more random hair clips and bows to put in the little bag so they can do the hair in different ways. I wanted to do brown hair but Scott suggested I do blonde hair so I did half and half and let people decide which they wanted. I think the blonde turned out to be more popular....story of my life ;)
I sewed the little pouches by looking at a few tutorials that were something like
this, and then adapting them to fit what I needed. I tried to get high quality yarn so it wouldn't just fray and fuzz up. I used puff paint for the face and thought it worked well.
Group 2 pages
Counting Bead Page
If I did it over again I would put the beads on thicker ribbon so they didn't just slide around freely all the time. For some reason I had a really hard time keeping the tension right while sewing these pages. I'm not smart enough to know why and how I could have fixed the problem.
Flower Button Page
I combined ideas I liked from several examples and made up my own version.
I decided I liked having the flowers sewn down to the page better than having loose flowers that could get lost. I found this perfect elastic ribbon that I love because it is fun for the younger kids to stretch and play with the flowers and it gives more slack and makes it easier to button the flowers on.
I found the best order to assemble the page was
~sew the flowers together with the ribbon inside
~sew the button holes
~sew the buttons onto the page (make sure to use some kind of interfacing behind them so they don't pucker or rip through the fabric)
~hook the flowers on to buttons and then pin the ribbons where you want them and sew the pot over them.
Because I am apparently out of my mind, I decided to make not one....not two....but FOUR quiet books. Once I saw how excited all my kids were about the pages I was making I was envisioning riots breaking out at church over the quiet book, so I decided to divide up the pages from both the groups I was in and make a few extra pages to fill up the books. By this point in the project the words Quiet Books were pretty much swear words in our house. Now that I'm all done I'm glad I did it, and the kids really do love having their own book, so it was worth it. Here are the extra pages I did just for my books.
Tie the Laces
I altered the pattern a little to make my shoes a little different and I sewed all the pieces down instead of gluing them like it tells you to. I bought kids sports shoe laces at Walmart. They look a little long and goofy, but remember it is much easier to learn how to tie with longer laces than if they are too short.
Noah's Ark Page
Looked at several examples and made up my own pattern.
I originally thought about doing this page for one of the groups but the idea of finding a way to sew a bunch of animals was too daunting. Then after I had done my group pages I saw someone just use these finger puppets from Ikea and I was sold! The page itself is very quick and easy to make and then just pick up a package of puppets and you're done. This shows the entire pack of puppets, but I only put 5 in each page.
Car Page
Again, I looked at a lot of examples and made up my own page.
I looked and looked at car pages and they all had different things I liked about them so I combined several ideas to make my own car page. I used vintage micro machines from my husband's childhood rather than matchbox cars. I like how they aren't as big and bulky. I liked having road signs on it so they can learn what the signs mean. I drew the signs with puff paint and then attached snaps so they could move them around. I opted to use puff paint rather than stitching for the lines in the road because I thought the cars might snag on the thread and eventually break it. This is definitely a favorite page.
All together I sewed 66 pages.
The whole project from start to finish took 3 1/2 months. I took on this project not because I had oodles of spare time and energy, but because after months of being home bound and doing nothing but take care of Ellie day and night I needed something. I needed something to take my mind off life, something to look forward to, something productive to accomplish and this was the perfect thing. For the most part I really enjoyed spending my evenings after the kids were in bed working on these. I did have to give up a good amount of precious sleep to do this, but it was worth it for the little bit of sanity it gave me during some very difficult months.
I can't wait to show you the finished books with all of the amazing pages everyone made. I really lucked out having so many talented women in MBASA that wanted to join the groups. My pages were pretty mediocre compared to some of the pages that were done. A huge thanks to all of my group members for all their hard work and helping me accomplish this goal of mine.
Check back tomorrow to see the first of the completed books.
