Busy Little Hands - Quiet Book

Keeping a toddler busy is exhausting! My 20-month old daughter is EXTREMELY social and courious. I love that she enjoys being around people and that she's interested in learning about everything around her... But it is also means lots of running around for mamma and little-to-no alone time. Sometimes I can get her to play by herself at home, but it’s usually for a short time. With baby #2 on the way, I’ve been trying to get more creative in finding activities she’ll do on her own.  My main project has been finishing a “busy book." My mom made a book like this for my siblings and I when we were little and I remember playing with it for hours… even as an older child I thought it was pretty cool! I’ve been meaning to make one of these for YEARS....I actually started it before my daughter was even born. I’ve been slowly collecting felt from swap meets and yard sales. I FINALLY forced myself to put it all together though over the past few weeks (it’s been my nap time project). 

I used a 2” wide, 3 ring binder for the book. The cover is made of jean material, with a thin batting on the front and back (batting isn’t necessary but I like the soft feel it adds to the book). For the lettering I just free-handed cutting letters out of felt (figured different letter sizes would just add character), then stitched them on with the sewing machine. I designed the cover so it could be taken off if the binder ever gets bent or damaged. The elastic was added so it would fit snug closer to the binder spine.

Now for the fun part, creating pages!

The great thing about using a 3 ring binder is that I can add pages later on as my child's skills and interests change. For the pages I used a stiff felt material cut into 8x11 inch sheets (found at Wal Mart). Once the pages were 100% complete I sewed them together (back to back). I used a 3 hole punch to create the ring holes. At first I was using metal scrap-booking eyelets to make the ring holes more secure, but they weren't thick enough to go through 2 layers of the felt, so I found larger eyelets at Wal-Mart that worked perfectly! 

This is the apple counting page. I cut everything out of felt; glued the tree on with a hot glue gun. The basket was hand-stitched on, leaving the top open so the apples could go in. The apples have velcro on the back.... I used the sticky velcro, but would recommend using the sew-on kind because it's sturdier (my velcro is coming off already). Snaps would be a good idea too!

This is the "Busy Bee Counting" page. The bee hive and bees are felt, again, I used the hot glue gun and some hand stitching to put it all together. I found the wooden spools at a local craft store and painted them (you could just as easily use beads or something similar). The strands are pipe cleaners sewn on with a zig-zag stitch using a sewing machine.

This one was pretty easy to make. I hand stitched the pumpkin on leaving the top open to put all the facial pieces in. You can be as creative as you want with the facial pieces. I put the rough side of the velcro on the pumpkin and didn't worry about putting velcro on the face parts since the felt sticks by itself.

 These were by far my favorite pages to make and my daughter's favorite to play with! She's very interested in animals lately so I made farm pages with finger puppets. I had to draw some of the details on with Sharpee markers and hot-glue gunned the felt pieces on. I tried to make little pouches to stick the animals but some of them kept falling out so I glued elastic straps on to help. The finger puppets themselves took some time... I would make a few here in there as I had the time. I wish I could give a better explanation on how I did these... but it was literally a trial and error process. Basically I just cut and glued felt pieces together until they started to look like the animal I was going for, then slapped some googley eyes on.

This is the buttons and shapes page. I started by tracing and cutting out all the shapes then making slits in the center for the buttons to go through. Then I glued the ribbons onto the shapes and used a long felt strip to glue all the ribbon strands down in a row.  All that was left was sewing the buttons on and I was done. Took less than 30 minutes.

The stop sign page was pretty easy as well. I just drew on the sign and wording with colored Sharpee's, cut out red, yellow, and green circles and put velcro on the backs. Super simple.

This is my daughter's 2nd favorite page because she is OBSESSED with buckles lately! I bought the buckle at a craft store for a few bucks. I had some left-over jean material which I used for the backpack flap. I used my sewing machine on this page because I wanted it to be very sturdy. We filled it with a notebook, stickers, and crayons to help keep my toddler busy (great during church)!

I'm hoping to add more pages gradually and would LOVE to get more ideas. Anyone else ever made or have a busy book with other page ideas you'd like to share?