Friday 5 October 2012

Quiet Book: Frog

As I mentioned previously, I recently made an animal quiet book for Little J to practice sewing curves, use up scraps and give him another toy with texture.

The Frog is another one of my favorite pages in the book:
The frog is on purple because the next page is the purple cat.

The frog is made from an old green, cashmere glove that I mended so many times I finally replaced it. It's very soft.

The steps for the frog were:
1 cut shape of the body and legs out of felt
2 sew green material to the underside of the felt (again, I top stitched on the felt)
3 sew on bead dots (I picked 5 beads that each had a different number of sides to keep things interesting)
4 sew on felt feet. Here I made the stitches where I wanted them for the webbing and then cut out the middle bits. I'm not happy with the color green I picked for the feet, but they do match the beads for the toes
5 sew on toe beads
6 sew on eye beads
7 sew on leg felt and mouth felt, which can also cover any sewing mishaps.

The frog is one of Little J's favorite pages!

Given the number of beads, you may not want to let a young child play with a book like this unattended.



3 comments:

  1. These are gorgeous! You are so talented! Did you hand sew all that down? or is it done by machine. (It looks like handstitching, but it's so even!)

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  2. Wow, thank you so much!

    The openings by the main color were sewn by machine (I laid the main color under the purple felt and sewed onto the felt). The feet were also done by machine (step 4). I sewed where I wanted the stitches and then cut away what I didn't want.

    The other bits were all sewn on by hand. Felt is really nice to work with and if you back your needle out before you've pulled it all the way through, it often doesn't show a hole. I found that the legs looked poofier when I sewed perpendicular to the cuts than along the cuts. I think with the horse, which I haven't posted about, I sewed the other way and his legs aren't as poofy. -Jessica

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    Replies
    1. I see! It's really great work! I'm looking forward to seeing the other pieces. Your kids will treasure these!

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