A Momentous Occasion

I finished Parker's church quiet book!  (Finally!)  It all started about a year and a half ago.  I had been toying with the idea of making a gospel-themed quiet book, but couldn't commit to such a big project.  Then, after watching the October General Conference, I decided that I would go for it.  It seems that everyone is touched by the messages of Conference in a different way; the major themes are so personal and varied.  For me, what stood out was that we need to be teaching our children the principles of the gospel at home and at an early age.  In the world we live in it's not enough to have their only exposure to Jesus Christ on Sundays at church.  I thought that a quiet book would be a fun, interactive way to teach Parker the gospel at home and on his level. But making a quiet book is a huge undertaking and so I decided to do a co-op.  Not only would this ease the burden (financially, creatively, time-wise, etc.), but it would also be a great way to make friends and get to know people in our new ward.  (We had moved in just a few months prior.)  So I sent out an email describing my plan and got a great response.  Each girl would make multiple copies of a single page and then we would all exchange pages to get a complete book.  I was so pleased with the results.  I think every girl could agree that it was a lot of work and we were thrilled when we were finally done.

But the funny thing was, we weren't done.  We still had to bind the book.  This is where things really slowed down for me.  So instead of having a church quiet book, Parker played with fraying church quiet pages.  I loved each page the other girls made, but there were some things I wanted to add to make it a little more cohesive.  Not only that, but I had no idea how to bind a book and because it was something so new and foreign to me, I just put it off.  I knew that I wanted to have a zippered book so that the pieces wouldn't fall out, but I'd never before installed a zipper.  That is, until a few months ago when I made throw pillows for our couch that have invisible zippers.  I found out that it's not that hard!  Also, instead of eyelets I originally wanted to make button holes for the rings to go through, but I had never made button holes.  For two days I practiced and practiced doing button holes with my sewing machine, but they never turned out right.  The tension was off and sometimes the machine didn't finish off the circle of stitches.  I troubleshooted until I was blue in the face and then decided that I'd just use eyelets.  Anyway, without further ado, I present to you, The Church Quiet Book:

I made this page after the fact, so that I'd have an even number of pages.  I love the way Moses turned out.  He's snapped onto the outside and can snap his way across the dry ground on the inside.  The sea creatures (from Etsy) are velcroed on and can be moved around.

I worked a lot on this page.  We were supposed to leave a half inch border all the way around our pages for binding purposes, but the girl who made this page didn't.  I ended up taking it apart, cutting back the felt, and re-sewing it on.  I embroidered the words onto the page and I also put vinyl on the inside of the water so that the fish slide out easier.

 
I embroidered the words onto this page.

Originally this shoe was on a page that said, "Tie The Shoe" written in marker.  I wanted to make it more church-themed and look a little nicer, so I put it on a new page and added the glove and the iron-on words.

I added the embroidered words to this page.  Originally there was an assortment of small plastic animals and finger puppets inside the ark.  I thought it would be fun to have animal pairs, so I ordered these from Etsy and added a few gender-specific details.

This is the page I made for everyone.  I tried a million and one different adhesives to make the vinyl stick to the felt and ultimately found that a very thick layer of hot glue was the only thing that worked.  After seeing the other pages, I decided that mine would benefit by being a little more interactive, so I added the fishes after the fact.

I added the embroidered words to this page.

And here's how it's all held together.  I really wanted rings so that I could add more pages in the future if I wanted to, but let's be honest, that's never going to happen.  I'm so glad to have this thing done and not continuously on my to-do list.

As this project stretched on and on, I kept kicking myself for spending so much time on it.  I mean, it's meant for children and is probably going to get thrashed, right?  In fact, a couple weeks ago Kate spit up all over the Peter Fishing page.  She had just eaten some squash and there were orange chunks all over it.  Gross. The point is to teach the gospel and certainly Parker won't care about some of the details I added.  Oh well.  I hope that it can withstand the use of lots of children and that hopefully they can learn from it.