Finished Felt Book

I finally finished Joanna's felt book.  When I started this little project I thought it would only take me a couple afternoons to finish it, two weeks later I made the last stitch.  I wanted a simple felt book with bright colors and simple pictures, so here's what I came up with. 

Here is the front cover with a J for her name.

Sorry for the poor quality of the pictures, I couldn't seem to get the lighting right and of course it didn't help that little man was constantly grabbing at the book while I was trying to photograph it, haha.

Now for the how to.  First I picked four different colors of 8x11 felt.  I chose black, purple, red and blue.

I placed two colors back to back and sewed all the way around.  A little tip from me, sew all your shapes and pictures on before you sew your pages back to back, just makes life a little easier.

Now you should have 2 pages of 2 different colors each.  Lay both pages on top of each other, find the center and fold it in half left to right.  Sew down the left side to make the binding.  The felt is really thick so be careful not to break a needle on your machine doing this step.

This is what it should look like:

Cut out different shapes for your pages.  I chose flowers, fish, balloons, clouds, an apple and hearts (I didn't have the clouds or hearts cut out when I took this picture).

If you didn't take my advice and sew the shapes on before sewing your book together, now is when you can applique them on each of the pages.  Now your finished and you have a simple, inexpensive, toy for your little one.  I'm making one for Grant next. 

I let him play with this one throughout the many steps it took to have it completed.  It works especially well to distract your little one during diaper changes.  Since every time I lay little man down to change his diaper he decides he should roll over or try to crawl away, this kept him in place long enough for me to finish.  So I guess I should get busy and started on the next one.