Stuckey Rhymes with Cookie: Quiet Book

So, I had all this felt that I had started accumulating because of little projects I was seeing on the web.

And then I saw this Mr. Potato Head Quiet Book page on Pinterest...

And I thought, "Hey! I could try that!" I figured, it didn't need to be done that well. I mean, Aubrey's not gonna judge me, right? ;) So I set out to do this one page.

So I cut out some pieces, and started hand stitching them...and as I slowly plodded along, I figured it'd be much more efficient if I used a sewing machine. Only, I don't own a sewing machine. Also, I hadn't used a sewing machine since middle school. When I made an apron, a pillow, and sweatshirt...with lots of supervision and trepidation. Trepidation because I will never forget the teacher telling us horror stories about people accidentally piercing their fingers, through the finger nail (at least that's the way I remember it) with sewing needles. Those anxious ones of us don't need help thinking of the worst case scenarios, thank you very much. Also, our teaching aide had really awful breath. But, I digress.

I called my friend, Lisa, and asked to borrow her sewing machine. In the past, oh, 15 years or so that I've asked to borrow Lisa's sewing machine, she always ends up just doing the sewing for me. Yeah, I'm that competent.

This time, she was tied up with a sick child. Lucky for me, she had the machine already threaded, so I could get started. I was definitely not making it perfect, but that was not my goal. I had that Ikea effect thing going on. I was just happy that it was coming together.

After one page (well two actually - the potato and the pocket to hold the pieces), I decided to try another...The barn with finger puppets. I mean, it's so cute!

But forget the horse. That horse-face looked too involved. :P

At this point, I was less intimidated.

Lisa had to come back to re-thread the machine a couple of times for me since I borrowed the machine. Finally, now that I'm done with it, I can finally thread the bobbin and machine. Yesterday, there was a needle lost to the zipper...but that was easily replaced.

(See that nice red strip above the ladybug? Yeah, the professional here accidentally sewed the ladybug to a piece of felt I must have cut a piece off of. I didn't realize it was shorter than the rest until today when I was sewing the pages together...I added the red strip made it long enough. Much easier than taking off the ladybug and reattaching it). :P

My favorite piece? The owl I added to the apple tree page. There was no template, I just cut out some felt and stitched it together. Because, that apple tree needed something cute. :)

Today, my day off of work (Happy President's Day!) was spent finishing the sewing. I just have to get the rings to put them all together and it'll be done.

What took the longest, or so it seemed, was the title page. It was an after thought and I didn't want to go to the store for anything. I just ended up printing off what I wanted and cutting out the letters, then hand stitching them.