Busy Book

Since I have discovered this website called Pinterest, I have decided to become more crafty. I saw a website on Pinterest where moms had made "Busy Books" for their children. I thought I would give it a go. Here are the results of my labors. I hand made everything and hand-sewed every stitch. Everything is made with felt and craft thread. I didn't buy any of the pre-packaged felt character, because I wanted it to be completely made by me with love. I used some ribbon, buttons, sequins, plastic eyes, peony beads, a zipper, pipe cleaner, and glass pebbles. The girls love it, but I spent so much time on it, I'm afraid they will tear it up! Oh well!

Here's the cover. The back cover matches and wraps around to button the whole book together.

Mikayla and Macey love watching "Peep and the Big Wide World," so on the left are the characters from Peep: Peep (the yellow one), Chirp (the red one) and Quack (the blue one). On the right are flowers using different textures to touch.

On the left is a fishbowl with orange fishies, while on the right are two little girls. One with blonde hair wearing green (like Mikayla who's favorite color is green) next to a cow (Mikayla's favorite stuffed animal is a cow), and one is a brunette wearing pink (Macey's favorite color is pink) next to a sheep (Macey's favorite stuffed animal is a lamb).

On the left side of this page is a rainbow - a complete ROY G. BIV, and a pot of gold with a clover on it. The gold in the pot are yellow pom poms. On the right is a flower garden with a smiling sun. The centers of each flower are buttons, and the actual flower comes off. That way, the girls can work on fastening buttons. The flowers are color-coded, too. The center of the flower and the button match.

On the left side is a purse that opens and has a pouch to put trinkets in. On the right is a gumball machine. The gumballs are made of pom poms, so there's plenty of texture to feel.

It's a cupcake match! The base of each cupcake is lined with either orange, green, yellow, blue or pink. The cupcake tops are attached to purple ribbon, and the girls have to match the correct cupcake top to the cupcake bottom. On the right is a tent with M and M on it. That's for Mikayla and Macey. When you unzip the tent, a monkey is waiting for you!

Since we are sports nuts, and we want the girls to play sports, I had to include a sports page! It has a basketball, soccer ball, football, volleyball and baseball on it. On the right, is a dog house with a cute puppy, and five bones with numbers on them.

On the left are numbered beads. The girls can slide the beads over and count them. They go from 1-10 from top to bottom, respectively. On the right side is a stop light with matching pom poms.

On the left side are eight different shapes: square, star, pentagon, heart, circle, oval, diamond and rectangle. In the middle are three pieces of ribbon to learn how to braid. On the right side is a dragonfly, ladybug and flower. These three all match Macey's room decor.

On the left side of this page are different animals: a pig, an owl, a bird, a cat and a frog. Macey can work on her animal recognition and sounds.
On the right is tic-tac-toe. The circles are made out of buttons, while the X's are just felt-on-felt. The buttons and felt both have a velcro backing with velcro sewed on to the actual tic-tac-toe board as well.

Once I got each individual page completed, I put the pages together and used a blanket stitch to bind each page together. After that, I cut holes for the metal fasteners. Then I hammered the metal fasteners in, and bound all the pages with binder rings.