Quiet book- Links and Elmo

Back when I was in my 1st trimester, I had pregnancy insomnia. I spent most of my restless nights on Pinterest where I found a lot of activities for Koala like sensory bins, etc. One night, I searched for ideas to keep Koala busy on a plane ride for a trip we were taking and I came across quiet books aka busy books. Quiet books are basically activity pages usually made of felt. Most help the kids practice skills like zipping or buttoning. I decided to attempt to make one for Koala. 

So I borrowed my mom's sewing machine, raided my sister's house for supplies and went to the store to buy the rest of the supplies I needed. I've since then made a ton of trips to Hobby Lobby, Michael's, and Joann's. Those 40-50% off coupons are awesome. The great thing about Joann's is they let you use as many as you want so you can use a mailer coupon, a mobile coupon and if you download the app Shopular, they have different coupons on there as well. Joann's also takes competitor coupons so you can use a Michael's coupon for similar items (ie you can't use it for fabric since Michael's doesn't sell fabric). I found that Joann's prices were a little more than Michael's but since they let you use multiple coupons, it was worth it because you didn't have to make multiple trips to try to save money. 

When researching the quiet book, I came across this website that suggested using non fusible pellon for the page background. It took me a while to find the right pellon since I know nothing about fabric and could only seem to find fusible pellon. Pellon is basically stiff felt that they sell by the yard with fabric for interfacing. The drawback with Pellon is that it only comes in white.

Initially, I was going to make the book 8x8 because I saw other blogs that made 9x9 pages and I thought 8x8 would be easier for adding colored backgrounds since felt pages come 8x11. But after cutting a bunch of 8x8 pellon sheets, I realized that it was too small and I needed to make the details of the pages really small which just made it more difficult. So in the end I decided to go with an 11x11 page. I came up with this odd size because when I folded the pellon in half, it ended up being about 11 inches and just made it easier to cut. 

My very first activity was making these colored strips of fabric that Koala could snap together to make a link chain. 

Even though the sewing wasn't too hard since I just sewed in a straight line, sewing felt isn't as easy as I thought- especially since I'm a novice sewer (is that a word? I mean someone who sews, not a sewer that waste goes in and where TNMT live). 

I later figured out how to change the tension on the sewing machine and that helped on later pages but the stitching on the links is a bit loose since I didn't figure it out until afterwards. 

I added the snaps which caused me a lot of grief because I didn't buy the starter kit that came with the installing tool so I ended up ruining a bunch of the snaps. Eventually, I ran out to Joann's to get the kit which helped out a lot. 

I never actually finished this page because I realized that the snaps were too hard for Koala and would just frustrate her. Even I have to push hard to get it to snap all the way so I decided to set this activity aside and work on pages she can do now. 

Since I had already cut out some 8x8 sheets, I didn't want to waste them so I made some 8x8 pages that didn't require a lot of detail.

One of my least favorite pages is this Elmo puzzle: 

It came out crooked and not as cute as I wanted. 

I started off by finding a picture of Elmo on the Internet and zooming it on my computer screen to the size I wanted. Then I look a piece of paper and put it on the screen and traced the image with a highlighter (so that it wouldn't mark up the screen like a pen and wouldn't bleed like a marker). This is how I made a lot of my templates. 

I then cut out the pieces and traced them to felt and cut those out. 

Elmo was better proportioned when I first started but somehow when I cut up the puzzle pieces, I sewed the eyes and nose too low so I had to make the mouth smaller. 

For the background, I just sewed yellow to the pellon and made an outline with ribbon. 

I couldn't really get the ribbon to stay in place even with pins so it looks crooked and even got bunched up but I didn't care to redo it lol- which is why this is my least favorite page. 

Koala knows the pieces go in the boxes but doesn't quite get matching the pieces to make a picture of Elmo so it ends up looking like Picasso Elmo lol. I thought about putting a picture of where the pieces go on to help her match the pieces but I ran out of time. Maybe I'll do it when I get home- I find these pages are a work in progress.