Busy Book

So I mentioned in my last post that I am making a busy book for Ben and James. It is mainly so I can take it travelling with us as I hope is it will entertain them for more than 5 minutes. Maybe. It is also pretty much my first sewing project. Eek! So when I post photos please view them with either one eye squinting so it is a bit blurry, or take your glasses off.  The latter would be preferable. Lets just say I am going for the 'rustic homemade' look!

"What is a busy book?" I am so glad you asked! There are hundreds of talented sewers on the internet with wonderful examples of busy books, sometimes called quiet books. But it is essentially a soft book that young kids play with. So you include flaps, buttons, zips, tags to pull etc to make the pages interesting. You sew each page into a special unique book.

Now I am not that fancy, or  a sewer at all, so my book is a basic easy book. I have used felt as it seems quite forgiving, it is cheap and durable. And lets face it, I could not work out how to sew a proper page from the you tube examples! So I decided on felt and then on a theme. I am making the alphabet book. *Cough if I get that far, cough.*

So far I have:

1. Cut out 10 inch squares of brown felt (who knew the sewing world uses inches!) To do this I used mum's quilting set squares and her rotary cutter. This makes the job much easier and more accurate!
2. Cut out 8 inch squares of coloured material. It is preferable if you can make more than one page at a time otherwise it would be too time consuming. So I have made 10 pages so far. (You can get scrap colour material/offcuts and its cheaper) 
3. Then sew the material onto the felt (try and do it straighter than I did, I did get better at it though) 
4. Then decide what you would like to do on each page.

So here is an example of my 'D' page. "D" is for dressing up. I will keep posting about what I decide to do for the other pages as I do them. So bare with me. Soon I will work out how I will make the pages into a book. Fun and Games on these cold wintery nights!