Stress Induced Creativity

Occasionally it strikes me that, were I to be imprisoned for some crime or other, not having access to craft materials would be one of the harshest penalties for me. That and chocolate. I know I must be finding all this moving stuff stressful because I find myself going a bit hyper on the craft. For instance, I spontaneously started designing and cutting out the felt for a Quiet Book a few evenings ago - and I never start new things in the evenings partly because I can't be arsed and partly because the light isn't good enough.

I had never heard about Quiet Books until Pinterest came along. Now it seems like the best ones come from Russia. I have no idea why. They are essentially books to keep children occupied by themselves. I have a Board on Pinterest about them and there are tonnes of other examples on there. Here are the pages I have so far for my 19 month old niece.

Let me admit straight away that I used hot glue for all of these pages. The stars are ones I picked up in Dongdaemun Market and I glued ribbon scraps and velcro to them before threading the ends of the ribbons through a small hole in the top right corner. I then used hot glue on the other side to secure those ends. My ickle niece can count the stars, name the different colours, move them about, pretend they're shooting stars, make wishes..I dunno. As with all the other pages I am going to layer this with some batting underneath and some interfaced fabric behind that and sew the lot around the edges. I'm going to leave the edges raw apart from a bit of fraychek on the fabric. I haven't decided on binding yet but I am probably going to use those little rivet porthole things along the left edge and use ribbon to bind them behind a cover. Second we have more stars - this time buttons on the end of ribbons.

You can pull on the ribbons and the buttons stop them coming through the felt. Of course I had to include a counting page since apparently all Quiet Books have something like this.

Mine is very simple but the beads move on the ribbon and again it is secured behind with knots and hot glue. The only other page I've finished is this one with more velcro, but this time with flowers.

She can swap the flowers around and make her own in time. I think I got the little buttons at the handmade fair I went to a few months ago.

The other pages I still have a bit to do on are firstly this little house.

The cat was also procured in Korea - and of course I had to get cats into this book somewhere. I need to add a button door handle to the door. Then the fish need their googly eyes.

They can slide on the ribbons. And then there is this rather dismal (so far) looking maze.

A bead on a string goes from start to finish through a series of little felt tunnels (the dark blue rectangles). I couldn't go on with that one until I know how big my bead is going to be.

Seven pages in one day - not bad considering I seem to spend most of my day arranging who is taking which bit of furniture and when they can collect.