Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Books. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Andrea's Baby Board Book

My baby girl Andrea is into babies recently. She likes watching babies on TV... she likes looking at baby pictures... and she gets all giggly and happy when she sees one around. For the past few weeks, I collected all the birth announcements and first birthday invitations we have at the house and gave them to her to play with. It has become her evening ritual to grab the stack of photos and look at them before bed time. Since the cards and pictures were getting all wrinkled and torn... I decided to put them all in a book that's safe for Andrea to play with. So I made her a board book using cardboard and felt.

For this project I used:

1) a stack of baby pictures: birth announcements, invitations, pictures
2) 5 pieces of illustration board, cut into 6" x 6" squares.
3) 10 pieces of felt in different colors cut into approximately 7" x 7.5"
The felt has to be bigger than your cardboard for seam allowance and one side need to have a wider allowance.
4) Glue gun
5) sewing machine
6) thread
7) different pieces of trim/items you can use to decorate the pages.

The first step is to arrange the felt squares into how I wanted the colors arranged from cover page to the back page. Step 2... decorate each page.It's like scrap booking (which I'm not very good at). Here's the thing... the first few pages I made were nice... I had several ideas. But for the last pages.. I kinda ran out of ideas so I just glued the pictures and glued a few items... I will probably add more to those pages when I find time.  Make sure to put a wider allowance on one side... this is where each page will be glued to the other pages.

After each page is decorated... put 2 pieces of felt squares together and sew 3 sides together. Slip the cardboard on the open side and then sew shut. You should have 5 pieces of cardboard pages covered in felt. Using the glue gun, attach each page to each where the allowance is wider. Since some of the stuff I glued on some pages were bulky... I had to insert a thin strip of cardboard between each page.

Here's my finished book:


The cover :)

Page 1 and 2
On Page 1: A disc which my husband got when he opened up a busted hard drive from an old PC, turned into a 'mirror' flower with a butterfly applique.

On Page 2: A picture of Andrea with a felt flower which resembles the flower print on the blanket on the photo.

Page 3 and 4
On Page 3: One of the last pages I decorated... A cutout of a cat (yes, that is a cat!) which I free handed. I used plastic eyes and drew the mouth and whiskers.

On Page 4: A picture from cousin Skylar's birth announcement, decorated with felt hearts.

Page 5 and 6
On Page 5, a picture from a friend's daughter's baptism invitation. This is the part where I ran out of ideas... I just glued one flower-shaped button to give Andrea something to play with on this page. I plan to add more to this page soon.

On Page 6, a picture of cousin Rizal from his birth announcement card, decorated with polka dots which match part of the color scheme of the card.

Page 7 and 8
On Page 7, a picture of cousin Caleb on his first birthday invite. I glued 3 charms shaped like little boys.

On Page 8, 2 pockets sewn onto the felt each pocket contains a picture of Andrea as a little baby attached to cardboard and secured with ribbons glued to the inside of the pocket(so she can't pull them out), a felt caterpillar with plastic eyes, and a felt flower.
Here's a closer look at the photo inside the pocket... she was so small then! Only a few days old

Andrea loves playing with her new book and the pictures will last a little longer since they won't get wrinkled every time she grabs them.

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

100 Books

I saw this going around on Facebook. Not really sure where this came from but I found it interesting. So here's how I rate :)

-o-

Have you read more than six of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only six of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your Notes (told you got this in Facebook). Bold those books you've read in their entirety and italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!


  1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 
  2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
  3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
  4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
  6. The Bible
  7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
  8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
  9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (just the first book!)
  10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
  11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
  12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
  13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
  14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
  15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (watched the movie version...does that count?)
  16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
  17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
  18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
  19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
  20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
  21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 
  22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
  23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
  25. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  26. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
  27. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 
  28. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
  29. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
  30. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
  31. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I read the complete set when I was 12.)
  32. Emma - Jane Austen
  33. Persuasion - Jane Austen
  34. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (why is this separate from #31?)
  35. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
  36. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
  37. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
  38. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
  39. Animal Farm - George Orwell 
  40. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
  41. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  42. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
  43. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
  44. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 
  45. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 
  46. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
  47. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
  48. Atonement - Ian McEwan
  49. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
  50. Dune - Frank Herbert 
  51. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
  52. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
  53. Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
  54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
  55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
  57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
  58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
  59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 
  61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
  62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
  63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
  64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
  65. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
  66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
  67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
  68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (watched the movie version)
  69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
  70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
  72. Dracula - Bram Stoker 
  73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
  74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
  75. Ulysses - James Joyce
  76. The Inferno - Dante
  77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
  78. Germinal - Emile Zola
  79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 
  80. Possession - AS Byatt
  81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
  82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
  83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker (watched the movie version)
  84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
  85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
  86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
  87. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White 
  88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
  89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 
  90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
  91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
  92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
  93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
  94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
  95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
  96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
  97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
  98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
  99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
  100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
-o-

That's 20 out of 100 for me! Not bad... made me miss reading. I used to read a lot. Come to think of it, I used to do a lot of stuff. Used to. Oh well :)