A Quiet Book for a Not-So-Quiet Boy

Being a minister's wife, we spend a lot of time in church. When R was just starting to crawl around, he got too wriggly for the pews, so we moved to the back of the sanctuary where he could crawl around. I wanted to make him some toys that he could play with in the sanctuary that were quiet - unlike a lot of the baby toys we had at the time. 

You've probably seen a lot of instructions on making quiet books online. They go from incredibly detailed, difficult instructions, to fairly basic. My quiet book doesn't have any moving parts or things to do - it was more of a book which was quiet. 

At the time, R loved clips of any kind (his favorite thing to do was re-buckle his carseat), so I used one to close the quiet book. 

I had a lot of fun with this project. I decided to use materials I already had. My largest piece of felt was black, so the quiet book became night themed. If you have a pet that sheds, I recommend choosing a different color...ours frequently gets covered in dog hair. 

I wanted to put things in the book that our son might recognize. We had already taken him camping at this point, so I put in a tent and campfire. The next page is meant to be the bat bridge in Austin, TX. 

For the center of the book, I made the 8 planets (sorry, Pluto). We'd already started teaching him about the planets, so he enjoyed tracing them and showing me how the planets rotate around the sun. 

It turns out, making a night-themed quiet book can be a bit challenging. Here we have some candles and the skyline of the city of Dallas. You can see that I really enjoyed using the star stitch on my sewing machine.

What I learned from this project was that making a quiet book wasn't difficult - but making a quiet book your kid will like and use is. R had very little interest in this book at the time that I make it. I may try to bring it out again, as he's very into books right now, but it probably still won't be a hit. In the end, it turns out that making the more complicated quiet book with things to put together and do is probably the better choice!

I would love to make a new quiet book for R and A, maybe with zippers and flaps and things. I've seen some neat ones that are roads, with pockets for car storage. Here are some of my favorite quiet book tutorials:

And Next Comes L has a fantastic page on how to build a quiet book which is incredibly detailed.

Imagine Our Life has some really great quiet book templates and ideas, but in particular I like her Quiet Book House, Camping Page and Felt Fire Station. Her books are hand-sewn and go into a lot of detail. By far my favorite, however, is the Rocket Ship page - the rocket is attached to a zipper and moves!

The Quiet Book Blog has a lot of great ideas, like this book which is full of fun things to do including a Mr. Potato Head page! You can also find a directory of quiet book templates from a number of blogs.

Happy (quiet) sewing!