Quiet Book - Page 10: Cat & Dog Collar Buckles

The final page for the quiet books was dedicated to house pets - specifically a cat and a dog.  Which is perfect because the parents of one of the little ones are cat lovers and owners and the other set of parents were pug parents before their little one came along.  I wanted some kind of fun motor skill activity for these pages so I added a chunky color with a buckle.  I know my Little Bear was so proud of himself when he figured out how to make a buckle work!

Plus, how fun are those tails?  I discovered just how much fun it was to sneak in some 3-D features into these books and these tails - especially that curly pug tale - were no exception. 

Thank you, dear reader, for sticking with me on my overload of quiet book cuteness!  I promise, I'll be moving on to other fun projects I've been working on and dieing to share with you all very soon. 

Quiet Book - Page 9: Frog & Flies Snaps

As I approached the second to last page for these quiet books, I knew I wanted to really focus on some fun fine motor skill activities that the little ones could play with.  I stumbled across several pages of a frog sitting on a lily pad using a snap on his tongue to "catch" the flies buzzing about his head.  Such a cute idea!  Using my very best free-hand drawing skills, I managed to pull this page together.  Which I have to tell you wasn't easy given the numerous re-draws I had to do since my free-hand drawing skills are a bit lacking.  But after only a few re-started, I had a template for this page I really liked. 

At this point of putting together the quiet books, I think the quiet book craziness had overtaken me and as you can see there is a ton of small details on this page.  Small details like the tiny wings on the flies to the veins in the cattail's leaves.

And more details like the frog's cheery smile and long tongue to the veined ribbing of the lily pad he is sitting on. 

There were far too many thread color changes on my sewing machine when I was putting this page together.  But, all that extra effort on this page was really worth it.  After all, I somehow managed to make even the flies on this page look cute!  Cute flies, what?

Quiet Book - Page 8: Lacing & Tying

What little girl hasn't at one point or another dreamed of becoming a ballerina? Even if that dream lasted but for a moment.  I'll admit that even I - a self-proclaimed tom boy while growing up - recall a few brief moments when I wanted to be a ballerina.  Besides, lacing up a pair of ballet shoes is much more fun than lacing up a pair of plain old every day boring shoes. 

Hopefully the little this page is intended for, will love lacing up this ballerina's slipper and maybe someday dream - even for a brief moment - of swirling around in a poofy tutu. 
Naturally, since the second of the two quiet books I made was for a little boy and not a little girl, I had to come up with something a little different for his book.  Luckily, I didn't have to look far for inspiration.  This little guy's daddy is a huge sports fan!  And what is one of the most popularized sports in America?  Football!

 I'm sure this football doesn't meet proper specification of what a football is supposed to look like, but ehhh it's close enough.  Besides, my football is perfect for lacing up and learning how to tie bows on.  

Quiet Book - Page 7: Zipper Camping

It's no secret that my husband and I love to go camping.  So much so that camping seems to be a running theme in most of our vacations over the past (almost) 5 years since we have been married.  And we are so crazy about camping that we have managed to talk some of our non-camping friends and family members to join in on the fun.  It just so happens that the mothers of the two littles that these quiet books are for are not the biggest camping enthusiasts we know, but we have had some amusing camping adventures with them in the past.  It seemed fitting to include a camping page into the quiet books especially after seeing several camping theme zipper pages that I loved on Pinterest.  Combing some of the best features from the pages I used as inspiration plus adding some personal touches, I came up with this page:

My favorite part of this page is the bear hiding inside of the tent!  Hopefully he is a night time lovey and not a rough camp scavenger.  ;) 

While looking at beads for a different project, I found these lovely fat star beads.  They add such a nice 3-D element to this page and I love that they almost shine and twinkle in the light like real stars do.

A few additional details on this page include the little pine trees in the background and the merrily crackling fire in the foreground.  It's lovely how all of the details of this page come together so beautifully and remind me of a warm summer evening spent next to a dancing campfire under the open skies. 

Quiet Book - Page 6: Counting

My husband, a self proclaimed numbers geek, believe that number are more universal and important than letters.  Which could very well be true in his world of engineering, so I humor him.  Debating aside, learning to count is a great skill to learn early on.  I had made an abacus page for the original quiet book I made for Little Bear and I had like it enough to consider doing another abacus page for these two quiet books.  I wanted to change things up a bit though and went for a slightly simpler and cleaner look for the abacus.

An added bonus and fun feature of the abacus is that I used the little guy's name for one of the rungs on the abacus.  Gotta love short names!

Quiet Book - Page 5: Basic Shapes

One of the basics that we start teaching our kiddos from pretty early on is their shapes.  And there are a lot of different shapes out there.  A friend has a shape toy for her son that has to have at lest two dozen different shapes on it - some that I didn't even know the proper name of.  Well, I didn't want to get that complex for my shapes page.  Four shapes seemed like a nice place to start - square, triangle, circle, heart and/or pentagon. 

Not only does this page help to teach a handful of basic shapes, but it has a fun little matching game on it where the shapes have to be matched together.  Although because I attached all of the shapes using ribbon to the page so there wouldn't be any lost shapes for this page, the matching game is a pretty easy one.

Quiet Book - Page 4: Colors of the Rainbow

ROY G BV - yup, those initials are how I learned the order of the colors of the rainbow.  But I figured that putting those initials on a page wouldn't be a very fun way for a little one to begin learning colors.  I wanted a page that showed all the colors of the rainbow without it being boring, and a quiet book page posted by Amber Mea at Amber May Be was my inspiration for the page I created.  

Using some imagination, I came up with different little characters or symbols to sew under each flap that are easily associated with each color. For red - of coarse it had to be an apple.  For orange, I made a little goldfish because honestly what toddler hasn't had a goldfish cracker?

For yellow, I made a sun.  It turned out a bit wonky, but I guess that's what happens when I try to just wing it while I'm cutting a shape out.  For green, it was a nice simple green leaf. 

For blue, I made a little blue bird (although it looks a little like an Easter Peep or that could just be the pregnancy hormones/cravings talking.....).  And for purple, not wanting to go with a bunch of grapes as I wasn't sure how to make that, I went with a simple flower.

Of coarse to ensure that all shapes, characters, and symbols that I used are recognizable by most toddlers, I tested the page out on my son and without too much prompting, he figured out what everything was.  Gotta love having a test subject from my target audience living right under my own roof! ;)

Quiet Book - Page 3: Animals Hiding in Grass

Page 3 of the quiet books is a page that I have made before for my son's quiet book.  I changed it up slightly this time around using three different shades of green felt for the grass and I used my pinking shears to cut the grass which gives it a cool grass-like texture. 

There are so many great things about this page which is why when I was coming up with page ideas, this page made the list yet again of pages that I liked and wanted to do for both books.  This page is a great sensory page for little ones as they search for animals hiding in the "grass".  And for older kids, it's fun to try to find all of the matches for the animals along the top of the page. 

I love making this page because the resulting page is so fun and it is one of the easier pages to put together. 

Quiet Book - Page 2: Ribbon Sensory Animals

And now onto page 2! 
For the second page of the quiet books, I ended up making two different versions of the same idea - an animal with ribbons as a large sensory feature for the page. 
For the "Girly" version, my inspiration was a jellyfish applique that I had seen that was so cute.  I figured out how to adapt the idea and use ribbons as the jellyfish's tentacles. 

I hand embroidered on the jellyfish's mouth and eyebrows/eyelashes and the googly eyes are the sew-in kind.  I love how cute and playful the face for the jellyfish turned out! 

I also had to add in some seaweed to the background of this page.  After all, jellyfish do live in the ocean!

For the "Boy" version of this page, I went with a dinosaur!  I'm quite impressed at how well the shape of this guy turned out considering I free-hand sketched him out.  I used lots of different ribbons for the dino's spines along his back.  I'm hoping the little boy who gets the book with this page in it loves it as much as my Little Bear loved it.  Needless to say, I wasn't able to do much work on this page while Little Bear was awake.  

For a little extra 3D feature to this page, I figure out how to sew the tale so that it was free the swing about. 

And for extra details, I sewed a bunch of orange spots onto the dinosaur.  I'm pretty sure this dinosaur doesn't fit the profile of any dinosaur known to man, but I still think he is pretty cute!  I also had some fun with the sun in the corner of the page by adding in some stitch lines. 

Both of these pages were so much fun to put together.  This was a page where I had so many different ideas of what I could do that it took a while to narrow down which animals to actually do.  But, I am really happy that the jellyfish and the dinosaur were the two that I ended up going with. :)

Quite Books - Page 1: Ribbon Pulling

I declare the next few days to be all about quiet books here on my blog.  Never fear though, I do have other projects in the works and will be posting things other than quiet books in the near future.  But for now, I'm going to jump right in and do a little show and tell of each of the 10 different pages I made for the two quiet books I just recently finished up. 
For the first page, I was inspired by a pin I stumbled across on Pinterest of this page by And Next Comes L. 

I love that this page is a really simple page to make and yet still provides for tons of sensory fun for a little one.  Below you can see the two different versions of this page that I made.  I did discover that next time I make this page, I definitely want to go with the darker colored felt so the ribbons can't be seen through the page. 

And that's a wrap for page 1.  Only nine more to go! ;)