Quiet Book

So, I have had a few people mention that they would like a closer look at the quiet book I made for Jonathan for Christmas this past year. I got most of my inspiration from a few old books that my mom had. It makes me laugh a little at the directions they had and some of the things that were "in" at the time to do! I have to be honest that I wasn't in love with all the suggested pages of any single book, and I also didn't love every detail of each page either. The end result is that I tweaked it a lot to make it my own! Here is a breakdown of the pages (click on the image to make it larger if you need to):

1) Noah's Ark and The Garden of Eden: the entire page layout is made with felt. The ark bottom is a pocket as well as the grass in the garden. I made the people so that they are reversible (don't exactly like what I ended up with, but I obviously don't hate it since they are still around!). The apples on the tree snap on and off for added fun. I got the animal finger puppets from IKEA. I love the puppets, but on the downside they are really bulky...

2) The Nativity: I decided to stamp the people on cardstock, color them in, laminate them, and put velcro on the back. Velcro sticks to felt pretty well, FYI. The bible on the opposite page has a zipper pocket to store them all in.

3) Peter fishing and Jonah and the whale: I used a little mesh bag that I had from who knows where to make the fishing net. The fish button on the water. Jonah is on a ribbon and goes inside the whale which has a mouth you close with a zipper.

4) Counting/matching: Each numbered circle has a corresponding colored circle with that same number of eyelets on it. I made the pouch to look like a tithing envelope just for fun. At this point Jonathan is really only matching the colors, but if anyone asks he is boy genius and recognizes his numbers already.

5) Josephs coat of many colors and the treasure chest: the stripes of Joseph's coat snap on and off. The jewels of the chest were supposed to be for shape recognition....I didn't realize until after I was all done with it that I left out most of the shapes. Oops! Oh well, when you work on these projects late at night you are bound to mess something up:)

6) The prophets: Each of the prophets has their picture laminated and a piece of velcro to hold them in place. Eventually I hope to have him trained on knowing what order they go in and who is who...someday right?

7) Feeding the panda bear: I adapted this page from a word of wisdom page. The original had a really scary fat babyish thing with 4 hairs on it as the thing that you feed. Umm yeah, that was so not going to cut it for my little boy! I turned "it" into a panda bear. I decided to make some felt food to feed the bear. At this point I was pretty over the whole quiet book thing and so I did slack on the amount of food. I have it on my "to do" list to add more to the diet of this cute little bear...way down towards the bottom of the list though!

There you have it. Not a perfect book by any means (don't look too closely for the many, many flaws!). If you have a desire to copy any or all of these page ideas, go for it. However, beware: this took forever to do. Like, I am talking over 30 hours...something I was totally unprepared for, but once it was started I was going to finish it! This book was definitely a labor of love and I hope it lasts a loooong time.