Quiet Books- Mission Completed

Back in June I posted about Jude's quiet book. At the time I started his book, and through most of the lengthy process of making it, I hadn't planned on making any others. I'd even warned my other children, who have young children, that this was a special one-time project for Jude. But, by the time I finished, and had time to recover, I thought, "How can I NOT make one of these wonderful books for each of my littles?"

But since I was going to be making [a bunch] more quiet books I decided to create digital patterns that I could print on Steam-A-Seam bonding on my computer so as to avoid countless hours of tracing.

My original idea was to make one book for each of the five families (so 4 more books) who have children under age 5, but as I neared completion Camille suggested splitting the pages into two books so her two Bitties could each play with a book at the same time! (Great idea).

I spent the next two months mass producing pages. I had quite a process of making all of the elements for a 2-page spread down to a science. The land, sea and air pages were a must.

As were the shapy-shaper-tons! And this time I did used Velcro instead of the magnets to attach them to the page.

Sandcastle building was also another set that had to be repeated.

Finally, after working diligently for two months I had all of the pages finished and sorted into file folders for each of my sweet grandbabies.

And I can't decided what makes me the happiest about this photo... all of the finished pages or the folded and color-sorted boxes of fabric in my closet!

I've realized today as I have slogged through about 200 photos that I would have had a less daunting task if I had blogged about this while in the process, but I wanted many of the pages to be a surprise. (Erm... next time?)

And since my sweet grandbabies are not ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL the books couldn't all be an exact duplicate of Jude's. I had great fun adding specialized pages for each of the littles.

Here are the pages not previously shown in Jude's book.

I knew that I didn't what to recreate the all hand-pieced Armour of God page. So I printed the pattern I purchased on fabric (sure wish my printer accepted 9" wide paper/fabric), bonded it to felt and used those wonderful tiny magnets again

In my Pinteresting I found this idea then found these fun flip-flop buttons on Etsy. Now comes the fun part... I put them on my bed scanner, scanned them and made up the matching pattern for the big flip-flop pieced from felt. I can't even remember now where I got the idea for the beach bag and smaller flip-flops, but I did the same thing here and made my own pattern. I just happened to have some random strips of hand-dyed fabric from a quilting project done years ago that were just right for the body of the bag. Since the buttons came in a two pack, there are only two of these pages (Emmy and Fiona).

Ah, but now I'd created a monster idea. As soon as I saw these darling fish buttons at WalMart I snapped them up for Miss Annabelle and then used fabric from her baby quilt as the background. I found a cool pelican idea here.

I also loved this sea-themed page. I didn't like some of the element so found ideas elsewhere for the Nemo-themed fish.

Deborah was also pretty excited about this repeat of fabric from Annabelle's baby quilt. I had to piece the little amount I had left to come up with the 2-9" pages!

This bunch of bed-jumping-monkeys caused me a great deal of stress! I knew I wanted to make a Monkeys-jumpin'-on-a-bed page but did NOT want to piece a bazillion little jumpers! I finally found this awesome FREE graphic. All I had to do was cut and paste those little monkeys... well, except... there was neither a Mama nor a Doctor. So I went totally PhotoShop crazy and cut and pasted a stethoscope and medical insignia on the Doctor (found in the plethora of clip art I've amassed over the years) and took a cake out of Mama's hands, changed the angle of her arms and gave her a cell phone. Yeah, I'm sick like that!

I played around printing different sized monkeys on paper until I got them small enough for little fingers and then printed them on fabric, bonded that to white felt and sewed it closed. Each little finger puppet is two sided.

Of course, monkeys NEED a bed to jump on. More clip art from the now defunct HugClub by PC Crafter's. The pillows Velcro onto the headboard and the quilt makes a pocket for the pillows and monkeys.

But all of this was just way-too-much for a single page. The facing page is a little zippered pouch for monkey-storage!

This Harley tic-tac-toe page was a must for the two little families that always come to Grammie's house. When Fiona hears Harley whining as she comes to the door (erm... or pulls up to the curb!) she says, "Harley says- My Nona! I love my Nona! My Nona's here!" (Grammie has taught her well.)

"I love to go to Grammie's house, to Grammie's house, to Grammie's house,
I love to go to Grammie's house, and see that Harley-dog! (repeat)
That Harley does some woofing, some woofing, some woofing.
That Harley does some woofing then we take him for a walk"
(Sung to- I love to go to Grandma's house.)

Another idea I gleaned from Pinterest was this one, but I couldn't find ANY-thing that I liked. So I just made it myself, says the Little Red Hen! I had great fun digitally painting this tree a leaf at a time, found a cute popcorn piece (I don't remember where) and the popcorns snap onto the branches. I used PhotoShop again to create the layers and printed it on fabric. I loved digging into all of the fonts and graphic elements I have to find just the right combination.

I sent Camille to my Pinterest board one night and she found this wonderful idea of adding a little envelope with a personalized note for my sweet baby-children.

I laminated the note, but saved it as well in case I need to print a replacement at some point.

Camille also found this ladybug counting page that I liked better than the counting or ladybug pages I did for Jude.

But I quickly found out that the googley-eyes and glued on dots made Little-Liam frustrated since he thought those should come off too. Bless him!

Since I was splitting two of the books I needed to add a couple more single-spread pages to go at the beginning and end of each book.

Another Camille suggestion-

The letters Velcro onto a strip of loop. I had a serendipitous find with this clearanced Velco at JoAnn Fabrics!

This little page got created on a whim! I already had the numbers printed, cute buttons, zippers, and strips from a quilting project, gone wrong, and ended up with this fun!

So here they are...

Fiona-

The edging is older than her mommy!

Annabelle-

With more fabric from her baby quilt.

Cohen-

Fabric from my cowboy-stash!

Liam-

The boy who loves RED and BLUE. He just petted the cover when I gave it to him.

Emmy-

With fabric from her infant car seat cover!

(And wouldn't you think I'd have a pix of the finished book? Nope, just tons of photos of how to put the binding on wrong! AGAIN!!)

And...

Well, I don't know what this baby's name it! He/she is still a gleam in Daddy-Stuart's eyes!

Actually it is the other half of Emmy's book but her Mama is looking ahead.

All of the fabric used in these quiet books comes from my copious stash of fabric. See!! There is a good reason to hoard... erm, save all of that fabric!

And this time... I really will come back and write up a post about how to bind these up. It took me until the last 2 (of 7) before I could get it right from the start.

(It literally took me 6 hours to find, edit, upload the photos, find the ones I missed the first time, and write this blog post!!)

Jude's Quiet Book

Back at the end of March I got a text from Jessica-

So I was off on a mission. The only quiet books I'd ever been involved in previously were not for my family but usually some kind of church project... I have to admit that I HATED MAKING QUIET BOOKS !!

But I've found an interesting fact... when I make something for someone I love I usually end up enjoying the process. This time is no different and I love this whole new creativity outlet. That being said, there is always a HUGE learning curve involved with some new craft and this one was no different. Luckily I was able to use many other skills I've learned along this path-of-life as I made Jude's book.

And here's the happiest piece of news about being creative in 2016... PINTEREST! I'm not good at pulling things out of my head but I'm an adequate copy-artist... give me a picture and I can make a good interpretation of it! I've worked very hard to try to give credit for each of my ideas. Thank you for the generosity of idea sharing!!

Jude's Quiet Book-

This is when it pays off to be a hoarder-of-crafty-stuff-and-fabric! The only thing I had to buy was felt and a few other miscellaneous items.

I had this lovely cowboy fabric and ric-rack left over from a quilt I made for my friend Holly!

The lady bug zipper makes me happy!
(inspiration)

Shapey-shaper-tons! I love these! I used mini magnets for these but think I will just go with velcro or snaps next time.
(inspiration)

Each shape name is written underneath.

Put on the Whole Armour of God! I really dug deep into my ancient embellishment stash for these trims... some go back 40+ years!
(inspiration)

I love this scripture from Ephesians 6:13-17

I found these cute ready-made owls while I was browsing at Hobby Lobby. This is probably the easiest page I made. Next time I will put loops on the ends of the ribbons so it is easier to unsnap. Love these snaps!

This next one may just be my favorite!! I just *winged-it* making the little worm/caterpillar! It took me two tries to get one I really liked! (And a serendipitous accident gave him a bulge part way down his body. I used an old bitty crochet hook saved from doing a L'Oreal Frost and Tip kit eons ago!)
(inspiration)

I DIE!!

This was another favorite. You'll notice that I included Pluto (he's still a planet in my book)!
(inspiration)

I used snaps again here! I color coordinated each planet and snap to make matching easier. (I couldn't find a satisfactory way to write on felt, so I left the names off.)

Sadly the inspiration for this page was an item that is no longer carried on Etsy. So I played around in photoshop with my pinterest photo and made up patterns. (I ended up doing that for many pages. Only two of the ideas came with free or low cost patterns)

I loved the pockets to hold the vehicles.

Counting page. The numbers velcro off. This was my very first page.
(inspiration)

This is one of the few pages where the idea came with a pattern page! Bless her!!
(inspiration)

The pieces are stored in the sand bucket.

And this is a fun detail.

This one cracks me up...
(inspiration)

But last Sunday I had baby-Emmy with me all weekend and took some other pom-poms (I bought a ginormous bag) in a little box for her to play with at church. Erm... let's just say Grammie did a lot of bending to retrieve thrown pom-poms!

Both the front and back covers have pockets to stash extra things or for an "Oops! look what I found!" as you're walking out of your pew!

And the finished spine. I may be back in a few days to do a tutorial on how I bound the finished pages together in a book, or maybe not. Either way I took lots of photos to remind myself how I did it next time I get the bug to make another quiet book.

Jude may not be busy with this quiet book (I've also heard them called busy books) but it sure has kept Grammie busy for 100+ hours!