Quiet Book:
An easy and inexpensive homemade gift idea
A quiet book is a perfect gift to give any child. They're very easy to make and incredibly inexpensive (the one shown here only cost $6 CDN to make). Customize this book to the interests of the child and it's a gift that will keep them entertained for hours.
Quiet books are meant to keep children's hands busy during a time when they need to be, well, quiet. These books are ideal to give to older children while their younger siblings take a nap. They can even be taken along on car rides, to doctor's offices and to that great-aunt's of yours whose place is riddled with breakable nick-nacks!
As December quickly approaches, I'm find I'm getting short on time, so I kept this quiet book pretty simple and used my sewing machine as much as I could; the hand embroidering was kept to an absolute minimum! The pages here are meant to be inspirational - a spring board for you to jump off of before you start to plan out your own fabulous quiet book!
Materials
- an assortment of felt pieces cut into 6" squares
- various scraps of felt
- buttons
- thread
- needle
- scissors
- fine tipped marker
- sewing machine
For my quiet book, I cut out 10 squares from various colours of felt. Each square measured 6" by 6". Let's go through the book page by page...
For the front cover, I printed off the letters I needed to spell 'QUIET BOOK' and then cut these letters out. 
Once the letters were cut out, I flipped them over so that the 'bad' side was facing me and, using a fine-tipped marker, traced the letters onto the felt. (I flipped the letters over so that there wouldn't be any visible marker lines on the front cover, because the side with the marker lines would be sewn down). 
The felt letters were pinned to the page... 
...and sewn down by hand using a running stitch with thread in a contrasting colour. 
Open the book and you'll see a page for an 'X' and 'O' game. I machine stitched the grid and the pocket down. The pocket holds the Xs and Os when the game is not being played. 
X wins! 
The garden page has a tree and some flower stalks stitched down... 
...and comes alive with the addition of flowers, grass, a sun and clouds. It's a perfect summer's day! 
The flowers are simply circles of felt with a button stitched onto the centre... 
The sun is two cicular layers of felt, stitched together. The eyes and mouth are also stitched on by hand. 
My favourite page is the dress-up page. It has a doll stitched to the centre and the clothes are held in the pocket to the right. 
This is one lucky girl, her wardrobe is very trendy and contains a ball gown, pjs, a bathingsuit, shorts, t-shirts, skirts and pants!
To cut down on the amount of work, I kept the embroidered details very simple...but you can make your wardrobe as detailed as you want! 
The next two pages are basic activity pages that were very quick for me to assemble. There is a ribbon page, where a little girl can practice her braiding and as well as a weaving page made from strips of felt. 
The felt for the weaving page was pinned down and then sewn onto the page with a sewing machine. 
Once the pages were done, I determined the layout of my book and then sewed the pages together two at a time (wrong sides facing) so that I had 5 complete pages when I was finished.
I then sewed all five pages together by hand (the book was too bulky to fit through a sewing machine). 
I thought the spine of the book looked a bit sloppy, so I cut a strip of felt that was 1" wide by 6" long...this was to be the binding of my book. I laid the binding along the edge of my book (right sides facing) and stitched the book and the edge of the binding together. 
Once the one edge of the binding was sewn down, I folded the other edge of the binding over and around the spine and tacked it down to the back of the book. (I made sure to fold the edge of the binding under so that it would look the same as the other side of the binding). 
In the end, I had a neat, professional looking binding that wrapped around the spine of my quiet book!
Now that you've got the general idea, all that's left is to go and start a book of your own! Cheers!
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