binding for a felt quiet book
I finished my quiet book on Friday night. It turned out really cute and my kids love it. I’ve already test-drove it at a restaurant! My mom, my 13 year old sister, 10 year old daughter and 4 year old niece and I went out for a girls lunch so I brought the book along. It kept ALL of us busy! I incorporated some fun game pages (tic tac toe and Hangman) that the older girls loved (me included) and the 4 year old loved the farm page. The only change I might make the next time around is to not actually bind it into a book. The only reason I say that is it would be nice for the older girls to play with the tic tac toe page while the younger one can play with another page. My idea would be to create pages and then create a closable “book” encasement to hold them all together. So my tic tac toe page would have an envelope on the back so it is one contained page. Make sense?I must say it really wasn’t as time-consuming as I thought it would be… but as I said here, I went into the project knowing it wasn’t going to be perfect and being OK with that. The next book I do I will take a bit more time and add some detail… maybe some button and snap action for my younger two. I even took a short-cut with the cover and used puff-paint. Alright, enough blabbering, here is the result:
As you can see I made it all out of felt. The pages are 8?x8?… to make it even easier I would recommend 9?9 since the felt is 9? wide you would just have to cut off 3? of length.After creating all the separate pages I sewed two together along the edge, wrong sides together. Once I had all the pages sewed together, but not yet bound into the book I did the following: Cut a piece of felt about 6 inchs wide and 8 inches long. I lined it up with the left edge of the cover and sewed a straight line down. (the blue is the front cover, the pink is the spine).
Now flip it over and do the same with the back cover – see image to see how to line up (you want the seam to be hidden).
Set this aside and take your first two pages. Sew them together down the left side. Do this again for the next two pages and so on.
Now it is time to bind into a book. The spine is too thick for the machine, so get out your needle and thread.
It is hard to describe how I did the spine, but I placed the pages into the book and then folded the spine down and around the pages. Make sure the page edges and cover edges are all lined up on the left and then just sew down the length of the book.
That’s it! You’re done. To make the finger puppets all I did was cut the shape I wanted and then sewed them shut. No flipping inside out or anything. Very simple, very easy. I then hotglued on the faces and, for the cow, the spots. Took about 1 minute each! I may even endeavor to make a more detailed book, but for now, the kids love this one and don’t care that everything isn’t perfect. I received tons of comments in the restaurant and my SIL has already mentioned how her kids would love one.