Felt Book for Toddlers and Infants

Personalized Children's Reading

© Mary Welling-Bonney

Feb 24, 2009

Materials Needed:

• Felt squares
• Sewing machine
• Thread
• Scissors
• Scraps of trim
• One Yard of clear plastic tablecloth fabric
• Shower curtain ring-plastic snap closed
• Paper (at least a dozen sheets)
• Pencil
• Exacto blade

Designing Your Book

The first thing is to decide what you want to say. You can combine more than one topic such as colors and numbers. You can make it a book about color using photos of the child the book is intended for. You can make a number book that uses family, pets and friends to visually express the number. You can make a book that just shows the child all of the people in their immediate circle. Whatever you decide is fine.

1. Take your paper and in the bottom corner on each page number them from one to twelve.
2. Beginning with number one, determine the design for your cover. You don't have to have a cover if you don't want because the pages will flip freely around the rings. You can just begin designing your first page.
3. Make sure you don't have tiny little object floating in a large field. Fill the page with color and shape.
4. Set up the ideas for the whole book first or design one page and see where it takes you. There is no wrong way.

Preparation

1. Wash all of the felt in hot water. The colors will bleed and the fabric will shrink but it will set the colors so they aren't bleeding later in your child's mouth. The shrinkage is not a problem if we allow for it.
2. Cut out clear plastic windows for each photograph you plan to use making sure to add one inch in height and one inch in width to the picture dimensions.
3. Cut out each of the felt shapes.
4. Cut out 12 pages approx. 8" x 8" and set aside.

Sewing Your Book

1. Mark the top corner of each page. Using the sewing machine sew a nickel size circle using your zig zag stitch.
2. Cut an 'X' in the center of each circle with your exacto blade.
3. Lay out each page with shapes and photos. Adjust size and placement as needed.
4. Sew the pieces onto each page.
5. For photos, sew the corresponding clear plastic window on three sides. Insert the photo and stitch the remaining side to seal. Sew trim scraps over the edges of the clear plastic.

Assembly

All you do to assemble your book is to put the sheets in order, open your shower ring and put the shower ring through the hole you cut in each page then clip the ring shut. That's it.

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