Kid Stuff

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Quiet books are usually made of fabric (often felt) and filled with quiet activities for kids. They are easily transportable and can be used for kids when they need to be entertained quietly (like at church or the waiting room at the doctor's office) or just around the house. To see a million example, just search "quiet book" on Pinterest or Etsy. :-)

quiet book swimming fishCompleted project! I'm participating in a quiet book page swap with some other crafty moms in my area. I've always been intrigued by the idea of a quiet book, but with the endless number of projects in my queue, I hadn't started one myself yet. I'm glad I joined the swap as a way to force me to dive in. I've made 13 of these fishy pages for the exchange. The fish slide across the page on the ribbon. Once I get back my set of pages from the swap I'll share them with you.

pages for the swapJust a couple of the process pics to follow, though I didn't capture the entire process. The background page is 12" wide and 9" tall, then the waves were cut from the 9" direction of two other blues. I freehand cut them using my rotary trimmer.

ocean wavesYou could pin them down, but honestly, I only pinned them like this on the first one, then I found it was just easy enough to hold it in place. I sewed from the top wave down, sewing the top and side edges of each piece before adding the next, and only sewing along the bottom edge on the last/lowest wave, along the bottom of the page.

fish detailAs for the fish, I cut two of each color (using the awesome felt cutting tips by Patty), then I sewed along the top half, then slipped the 9" piece of 1/8" ribbon between the layers before carefully sewing the second half of the border. Then I attached the ribbon at the ends with some three-step zig zag stitching.

I'd say they took me about an hour a page.

Thanks for swimming by!

 

finished crown and skirtI don't have much to say, except that it's done! And delivered. And I hope that the 4-year old who received the gift will excuse the imperfections that are the bottom hem. Yeah, don't look to closely.

Okay, I have a little more to say. The tutorial I found was great (though when you cut out your B+2 circumference hole, you'll need to use c = 2πr to calculate the radius measure). And attaching fold over elastic (FOE) was nice and easy (though it took me a bit of effort to get used to stretching the elastic as I sewed). The challenge was the rolled hem. Perhaps I should have gone with the serging option for the bottom hem, but I have the fancy rolled hem foot for my machine since I used it (once) on The Girl's first birthday dress. The difference though, was that The Girl's dress was made out of a 100% cotton woven that behaved much better than this slick, slippery, satiny fabric for the skirt. I'll need more practice. I hope the 4-year old dances around sufficiently fast that nobody notices.

I thought the felt crown and circle skirt were a nice pairing for a birthday gift and they were both quick projects.