Alphabet Quiet Book: H is for Hair

This post is the ninth in a series about the alphabet quiet book I'm making with the girls for preschool this year. To read the introduction, click here, and to read the rest of the posts (updated on a weekly basis) click the "Quiet Book" label on the right.

H is for Hair
Hair braiding is another page it seems almost every quiet book includes. And with three girls in our family, two with hair already long enough to braid, it seemed like an obvious choice to choose for the letter H.

Inspiration and Page Design
I was inspired by several other hair braiding pages for my design. After looking at a number of them, I found that I prefer simple, doll-like faces to more realistic versions. I especially liked one from the Bungalow Boutique, which also had some cute changeable jewelry. Unfortunately, the domain name has expired and you can only see the picture on Pinterest. I also thought that storing the extra hair clips on a thick ribbon like in this page from Oikology was genius.

One thing that especially makes my version cute, of course, is the cotton bouclé yarn. This is Cotton Stria yarn by Manos del Uruguay, which my sister-in-law gave me as a gift from her yarn stash a few years ago. She bought it thinking of making a doll with it - the yarn is kind of begging to be doll hair, isn't it?

To make the hair for our page, I wound a small (1-yard around) skein of the yarn on my yarn swift until it was the thickness I wanted for my braids. If you don't have a yarn swift, winding the yarn around the back of a chair would work just fine. You just want to be able to have your "hairs" fairly aligned so they are ready to be sewn to the page. Then I cut my circular skein so that it was all in even-length pieces, and laid the whole bunch around the fabric face which I'd already appliqued. I stitched a side part and a line on each side to be the starting point for the braids. Then I braided a pigtail on each side, and cut the ends even with the bottom of the page. That way, when the hair is braided it will fit inside the book, but when it is loose it hangs off the page a little.

Preschool goals for using the Hair page
This page is all about the fine motor skills of braiding, rubber-banding, and attaching hair clips. Accessorizing with the hair clips is definitely my girls' favorite part about this page! Annie is starting to get the idea of the braiding a little bit, and the yarn is definitely easier to practice with than real hair. But both Annie and Laurel are all over changing the hair bows and picking out new ones to try out.

Check back on Thursday to see a small related project I did recently to organize Annie and Laurel's hair bows. It was fast, easy, involved packing tape and a stapler, and still looks beautiful!