Alphabet Quiet Book: ABC Block Train Title Page

This post is the fourteenth 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.

With the completion of L is for Laundry, the first volume of our quiet book was filled! Technically, of course, M and N mark the middle of the alphabet, but because there were more two-page spreads in the first half of our alphabet quiet book than I have planned for the second, I decided to end it with L. I had plans for M and N to work together in a page spread, so I needed to come up with a title page to begin the second volume. 

Trains are a traditional quiet book page that I wanted to include, but ran out of room when I outlined the ideas I had for each letter of the alphabet. Making a train pulling alphabet block cars seemed like a good way to both start off the second volume of the alphabet book, and to slip a train in as well.

My train comes partly from the excellent Circus Train template on Imagine Our Life, and partly from tracing my girls' actual alphabet blocks. First I traced the outline and letter shapes from the ABC and XYZ alphabet blocks onto freezer paper. Then I scaled the engine and cars from the train template to match on my computer, and traced them directly from my laptop screen onto freezer paper. After all, a laptop is an awful lot like a light box, as long as you treat it gently!

Once I had my freezer paper pattern, I ironed the pieces to the appropriate colors of felt, and cut out all the pieces. I cut out some squares of slightly darker tan to set the alphabet block cars apart from the cream colored background. The contrast wasn't quite as strong as I would have liked, but it was better than nothing.

With so many pieces, it was a bit tedious to sew together (there are seventeen buttons alone!), but it came together to make a clean, simple look, and a sturdy, easy-care title page. Many of the pages coming up tend toward the busier side of the spectrum, so it was nice to start out the second volume with something uncomplicated like this.

Alphabet Quiet Book: L is for Laundry

This post is the thirteenth 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.

L is for Laundry
This is probably my favorite quiet book page to date. And I have some really good ones coming up in the next few weeks. But I especially love this one because it is so personal. It looks just like the laundry area in my kitchen! Check it out:

Isn't that fun?! It even has the glass bottles in the window and my red refrigerator!

I mean, lots of quiet books have a laundry page, whether they're about matching socks or hanging laundry out to dry, but with our page the girls can take the clothes through our whole Wednesday Wash Day routine.

First we gather the dirty laundry and bring it downstairs in wicker laundry baskets.

Then we sort the clothes into piles of darks and lights.

We wash them in the washer, and dry them in the dryer. This is the point where I'd like to pretend that I'm as eco-friendly and budget savvy as I'd like to be, and that I take my laundry out to the back yard and hang it on a clothesline. But I don't do that in real life, so I didn't see any reason to pretend we do in our quiet book. I do hope we'll hang up a clothesline this summer, but between Indiana humidity and my love of tumbled-dry blue jeans and bath towels, a clothes line will never completely replace my dryer.

While the quiet books with miniature clothespins are truly adorable, and I was severely tempted to make one just like those, I knew that they wouldn't stand up to my girls' playing with them. Clothespins have a tendency to fall apart even under fairly gentle use, and I didn't want to be putting them back together every time the girls play with the quiet book. Also, I think the mini clothespins are kind of difficult for little fingers to manipulate. Pair all of that with the fact that we don't actually have a clothesline yet, I decided to go for an alternative drying method we actually do use: clothes hangers!

I found this tutorial on how to make miniature hangers from paperclips, and it was a perfect and very easy way to hang up the clothes. I closed the hook on the hangers, so they are semi-permanently attached to the page. They still can come off, but they generally stay put when you're turning the pages of the quiet book - a big plus.

The clothes are my other favorite part about this quiet book page. I made a piece of clothing that is especially appropriate for every member of our family. A little pink dress for Jenny, a purple shirt for Laurel with her name on it (continuing the theme of working the girls' names into the quiet book pages of the letter that starts their names), and a sunshine shirt for my Annie Sunshine. For me, there is my chocolate brown cardigan with pearl buttons that I'm very likely to be wearing in the cool weather, and for Collin there is his yellow/orange fleece GoLite vest that he wears almost daily from fall to spring. This one especially makes me smile.

All of the clothes I sketched out on freezer paper before ironing to the felt and cutting out. That way I could make a matching front and back to each piece, and get finer details than by freehanding. I sewed them with a blanket stitch by hand, being careful to leave enough extra open space around the neck on the t-shirts that I could still slip in a hanger.

Inspiration and Page Design
I already shared a good bit about this page and some of my other favorite laundry quiet book pages, but here are a few more loose ends:

For another alternative clothesline idea, I think this Velcro clothesline is clever. A good alternative to a felt laundry basket is this mesh laundry bag. A fun pairing for a laundry page is to wash and dress a doll on an adjacent page. That way you both practice laundry routines, but also morning dressing routines. If you do go for mini clothespins (because they are extremely cute!), stringing waxed linen thread through the spring seems like the way to go. Like in this beautiful example from Glued to Glory, except waxed linen thread (sold with jewelry supplies) would be stronger and hold up better to use. Stringing them through the springs this way would ensure that even if the wooden clips fall off, at least part of the clothespin will be permanently attached to the page.

For my quiet book page, I used Stephanie's template from Imagine Our Life for a washing machine, sized down, for both the washer and dryer. I used a flat white shoelace for the trim around the window and the clothesline. The glass bottles in the window are all beads I sorted out from one of those jumbo mixed bags of glass beads you find at craft stores.

Preschool goals for using the Laundry page

This page is about learning to help out with our weekly laundry chores. By taking the clothes through the steps on the quiet book page, the girls will learn more about washing laundry, and hopefully be more excited about helping me take care of our actual laundry. So far, it's working! Laurel helps me collect and sort the laundry, and Annie now folds all the hand towels and rags, which is a pretty substantial pile. I'm working on teaching them to pair socks too, but with so many little girl socks of various sizes, that is a somewhat more advanced job.

All this also goes along with our new chore chart, which I have almost finished. I'm hoping to paint the frame really soon, and after I get that done I'll be able to share it with y'all. I can't wait!

Alphabet Quiet Book: K is for Keys

This post is the twelfth 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.

K is for Keys
Have you ever seen those baby teethers that look like a ring of keys, but each key is a different color and topped with a different shape? Something like these, except the set I remember was flexible and more inviting for a baby to chew on. Anyway, that was the first thing I thought of when brainstorming what to make for the letter K. Shape keys. Keys of different shapes. Which lent itself well to a matching page!

Inspiration and Page Design
Although I couldn't find any other quiet book pages that were quite what I imagined for our key page, matching and shapes are standard themes for quiet books, and for preschoolers in general. The closest ideas I found were this key matching page from A Back to Basics Lifestyle, and a laminated paper file folder matching game from Desert Crafter. These were both sort of what I had in mind, but not exactly, so I just sketched out my own page.

I picked the shapes square, rectangle, circle, triangle, diamond, octagon, heart, and star, since they were eight of the most basic shapes, and all quite distinct from each other. I also decided to draw the shape both on the top of the key (the bow) and to echo the shape on the key blade.

After I finalized the key shapes, I traced them onto freezer paper to be my cutting pattern. Then I made a sandwich of two layers of felt with Wonder Under in between, placed the freezer paper on top, and ironed the whole stack to fuse it together. The Wonder Under permanently sticks the felt layers together, while the plastic side of the freezer paper lightly sticks the pattern to the top so you can cut it out and then peel off the freezer paper. Then I stitched as close to the cut edge with my sewing machine as possible. This really is The Best way to make stand-alone felt pieces that are common in quiet books. They're strong, hold their shape, and the freezer paper helps you get very precise edges.

After I finished sewing the keys (and cut duplicate pieces from black felt to make the matching silhouettes), I inserted a small eyelet and clipped them together with 1" book rings. Then I sewed down a piece of a handwoven belt left over from another project, added some belt loops from worn out blue jeans, and had a nice place to keep the key rings when not in use.

Preschool goals for using the Keys page
Learn the names of shapes! Be able to match them up with blank silhouettes! The practice of matching the key not only with the shape on top but getting the blade on the right side is especially good for young preschoolers. Beyond that, I know the Internet is full of preschool shape activities, but I've been going without enough sleep for way too long and I can't think of any right now. What are your favorite shape-related activities?

The story of a little couch

Last week I was visiting my family in Bloomington, and while I was out shopping with my sister, I came across a little loveseat at the Habitat ReStore. The couch needed some love. Actually, it needed reupholstery. It had small stains all over it, and a whopper of a stain all over the back. But it didn't smell at all, it more or less matched the style of our other living room furniture, and it was marked down to $33. After spending a long while conferring with my sister, random shoppers, and finally my dad on whether or not I'd be able to bring it home on the roof of our station wagon, I bought the couch.

After my dad tied the couch to the roof of our car, I drove it (and my girls) the three hours north back to our home. I don't like Interstate driving anyway, but doing it at night, with my littlest baby crying because she hates her carseat, and my biggest girl wailing, "Mama, Jenny's crying! Make her stop!", and with a couch tied to the roof was kind of nerve wracking. All I could do was imagine the disaster that would ensue if the couch flew off the roof and hit a car behind us. I pulled off a few times on the drive up, both to calm the crying girls and to check on the couch, and it remained securely tied on. Somehow, despite all of that, we made it home, with the couch intact.

Of course, as soon as we got it in our living room, it was obvious that something had to happen to the aesthetics of the couch if we were going to coexist peacefully with it. I should back up here and say that even when I bought it, I wasn't planning on it staying in our house for long. We have a fainting couch about the same size that we're eventually going to put our living room, but it's about halfway through being reupholstered itself. Realistically, we know we're not going to be able to finish it until sometime this summer. But we desperately needed more seating, since we are hosting a regular evening class in our home for some of Collin's students to come hear from guest speakers in various professional fields. Our first meeting had students sitting on the floor or in child-sized chairs, and that wasn't very hospitable. Thus, the $33 temporary couch.

The first day the couch was in our house, I spent a lot of time staring at it. What could we do to make it fit in, and to enjoy the months we had to live together? Most of that day, I researched and very seriously considered several methods of painting it. I learned a lot in my research, and also discovered that our couch was a pretty good candidate for paint. I envisioned a gorgeous plum colored loveseat, maybe even with golden yellow trim, to cover over the poorly painted navy blue wooden trim.

In the end, however, I ran the numbers and realized that it was going to cost at least $50 and a weekend of warm weather to do the job properly, and that was in the best case scenario. For the same price, I could buy a beautiful Indian throw blanket (already something I was hoping to get for our living room), use it as a cover for the couch while we keep it and then have a lovely throw blanket for after we get rid of the couch. And so, I present to you:

The Easiest Couch Makeover Ever

Ta-Da!

I know, throwing a blanket over the couch isn't really a DIY project to brag about, but oh my goodness, I just love it. And this isn't just any blanket. It is called a kantha quilt, which is a traditional Indian blanket made of piecing together used saris together, and quilting the stacked layers with long running stitches across the entire blanket. I've wanted something like this for a long while, to add some bohemian flavor to our living room and keep the antique look of our other furniture and house from becoming stuffy and non-kid friendly.

Picking out a kantha quilt to order was the hardest part of this whole "project". There are so many gorgeous ones, and Collin and I each had different favorites. We picked out this one because it had lots of jewel-tone fabrics that go well with our other throw pillows and the stained glass windows in our living room.

I was a little nervous ordering from this shop because it is brand new and I was the second-ever sale. But they had the prettiest kantha quilt I'd seen, so I went for it and hoped for the best. Not only did it ship exactly when it said it would, but it made it from Jaipur, India to our little town in Indiana in 48 hours. That is simply amazing to me! Everything must have lined up just perfectly, because the package arrived 25 hours even before FedEx expected to deliver it. In fact, this morning just as I was sitting down to check the tracking number, my doorbell rang with the delivery.

I spent longer dancing happily around the living room exclaiming, "It's so beautiful" along with my girls than I spent fixing up the couch, which was just how I wanted it to be. With a house full of half-finished projects, it was so nice to keep one very simple.

But, does it pass the final requirement? Is it cozy enough to invite girls to snuggle in and read books?

Oh yes.

Alphabet Quiet Book: J is for Jelly Beans

This post is the eleventh 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.

 J is for Jelly Beans
I love jelly beans. I also (maybe even more) love the look of vintage gumball machines. I remember as a child visiting the county historical museum and buying marbles for a penny in the vintage gumball machine in the gift shop. Even then, being able to buy anything for a penny was super exciting. And now we have a free-standing gumball machine in our school room, filled with felted bouncy balls. I think that gumball machine is older than I am since I found it in my grandparent's basement a number of years ago, and they didn't have any idea where it came from. It runs on dimes, and had a couple Chiclets in the bottom when I cleaned it out.

Anyway, since we already set aside the letter G for Giraffe and Goat, I decided to fill our gumball machine with jelly beans (Jelly Belly style), and put it on the J page.

Inspiration and Page Design
I first got the idea to do J is for Jelly Beans from Hippos and Dinosaurs. Although I liked the idea of being able to fill the machine up with jelly beans, and even spent a while trying to figure out how to make the jelly beans come down the chute, eventually I decided the virtue of no loose parts trumped another interactive feature to the page.

In my version, you can turn the knob, prod the jelly beans around through the I-spy vinyl pocket, try to guess how many jelly beans are in the jar, and (especially for my preschoolers) name the specific colors and flavors of the jelly beans. But more on that later.

When rummaging through my bags of leather scraps to find pieces for the face plate, I came across a piece of shiny, copper- colored leather, just the color of an old penny. I cut a penny-sized circle from it, wrote 1¢ with a ball-point pen, gave it several coats of clear fingernail polish, and super-glued it to the tan leather rectangle.

For the turn-mechanism, I cut out and shrunk a piece of shrink film plastic in the shape of a spinner knob. Then I found a plain round wooden button (and another one for the top of the jelly bean machine), and spray painted all three with silver paint. I added a washer, and the whole spinner assembly turns freely, although it's a little bulky.

I've been trying to include each of my girls' names on their letter page (see A is for Abacus... and Annie), but I couldn't come up with any clever way to put Jenny's name into the jelly bean page. So in the end, I just embroidered, "Jelly Beans for Jenny" as the title.

Preschool goals for using the Jelly Beans page

Jelly bean week was even more fun than ice cream week! I bought a bag of "gourmet jelly beans" (Jelly Belly knock-offs), and we ate a few every day. Before I'd give jelly beans to the girls, they had to name the color, and take a guess at the flavor of each little jelly bean. I tried to introduce some unusual colors, although the main one I remember the girls learning that week was "chartreuse." Annie got a fun alphabet book called The Other Colors for Christmas, and it would have been a great one to pair with our jelly bean color and flavor explorations.