Quiet book: Duckling gets a Cookie

Koala loves reading books and one of her favorite series is the Pigeon books by Mo Willems. She got this set as a birthday gift and we read them soooooo many times that we borrowed the rest of the Pigeon books (that we could find) from the library.

When I was thinking of what quiet book pages to make, I wanted to incorporate things that Koala would be familiar with. One of the first pages I worked on was a cookie jar. On Pinterest,  I saw a couple different pages with the cookie jar concept where the cookie jar opens up for the child to put a cookie in. 

Of all the different cookie jar pages, I liked this one the best: cookie jar

I traced this cookie jar and the letters (using my highlighter & computer screen) and cut out the felt pieces. I reinforced the opening of the cookie jar with Pellon to make it more durable and used my sewing machine to sew the jar on the page. 

But I decided to tweak the page to make it more interesting for Koala. One of the pigeon books is The Duckling gets a Cookie.

So I decided to add Duckling to the page just as an accent. 

Since the book was about the right size, I made the template for the Duckling by tracing the Duckling on the front cover. Then I glued the Duckling and the letters to the page. I also made a felt cookie. 

The cookie goes in Duckling's hand and in the jar. 

I added a snap to the back of the cookie and to the page so that the cookie snaps in place so that Duckling is holding it. 

Since this was one of the first pages that I completed, it was a learning experience.  When I was all done, I let Koala play with it and I learned 2 things. 

1) Loose pieces need to be attached with ribbon

Koala seemed to like the page right away and immediately knew to put the cookie in the cookie jar. As much as she liked the page, she really LOVED the cookie! She kept it with her and carried it around with her which is how the first cookie got lost. I made a new cookie and attached it with ribbon to the page. Koala was furious at first that the cookie was stuck to the page because she couldn't carry it around but she eventually got over it.

2) Glue isn't strong enough 

When researching how people put together the pages, it was hard to find details on exactly what materials people used. So I searched Pinterest for the best glue for felt and came across a pin that said Felt Glue was the best and 'bonds felt permanently'. Duh- seems logical that the best glue for felt is called Felt glue.

So I glued everything down from the cookie jar itself to the letters and Duckling-  feeling confident that the pieces would be 'bonded permanently.' But when I came home from work the first day that I let Koala play with it, I discovered that 1) the cookie was missing and 2) the cookie jar now read "co ki". Hubby told me that he found Koala picking off the letters. I glued them back on and gave the page back to her only to find that she was really interested in picking off the pieces and I realized that I would have to sew each piece down to the page so that she couldn't pick them off. It was a bit tedious because I ended up hand stitching everything on (except the cookie jar) because it's less frustrating to hand sew and requires less concentration since I'm not very good with the sewing machine. The drawbacks are that it's time consuming and my stitching is uneven. But it keeps everything in place and prevents Koala from peeling off the pieces. She's stopped attempting to pick pieces off since she knows they're stuck on. I no longer use the felt glue because I find that once the glue dries, it makes it really difficult to get the needle through the felt. It's one less step to skip the glue.

When I added a page to the other side of the Pellon, I messed up the stitching in the top right corner so I added Pigeon to the page to cover up my mistake. It worked out nicely. 

Here's the final product: