Page 10: Colour Me Happy

This page was very simple and fun to make.

Mom had passed along some very cool and colourful bug cotton fabric. A few quick snips and I had a lot of fun blocks to add to the page. I also had at my disposal some light cotton fabric that could survive going through the printer.

So, after playing around with the layout and printing the name of the colours and sewing the colourful bug blocks onto the page I had a ton of fun drawing little trails all over the page. I'm hoping Andy will like tracing the trails with his finger.

Page 9: Baby Steps - Shoe Tying

This page was so easy to make - thank goodness!

I simply cut the bottoms off of a pair of baby shoes and sewed them onto fabric. These particular shoes had refused to stay on Andy's feet (I don't think they'd stay on any baby's feet for that matter), so instead of passing them on, I incorporated them into the busy book.

Page 8: Hey Diddle Diddle Hidden Textures

Oh my, what can I say about this page? I was given this adorable piece of fabric illustrating the Hey Diddle Diddle nursery rhyme and I just couldn't figure out a way to use it in Andy's book without covering it up. After much pondering I decided to hide differently textured items under little flaps cut into the fabric. Voila!

Another tricky bit was that once I had the textured pieces sandwiched between the top and bottom fabric pieces I couldn't use the iron to fuse the pieces together. How does a person get two pieces of fabric to stay together without glue or fusible adhesive? Quilting. So after many evenings quietly quilting the page it is complete.

Inner Strength

As there are now several pages ready to go, I thought I'd better resolve how to stiffen the pages.

My conclusion is this: I'll purchase a large piece of corrugated plastic like the sheets used in the shipping office where I work. Once trimmed down to size, the plastic should offer enough stiffness so that Andy can manipulate all the items of his pages and I'll still be able to pop the pages into the laundry when needed without compromising the longevity of the page.

I'll make a pocket for the plastic to slide into by edging an activity page and a nursery rhyme page in bias tape, then use velcro or something similar to close the page before it is inserted into the binder.

Page 7: One, Two, Three, Come Play With Me

This was a lovely quick page. It is a fairly straightforward counting page with the numbers marked directly on the page, represented by the appropriate number of dots and some tactile objects on ribbon.