Sewing Tutorial: Quiet Book Page - Monkeys and Balloons

The idea for this page came from Serving Pink Lemonade, although I've simplified it to include just the monkey and the balloons, and generally only make it with buttons and buttonholes nowadays.

STEP ONE

My previous post explains how to prepare your pages and other materials and also mentions the applique paper that I prefer to use to make the process easier.

The first step is to draw your shapes onto the applique paper.

For the monkey page, you will need:

• monkey
• monkey's belly and face
• eight balloon shapes - choose four colours and make two iron on balloons of each colour. This will make four balloon backgrounds to attach to the page, and four button-on balloons.

Cut roughly around your outlines on the paper and iron on to the felt. Follow the ironing instructions for the particular applique adhesive that you choose to use.

Then cut your felt shapes out and peel off the paper layer, leaving an adhesive backing on the back of the felt shapes.

STEP TWO

Put your shapes into position on your page fabric and iron on.

For figures that have two layers (or more), such as the monkey below, do only one layer at a time. Start with the bottom layer (in this case, the dark brown monkey outline) and then iron on the next layer (belly and face in light brown). 

STEP THREE

Make the balloons. Iron the remaining four balloons onto their matching coloured felt and cut them out.

STEP FOUR

Sew around everything. You can choose to skip this step, but the applique adhesive will eventually lose its effectiveness and the felt shapes will come off, especially after repeated buttoning and play. It's much safer, and looks much neater if you sew around everything.

Start with the shapes attached to the page. Sew close to the edes with a machine stitch. For the monkey, you could choose to just sew around the belly and face as this will also secure the body to the page.

 

Also sew strings to connect the monkey's hands to the balloons. 

 

 

STEP FIVE

 

Sew button holes into your balloons.

 

 

STEP SIX

 

Do all hand sewing. For the monkey page, this will mean sewing buttons to the balloons on the page, and embroidering the monkey face.

 

When you have finished, put your page aside until you have all pages finished.

 

Well done!