Quiet Book Page 16: Make a Phone Call

At the time I was making the quiet book, Owen was just learning what a phone was. Now, phones are one of his favorite things and I am so happy that I included this page for him. 

Page 16: Make a Phone Call

Teaches: Numbers, snapping, dialing, talking on the phone

My inspiration for this page came from my friend's book and from here. 

Here is my finished page:

This page was pretty simple to put together. I asked my grandma to check her local thrift store for an old phone with a cord and she found one! They sent me the whole thing, so I used the cord for this page and kept the phone for Owen to play with. 

I first drew out the phone on a piece of paper and picked my felt for each piece. I did mostly hand stitching for this page and I love the look of the blanket stitch. The only tricky part about this page was sewing the cord on. It is a real cord, so the plastic was hard to get the needle through, but it worked out and it hasn't come apart yet. 

I used sew-on snaps to keep the phone piece in place. These snaps are much easier to get off than the snaps I used on my shapes page, but both kinds are good. 

This page is so simple, but Owen loves it! He picks up the phone and says, "Hello?!", then talks all sorts of gibberish until we try to talk back, which is apparently his queue to say, "Bye!!". If your little one loves phones, this would be a perfect addition to their quiet book!

~K.A.N.

Quiet Book Pages 4 and 5: Numbers and Math

Of all the pages I did, I think these took the most amount of time. It was worth the extra effort of hand stitching to get the end result though!

Pages 4 and 5: Numbers and Math

Teaches: numbers and counting, order, addition, subtraction

My inspiration for these pages came from all over. After looking at several quiet books, I knew I wanted a page with numbers. I initially wasn't planning on doing a math page, but I just couldn't help myself. Math is my favorite, so why not add it in? 

This is what I came up with: 

For the numbers, I found a web page that had numbers as coloring pages. I zoomed the screen to be the right size, then traced them by holding plain white paper right up to the computer screen and tracing (lightly) using a pencil. 

I picked the three colors of felt I wanted to use, cut the numbers out of the paper and used those as my pattern to cut the numbers out of felt. 

With each number cut out, I then cut out black rectangles to be just larger than the numbers. I used a blanket stitch to hand sew each number onto the black. That is the part that took forever. I love how they turned out though, so I'm glad I took the time to do it that way. 

I then cut nine more black rectangles, machine stitched one side of velcro on each, then machine stitched those to the page. I then realized that if I didn't want machine stitching to show through my numbers (which I didn't) I was going to have to hand stitch the other side of velcro on the back of the number rectangles. I knew I would rather take the time now to do the work and have it be exactly how I wanted, so I did. 

For the math page, a similar approach was taken. I made a whole second set of numbers (plus a 0) to allow every possible addition and subtraction formula of the numbers 1-9 to be done. The plus, minus, and both equal signs were hand stitched onto the page. 

As with the numbers page, these numbers velcro on and off. A large pocket was sewn to the bottom of the page to hold the extra numbers. 

So far, these have been two of Owen's favorite pages. He may not know what they are actually for, but he loves the velcro and the bright colors!

~K.A.N.