Inspiration on Monday: Quiet Book

Inspiration on Monday is a two weekly link up hosted by Trish and encouraging us to share all things inspiring and creative! So far for this link up I've posted about things I'd like to make and ways to inspire yourself but not about anything I actually am making. Time to change that! 

Sam's birthday is coming up at the weekend (as is mine since it's on the same day. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to not spending my birthday in labour this year!) and I'm making him some name blocks in an 'I've been making them for six months, they will get done probably the night before' kind of way. I'm not posting about that today. Ben's birthday is in October. Obviously in my head this makes it perfectly logical for me to be making a Quiet Book for him! I'm really excited about both these things but I wanted to share the blocks once they're actually done whereas the quiet book I don't mind sharing while it's in progress!

So far I've made two pages and am in the middle of a third. The first (and my current favourite) is from a template I found online and which you can also get hold of here. You will notice that her sewing is much straighter than mine and her finger puppets not only have eyes but she also has a duck. Eventually mine will have eyes and I will make a duck. Good things come to those who wait. Also all my sewing is done by hand, whereas all hers was done by machine. I am still afraid of my machine. 

With the doors shut...

Ta-dah!

The animals are finger puppets and the idea is that the kid/s can use the sunny grass page to play with the animals.They're also pretty cute and super simple to make. 

My second page was from a template from the same blog and is designed to help little ones with their buttoning practice. The pot has an open top so you can store the flowers in there once they're off. 

The colours are much better in real life, this is literally the worst photo I've ever taken I think. If anyone has any inspiring photography tips they'd like to share I'd love to hear them! The template for this page is here. 

The third page which is currently in progress is pretty cool and is for colour matching. Ben's just getting to the point where occassionally he'll point out colours to me or pass me something and tell me what colour it is. He seems to be picking stuff up really well without me actively 'teaching' him anything so I'm trying to keep up the pattern of incorporating things into play and helping him learn that way. 

As you'll see there are two balloons, each with a little velcro dot on them. There will be three or four other colours and each balloon will be attached to the elephant with a little ribbon string. Also the elephant is going to have an ear and an eye eventually. I really love this page. There isn't a template for it (I made my own) but the idea was entirely borrowed from this site.

Because I have a huge box of felt from when I was running my (currently on hiatus) craft business making kids toys I have a few more pages planned to use it up. As always Pinterest is so overly inspiring that I'm pretty sure I'll be making Sam one for Christmas as well!

The other pages I plan on adding (in case you're interested) are:

The ladybug page from Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows

The car page from Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows

The Mr & Mrs Potato Head page from Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows

The sock matching page from Imagine Our Life

The alphabet page from And Next Comes L

Possibly a shape matching page like this one

Possibly the fishing page from Pops and Podge

Aaaaand possibly this amaznig counting Hungry Caterpillar page from Imagine Our Life

My favourite thing about this project is that felt is so easy to work with and because I'm hand sewing the whole thing I can just sit down and get it done. I've not even been working on it a week yet and I've already achieved so much, I'm pretty proud of myself! 

What are you working on at the moment? Have you ever made a quiet book? 

#yearofmaking: January roundup

I want to blog about my #yearofmaking project, because honestly so far it's been so much fun and I feel like I've achieved a lot more than I expected to. I didn't want to blog too often about it though as that's really not the focal point of the blog, so I figured a monthly roundup of what I've made that month would do!

As you can imagine I've been massively utilising Pinterest so far this year, and have a 'Stuff I Want to Make' and a 'Things to Make For Kids' board. If you're interested in following along with my daily makes as they happen (because, you know, they're hot news and if you wait a month they might be less exciting or something) I'm armchairbythesea.

So, January!

Basically, you can't see any of my pictures because I can't work out if there's a way to get them back off Instagram, so you'll just have to take my word for it that I've posted something each day! Not everything has been a finished work, and in fact at the time of writing there are three projects where the knitting is finished by the lining still terrifies me and so is sitting inside the knitted pieces, all nicely cut out, waiting for the sewing fairy to come and finish off.

I did finish some things this month, which include:

* Gluten and dairy free chocolate cake for Sam's baptism, modified from the Hummingbird Bakery Home Sweet Home book. (It was yummy but we ended up having to buy a cake to take to the actual baptism because it turned out more like chocolate pudding. Ah well)

*The title page of my One Little Word journal

* A sketch of Moomin in preparation for painting a couple of bookcases for the boys bedroom and playroom in the new house!

* A wooden spoon puppet superhero lady

* My very own homemade fabric conditioner! It's awesome and smells gorgeous but I think next time I'll go for the other recipe I found because it doesn't require me buying two bottles of conditioner and thus might actually be cheaper than buying it! If you're interested, the recipe I used is thus: get a big empty container, pour in 5 cups of hot water, 3 cups of white vinegar and 2 cups of standard hair conditioner. Shake (a lot) until mixed. Use.

* Yummy yummy yummy clementine marmalade because the farm shop were selling huge bags of clementines for 50p. Did I mention it's yummy?

* A pair of handwarmers as part of my Chase Your Dreams swap parcel, organised by the lovely Mia

* Pasta with tomato and baked ricotta from a Jamie Oliver recipe.

* A couple of lavender bags (of the many I'm making for the new house!)

* Fudge!

* The front cover for my Gratitude Journal

* A literary inspired card

* Chicken Korma, from the Rick Stein India book that Charlotte got me for my birthday. Yum.

The unlined projects are: a bag to house all of Sam's many thousands of bibs which I never remember to use because they're always in the drawer in the bedroom and I'm always not, a basket to house my current works in progress and stop them annoying the hell out of Rhys, and a draught excluder for the back door of the new house which hopefully we will be moving into as you read this! I'm writing a few days ahead of time so there's always the possibility that I'll have finished up a few lavendar bags before the month is over as well!

Still, way more than I thought I'd achieved! I'm finding this project so motivating - some days I make more than one thing. Today for example, I cut out letter for a door sign for Sam's new room, made pizza from scratch with Benji, finished knitting the draught excluder and started on the lavender bags. Other days I have to push myself to make something (these tend to be the days where whatever we have for dinner features!), but I always feel better at the end of the day for having reminded myself to make something. Creation is just empowering I guess!