design

When it's the height of tax season in the United States, that means my hubby is swamped with work. A great time for me to slip out of state to visit someone! 

This year, I went down to North Carolina to stay with my sister and her family for a week. She had a baby last year, and I must say, my niece is more adorable every time I see her.

Usually, when my sister and I get together, we bake something that's nearly impossible to pull off on one's own. This time, though, we worked on a sewing project instead. (I know, me--sewing...) I want something for the plane ride home from China and have been thinking about making a quiet book ever since Carissa the librarian made one a couple of years ago. So armed with Pinterest, some ideas of what we wanted to include and a bit of brainstorming for the cover, we set out to get started*.

After a trip to the store for things we didn't have on hand, we started measuring and cutting. And more measuring. And more cutting. In general, we found that most quiet books are about 10x10, with the cover a little bigger to accommodate binding and fatness. Because our pages are not strictly felt, we needed something to stabilize and got Pellon Peletex (#926).

We used the cover plans found at still:living, adapting a bit to fit our resources. How pages fit into the books varied greatly, but we decided the cover is so much work that we want to be able to easily interchange pages, so went with grommets and ring binders.

Baby tested!

I'll do a separate post with all my pages, but here's a sneak peek of the first page I got done once home:

*With a 7 month old in the house, we knew there wasn't enough time to finish the whole book during my trip.