Monday Minute

It was a cutting out sort of weekend round here ~

I cut into my new Hungry Caterpillar fabric to make a new version of the case for the Hungry Caterpillar felt set in my etsy store.



I cut out some colourful page backgrounds and chalkboard vinyl numbers to put together a new counting quiet book.



Watching my three year old son's obsession with cars keep growing, I finally cut out some car play mats. First, this racing mat.



And then this little town mat. Stay tuned for some of the detail I plan to add to this one!



And finally.... a whole pile of fabric pages to start putting together a new batch of quiet books! Yay!

Sewing Tutorial - Hungry Caterpillar Felt Set

This has always been one of our favourite books in our house. Our children are being brought up bilingual (my husband is German) and it's one of the few books that we have in both English and German.

From a teacher's point of view, I love the book because it teaches kids the days of the week, number sense and counting, the process of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly and, for our younger child, we even talk about colours when we read because the pictures are so bright and beautiful and those fruit pages are perfect for it.

Now, our eldest is 4.5 years old and very interested in learning about how to put a story together and how to read. And that is where the idea for the felt set has come from.

I started out by going through the book and choosing the main parts of story and the most important pictures. I then sketched these. I made each item double layered and added any trim on top of this. It makes them stronger (to last longer) and not as floppy (for more effective play).

I then cut out fabric for a case in which to keep the set together. You could make any size that you prefer, this just fit the zippers I had available at the time. I used clear vinyl PVC for the front of the case and a cute hungry caterpillar quilting cotton that I bought some time back. To keep the seams neat through the PVC, I cut a double layer of cotton, put right sides together and sewed around the rectangle, leaving a gap to turn to out the right way (so that front and back are showing the fabric design on the right side, and all seams are hidden inside). After turning it out the right way, I attached the zipper to the front and back as in the above right picture.

With right sides of the front and back together, I sewed around the edges, opened up the zipper and turned the case out the right way to finish with the above case. 

But back to the felt set....I placed all layers as I wanted them when finished and sewed around each edge, a few millimetres in from the edges. 

Works in progress: quiet books, hats

This week I started on the new Quiet Books. The idea is to make four different kinds, each following a different theme.

I'm starting out on the colours and alphabet books, and will later add a numbers book and a shape book.

The colours book is turning out as also an animal book, as it will feature a yellow baby chicken, orange goldfish, green frog, red crab, pink pig and a blue whale. I'm planning on making each page interactive with either zippers, magnets, buttons, velcro, finger puppets or some kind of movement.

The alphabet book will go from A to F: Apple, Balloon, Cat, Dog, Egg and Fish, and in a similar way will also have interactive pages with velcro, buttons, bow tying, buckles, zippers and magnets.

So many little pieces go into making these books that the first thing I've had to do is order a few more supplies (such as magnets and buckles). I've also cut out all of the pages in cotton calico, using a cute three little pigs fabric for the front and back covers.

I'm in the process of drawing up the pattern pages at the moment and will make some of these available here soon.

With the weather warming up here on the east coast of Australia, my newborn baby hats have been selling quickly from my etsy and madeit shops, so I'll also be cutting out and making up some more of these in the next few days.

Lesley :)