More Quiet Book Pages

I saw this idea all over the internet.  I chose to attach the flowers to ribbons, just like everything else in the book, because I do not like to lose things and despite that fact, things are always getting lost! The flowers button on and off. This was my first time making button holes! They are not exactly shirt quality, but they work for the book.

I love this page! G is for garden.  The carrots are attached to a ribbon inside the button hole and sewn down to the bottom of the page. They pop out like you are harvesting them, and can go back in. The vine-y thing is supposed to be a tomato plant. Didn't turn out all that well, but I guess it could just be an imaginary plant... or something. 

This was another one that was popular on the internet. And since I have girls, I thought they would really like this page. I was right! My big girls really love it. Hanny will like it more as she gets older. The yarn hair is sewn down with a zig zag stitch in 3 places, then the bottom of the hair can be braided and clips can be put on. I could't figure out the nose, so it's a no nose face. 

I for ice cream.  The cones are sewn down and the scoops are on ribbons and can be stacked in any order. 

The jellyfish page! This is another of my favorites. It's just tentacle ribbons sewn onto a jellyfish body, but I think it's fun. 

The kite page was pretty easy. The kite moves around and it is supposed to look like the K is flying it. 

One other thing: I decided to do all lowercase letters for this book. Usually you see them in capitals, but I found that when teaching my older two to read, they had a really hard time with recognizing lowercase letters. They knew all the sounds but couldn't really read because they didn't know the lowercase alphabet.  So I made all the letters lowercase in this book in hopes that Hanna will be able to recognize the lowercase  letters when it comes time for her to learn to read. 

Thanks for looking!

What I' ve Been Up to...

This is the front page, the letters come loose but are secured with
ribbon so Hanna can practice putting the letters of her name in
the right order. 

Here's the A page.  A simple apple, with a flap that lifts up to
show seeds underneath.

 In September, I decided to make an ABC quiet book for Hanna for Christmas.   I had all this scrap felt and thought it would be a fun and inexpensive project to make,  I was right about the fun, but very wrong about the inexpensive part. All in all, it didn't turn out to be that expensive, but just a lot more than I had anticipated when I thought I would just be able to use what I had.   Also, it took all of my spare time for the better part of two months.  But it was fun to make.  I like projects where I don't have to use a pattern because then I don't feel like I've messed up all the time.

B is for barn.  The doors open and I added a puffy lamb on a ribbon
to play on the page. 

C is for cupcakes.  The frostings are attached to a ribbon and
the sequin on each frosting corresponds to the color for the
cupcake liner to practice colors. It also has the same number of
sequins on the frosting as the number on the liner to practice one
to one correspondence. 

 I did a lot of google searches for ideas for my pages and I came to a lot of blogs featuring quiet book pages.  I took ideas from all over the place, but didn't use anyone's patterns or exact ideas.  But I was so grateful to others who had posted their books and gave me a great jumping off point for my pages.  In the spirit of that, I would like to share the pages I have made as well and hope they can give some inspiration!

Hanna loves ducks, so I made D the duck page. The ducks can
move around, but are once again secured with ribbon.  

This is one of my favorite pages.  The egg can hide inside the
shell, and she can pretend to crack it open and put the egg into
the frying pan. Super fun. 

I think, looking back, it would have been better to tackle a smaller quiet book as my first attempt. After all, an ABC book has a lot of pages! But I'm really happy with the way it turned out and Hanna really loves it, which was the goal all along. Even my 5 & 7 year olds love it and I hope to create some more activity pages for them after a long break from quiet book making!  So here's the beginning of the book; I will be posting some more of the pages soon!

Making Halloween Costumes without Spending any Money, Part 3

So here is the last Halloween costume for this year. I knew this would be the easiest so I saved it for last. Kaiya asked to be a jellyfish for Halloween this year.  After some internet searching, I found some cute ideas for making a jellyfish costume with an umbrella.  Some of the ideas I saw were quite elaborate and very beautiful. But the one I made is pretty simple. I started with a smaller, purse sized umbrella. This was one that we have had for years stuffed away in the car and when I opened it up, it was kind of breaking anyway. So it's just as well we use it for this costume!

I put a large piece of blue fabric over the top (you guessed it, the last of my curtain fabric!!), but you could just as easily leave it plain. I put a few stitches through the fabric and around the metal wires of the umbrella to hold it in place.

The girls liked it this way and I almost just left the long pieces hanging off the umbrella, but then decided to sew them up to look more like the bell of a jellyfish. 

For this part I just gathered the material and hand sewed through it to create a puffy bottom.  I wasn't sure how it would come out, but I think it turned out looking jellyfish-y enough.

Now for the fun part.  I have had this pink curling ribbon for about 4 years now. I don't remember why I bought such a large spool of it (must have been on sale or something) but it has come in handy A LOT since then. So if you ever see a large spool of curling ribbon and think, when would I use all this?, just buy it. 

So I cut a large piece of curling ribbon and tied it around the the umbrella spoke (is that what it's called? It should be if it isn't).  And then I curled it up.  Repeat about 25 times.  

Here's Kaiya with the finished jellyfish. I may put some more ribbon on for tonight.  She will wear matching top and bottom colors so the focus is on the jellyfish. This is also a good costume for cold weather because she can layer up without covering the costume. It is NOT a good costume for wind, however, which is what we are supposed to have tonight. Crossing my fingers that the weather clears up before Trick or Treat!

Thanks for reading my costume posts! Hope you have a fun and cheap Halloween!

Making Halloween Costumes without Spending Money, Part 2

So this is Hanna's costume, which took way more time than I thought it would. Hanna is going to be a starfish this year. At first, I thought I would just use my leftover orange fleece and cut two star shapes and sew them together, leaving openings for the feet and hands, and of course, her head. But the more I thought about the outcome, the more I knew she would not look like a starfish, and instead she would look like an orange blob. She won't keep her arms out and she won't keep a hat on for the top of the star. So I searched a little more and found this idea and thought it was completely adorable. And my version of this starfish is not nearly as well done as hers, but we did what we could without purchasing anything and it turned out alright. So here goes...

I started with a plain white onesie turtleneck and a sparkly white tutu type skirt. We had to go with the turtleneck because it's cold here in Oregon at Halloween time (that's certainly one thing I miss about Death Valley!)  From there I cut a large starfish pattern and a smaller one from the girls' roll of easel paper.  I then cut one big starfish from the orange fleece, hoping the fleece will help to keep her warm on Halloween night. That piece was then hand sewn to the onesie. I wanted to be able to remove it later and keep using the onesie, so I just made some big stitches to hold it on. 

Patrick told me that my starfish were not "pointy enough", so I find it necessary at this time to point out that I was going for cute cartoony type starfish and not anatomically correct ocean creatures. 

Step 2 in the process was to pin and cut the smaller starfish out of regular scrap fabric in orange, green, and blue. I wanted the fronts and backs to be different because you will be able to see the backs when it is finished. 

The next picture is after the fronts and backs are sewn together. I did not cut my corners on the inside, so they are a little puffy, which is what I wanted. I thought it would give the costume some dimension.

One of these starfish will be sewn onto the skirt and the other one onto the big starfish on the onesie. 

Next I went through a lot of trial and error in working on the skirt. I didn't want to cover it completely, and I wanted it to look like seaweed, so eventually I settled on making some seaweed type strips to sew onto it all around. I used some leftover curtain fabric (those curtains are really coming in handy after 5 years!) and sewed it to some green scrap fabric in strips, making the seam look like a wave. Then I turned them right side in and once I had made enough, sewed them around the skirt. I should have tucked the edges under before sewing them down, but didn't, so I needed to make something to go over the top of all the unfinished seams. I decided just to sew some more blue around the waist of the skirt and cover it all up. I worked really hard to pull the elastic and pin it tightly so it would still be stretchy when I was done, but somehow when I pulled the pins it gathered back together and in the end it is not very stretchy at all. She can still get into it at least.

Now, Hanna is in that stage of absolutely hating to get dressed. Or undressed. Or put a jacket on, or socks, or a hat, or anything at all that I try. So she was pretty grouchy about having to put this costume on just so I could take a picture. I got several pictures of her screaming and swinging at me, but no really-cute-happy-to-be-wearing-the-costume-Mommy-spent-3-weeks-on type pictures. Here was the best one, but still not great! The orange on the skirt part is the other starfish. And she really did look adorable in it. Hopefully we will get some better pictures Halloween night!

Making Halloween Costumes Without Spending Money, Part 1

This year, I challenged myself to make the girls' Halloween costumes without spending any money on them.  And this could have been really easy, except that they had already decided what they were going to be. So instead of raiding the costume and dress up clothes and putting something together, I have to actually make the costumes that we agreed upon previously. In our family, we like a good Halloween costume theme.  We've done Goldilocks and the three bears, Alice in Wonderland, Japanese kimonos, etc. This year will be no exception. The theme: sea creatures. And while a mermaid is not technically a sea creature since it is not technically real, it still fits the theme. So here is the first in a three part series: How I made a mermaid tail.

This one is Leah's costume, and Leah gets cold easier than anyone else in the family. So I knew I wanted to make her mermaid tail as warm as I could.  Luckily, I had about a yard of orange fleece in my sewing scraps from who knows when and what.  Originally I was just going to use the fleece, but then came upon a package of unopened curtains in this beautiful shade of blue. That's right, curtains.  We have had these curtains in the package for about four years now, and while I have wanted to put them in the girls room forever, for whatever reason we haven't.  So I put them to good use for the costume. 

I had found some really cute ideas online about how to make  a mermaid tail out of really pretty sparkly fabric, but once i committed to not spending anything on it, I had to go it alone. No pattern. The other thing is, I'm not great at sewing. So in figuring out how this would come together I probably ripped out as many stitches as I put in. But eventually, it all worked out. I started out by tracing Leah's lower half onto a roll of newsprint. From there, I cut pieces from both the fleece and the curtain fabric. Then after a lot of trial and error, I got the blue stitched over the orange and left the bottom unfinished so I could attach the tail fin. I also left a bit at the top to fold over to look like that part at the top of a mermaid's tail that folds over (whatever that's called).

The tail fin was challenging, because I wasn't sure how to make it look like a fin and not just extra fabric. I had some leftover elastic thread from another project and decided to try it on this. Elastic thread gathers the fabric together as you sew, resulting in a ruffly look.  I sewed a bunch of straight seams of it down my tail fin pieces and this is what we ended up with. Not really tail fin-ny enough yet.

Next I finished the edges of the tail fins, cutting more off the bottom to get the upside down V shape that I wanted. I then had to sew them into the body of the tail.  After a first attempt I tried it on Leah and realized she couldn't walk because it was too tight at the base.  So I removed those stitches and sewed it open further up the leg on one side so the poor girl will be able to move while Trick or Treating.  I also had left the side of the top open so she can get into it easier, so I attached a ribbon piece on each side for the closure (and since I was spending no money, I couldn't buy matching ribbon... oh well).

At this point, I decided it needed some dressing up, and hot glued some sequins on the front. This was tricky, because the thin blue material let the hot glue seep onto the fleece below, so I had to insert some cardboard between the layers so they wouldn't stick, but also had to keep lifting the blue layer so it would stick to the cardboard. But it worked out in the end.

Here's a picture of the final product.  I wanted it short enough that she wouldn't trip on it when walking, but I wish now that it was a little longer. For the real costume we will be adding some shell necklaces and flowers in her hair.

The whole point of this challenge is not to deprive my kids of really cool Halloween costumes, but to try harder to use what we already have instead of going out and buying something new.  I hope this challenge will help me to get more creative in my use of things and help me to learn to use old things in new ways.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for Part 2!