Bubble bibs

My first crafty sewing project started when Koala was a baby and she just started teething. She drooled a lot and the baby bibs we had didn't match her cute outfits. I started to look for more fashionable bibs.

First, I bought some bandana bibs from Amazon from a brand called Zippy. They don't have the exact ones that I bought but these are the same except they're blue. 

I then came across scarf bibs. 

When I saw this I thought, 'Hey I could totally make this.' So I bought some material and went to my mom's to use her sewing machine. After a really long time and I think even a broken needle, I made my first scarf bib. It definitely wasn't the best- the stitching was crooked and a couple times the thread bunched up, but I did it. And it looked so much cuter on Koala than the baby bibs! I got a lot of compliments whenever Koala wore her bubble bibs. 

I started to buy all sorts of different material to make them. 

Some of the bibs that I've made

The bibs were cute and fairly easy to make so I had dreams of selling them on etsy or something. I came up with a brand name (Bubbles) and designed a simple logo. I even made labels to put on the bibs. I eventually simplified the tags and decided to stick with just black. 

And I made tags with wash instructions. 

I even tried to branch out and make boy print bibs to get a larger audience. (Buffalo plaid, super hero, sports ones, mustaches). 

As you can see, I get pretty invested in my projects.  But I lost steam when it came to actually posting the bibs and selling them. I got overwhelmed with the business end of it like copyrights and all that. 

 After a while, Koala stopped teething/drooling and she didn't need bibs anymore and my bubble bibs business was put on the back burner for a while. I invested my time in other projects like the quiet book, etc. 

Just recently, I started making the bibs again- mostly because I have a lot of friends who are having babies and I figure the bibs make a good gift since they're practical, cute and handmade which shows the thought/time I put into them.

Now that Baby Bear will be here soon, I'm working on making a stash of cute bibs for him to wear. Who knows, maybe my bib business will take off but even if it doesn't, at least Baby Bear will be stylin'.

Quiet book: Simple 8x8 pages

I wanted to use up the Pellon that I had cut up into 8x8 squares so I decided to make a smaller book. For the 8x8 quiet book pages, I had to use simple designs/pages since I didn't have much room.

Music:

I saw this music page and thought it would be fairly easy to make. 

I wanted to make my page look more like real sheet music so i started off with just black ribbon and a felt note with a bell in it. But it looked too plain so I added a treble clef. 

I attached the note to the page with black ribbon after the first one disappeared. The page is not that exciting but was easy to make. I'm hoping that later when Koala is older and is maybe taking music classes, we can use it to practice reading music or something.

Abacus: 

Another simple page was an abacus counting page. For this page, I poked 10 holes on each side of the page. I threaded black ribbon through the holes and on the back side I tied a knot. I put beads on each of the strings- first one, then two, etc. Then I threaded the ribbon through the other side and also tied a knot on the other side. 

I added a vertical strip of felt on each side to make the ribbon more secure and to give the page a cleaner look. This is another page I think we'll use more when Koala is older and learning to count. 

Shapes:

I made a simple matching up shapes page. This isn't the most interesting page but was easy to make. 

I modeled it after this quiet book page. I cut out two of each shape/color. The first set, I sewed to the 8x8 sheet of Pellon and then added a Velcro circle. 

Initially, I just attached the second set of shapes to Pellon and put velcro on the back. 

But as I discovered, loose pieces get lost easily so I eventually attached each piece to ribbon. 

I was impressed how Koala immediately matched the pieces to the correct spot the first time she played with it. It's not a page that keeps her attention for long right now since she's mastered matching the pieces. I'm now starting to use the page to teach her the names of the shapes.

Stop, slow, go:

On the backside of the shapes page, I have a stoplight page modeled after these pages: 

Stoplight 1

Stoplight 2

It's a fairly simple page with circles attached by ribbon.  This was one of the more recent pages I made and I used snaps instead of velcro because I found that velcro really wears out the felt. The downside to snaps is that they're so small that Koala has a hard time snapping them on. But I think in a little while she'll be able to do it with no problem.

When Koala matches the colors, I try to teach her that Red means stop, yellow means slow, and green means go. Since it's so new, we've only done it a couple times so we'll see if she catches on.

Dog collar: 

Some pages like to teach coordination or skills like zipping a zipper or fastening a buckle. I was going to make a page with just buckles and zippers but thought that was not very creative and I'd rather have a page that's cute but uses the zipper or buckle. So I searched and saw a popular page was a dog collar or even a belt. I decided to do a dog collar page. 

I thought the dog in this blog was cute but wanted to do a more recognizable dog. Snoopy was the simplest dog I could think of. 

Not much to it, but it teaches the skill of opening and closing a buckle. I thought Koala would have more fun with this page because she used to love to play with the buckle on her high chair. But I guess the novelty wore off.

For now, the 8x8 book is complete with 6 pages including the Elmo puzzle page. I still have some 8x8 Pellon so I may add pages in the future but for now my focus is on the bigger more detailed pages.

In order to keep the pages together, I poked holes in all the pages and put in grommets. I then used 2 loose binder rings to hold the pages together. I eventually need to make a cover but that'll be another time/another blog post.