Quiet Book Matching Game

     For this quiet book page, I wanted to do a game of some sort.  I decided on a matching game and I think it turned put really cute!  I haven't decided on what the background color will be for this page yet,  but here's what I have so far :)

     First I cut out all my pieces (my favorite part haha) and laid them out so I could see what I had and where to start.

after cutting out the pieces

When I was finished cutting everything out, I had:

2 red hearts

2 green triangles

2 orange circles

2 blue squares (small)

2 yellow stars

2 black 'x's

24 white squares (large)

     I started with pinning each of the colored shapes onto a large white square.

     Once they were all pinned to  white square, I sewed each of the shapes down.

first two done, woohoo!!

     When I was finished, half of my white squares had shapes sewn onto them and half had nothing on them.

     I took one shape/white square piece and one blank white square and set them aside until they all had a blank buddy.  Then I stacked them all with their partner shape, just because I wanted them organized somehow (and they were taking up a large portion of my table).

     Next, I sewed each of the colored shape/white squares to their blank buddy.  I did this so the shapes couldn't be seen through the back of the white squares when playing the game.  No cheating allowed!! Hehe

stacked up with their partners again :)

     Now they're all set and ready to play the game!

Happy sewing friends!

    -Katie

Menu Board

     Anyone who knows me knows that I am EXTREMELY indecisive when it comes to deciding on something to eat.  Extremely.  So I came up with a solution to the problem.  A menu board.  My cousin made one and I really liked how it turned out so I thought I'd give it a shot and gathered all my supplies:

     Well, almost all my supplies.  I made a few more trips up and down the stairs to get a hot glue gun and two empty crayon boxes.  First I glued my scrapbook sheet of paper onto the foam board I had leftover from another project.  I let that sit overnight to dry:

     I weighed it down with a few things, and as you can see, our family enjoys candles :)  My favorite is this one:

It's apple cinnamon and smells wonderful!!  These candles have a cool story behind them too, you can check it out here.  After letting the board dry, I folded the edges of the paper over and taped them to the back of the board:

This is the front at this point:

     I then figured out where I wanted my ribbon on the board and made a small mark on the back/edge to line it up to.  I taped the ribbon down as well:

     Next I got out some brown scrapbook paper (sticking with the neutral color theme) and covered my crayon boxes.  I added a bit of ribbon to them as well to jazz it up a bit.  Just seemed too boring without anything on them :)

     I lined them up where I wanted them on the board as you can see in the picture above and secured them to the board with packing tape as well.

     Then I set to work on my clothespins to hold the menu choices on the ribbon.  I was going to just hot glue them to the board, but it was pointed out to me that the clothespins might rip off if pressed too hard.  So on the ribbon it is!  I cut 7 rectangular pieces of brown scrapbook paper and 14 small squares of white paper:

     On each strip of brown paper I marked where I wanted the white squares to go.  I used two squares for each clip and I turned the top square so that its corners were on each side of the bottom square.  I found these really cute stickers to put the days of the week on the papers (it would have driven me nuts if I wrote them when the menu choices are typed up...odd duck I know).

I put the stickers on each of the white pieces and they turned out like this:

Using some glue, I attached the white pieces to the brown rectangles and then the brown rectangles to the clothes pins:

     I decided that I needed some way to hang my board up without putting a hole in my pretty little project (or the walls), so I used a hot glue gun to make a bow out of some ribbon.  Cue the impatient wait for it to dry.  I attached it to the back of my board.  And then took it off.  And reattached it.  Over and over again until it was (to my mind) perfect.  I may be a slight perfectionist.  Maybe.

     Now all that's left is to put the cute little clothes pins on the ribbon and add my menu options I've already made up:

Tada!!!  Here it is hung up on a command hook in our kitchen:

Happy crafting friends!

    -Katie

Quiet Book Long-neck Dinosaur Page

   

     For this page, I forgot to take pictures, but basically I just did the same thing that I did for the football page.  I traced my patterns onto newspaper, then pinned the newspaper patterns onto the felt like this:

     After pinning all the patterns to the felt, I cut the shapes out and stitched them all onto my background piece (the light blue felt).  The leaves were stitched on, I kind of just kept making more until the tree looked full enough, and left small gaps for three removable leaves.  I attached the removable leaves with small snaps.  When I stitched the dinosaur on, I left a gap in the front of its tummy so that it can 'eat' the leaves :)  And that's all there is to it!

     Now that the first two pages are done, I'll sew them together and add holes for the rings to go through to keep all the pages of the book together.  More on that later.

Happy sewing friends!

     -Katie

Quiet Book Football Page

 

      Lately I've been seeing quiet books all over Pinterest and I decided that I really wanted to try making one.  Now I'm not amazing at sewing by any means, but I thought I'd give it a go.  There were gazillions of different designs I wanted to make, but I decided to start with a simple football.  I figured if I could handle this it'd be a bit of a confidence booster :)
     I started with making my pattern.  It's possible that I went a little crazy and made all of the patterns I needed...for all of the pages...before I even decided to make the book.  Anyhow, I made my pattern for the football page and then traced it on newspaper like my best friend (who is actually very good at sewing!) does with all of her patterns.  I then pinned the newspaper pattern to the brown and white felt sheets like so:

     After pinning the pattern, I cut out the shapes I needed.  Definitely not a huge fan of cutting felt.  Once all the pieces were cut out, I placed them all together like I wanted them and pinned them down.  Pins, pins, and more pins! :)

     After everything was where I wanted it, I got out my trusty sewing machine and hooked those buggers down to the green background.  Once all the pieces were hooked down I added laces to the football with a large needle.  I just threaded a piece of yarn on my needle and weaved it in and out of the white trapezoid pieces in the center.  My final (ish) product looks like this:

     I'm still considering stitching on some words about tying the laces with embroidery thread.  I haven't quite decided if I'm going to or what it will say yet...we'll see.  It was definitely a confidence booster that I managed to finish this without stabbing myself in the finger with a pin or sewing anything on backwards :)

     The next page is going to be a long-neck dinosaur eating leaves, which will be posted tomorrow!

Happy sewing friends!

    -Katie