Up-cycled Clothes Quiet Book

After seeing this "Close Your Clothes" quiet book by Anna of Forty-Two Roads, I knew I had to feed my quiet book obsession and make one. Ok, two of them! This is my version, sans poem, and with a little Aussie flavour.

I made one book for Tahlia and one for my niece Vashti for this last Christmas. They are very similar but a little different in places, so I tried to put the related pages next to each other in the photos, although they are not in the same order in both books due to the page colours clashing.

I thought that a belt would be great for the cover as we could use it to keep the books shut.

These pages feature a bow tie that clips together at the back of the collar. You can lift the collar to put it on and then fold it back down once the tie has been clipped together.

These page features the all popular netball skirt. Netball is very popular in country areas of Australia. Netball skirts are wrap around skirts and are adjustable to to your particular waist size because they fasten using a rail belt slider and adjuster. I never knew what they were called until I started writing this post and had to find out!

These pages feature overall clips/buckles. They are not as common as they were in the Eighties lol

These pages feature press studs. The other activity for these pages is pulling the arms and legs inside out so they fit inside the book for storage (see below).

There are hidden bras behind the tops. One bra has a front clasp and the other has padding which can be rather easily removed and put back in.

The baby jumpsuit is located here so that the baby would have ready access to breastmilk :)

The center pages feature a button-up dress or skirt and hat clips.

These pages feature hook and eye closures. I guess this is not the book I will be taking along to church hahaha... lingerie might be better suited to the car or home!

These pages feature zips. I made sure to have them unsecured at the bottom so the girls could learn to thread the zip themselves.

These pages feature Chinese knot buttons. I think they turned out quite pretty.

The last pages feature lacing. One of the books received a bonus belt clip too. I did find it a little difficult finding two of everything I wanted to included, so the two books do vary slightly, but I think they are comparably exciting overall.


I bound the books using the Skinny version of How to Make Cloth Books described by Deborah from Cloth Books for Baby. It worked OK, but I think the bulkiness of my pages made it difficult. The method is better suited to pages without so much going on around the borders.

Follow Faith and Felt Obsession on Facebook, Pinterest and You Tube

Which is your favourite page in these books?

Chicken in a Manger - Two Versions

Reuse the manger at your church during the rest of the year with this creative idea...

I took Tahlia to Bible class at a church in Melbourne, and she absolutely loved one of the play activities they had for the littlies. They had put some stuffed chickens in the manger and they were sitting on blown eggs. There were empty egg cartons so they could go egg collecting! She loved it so much, I had to come home and make something similar.

When I told my friend about the plan, she hunted the net and found a pattern for a stuffed chicken that lays eggs. With the temptation of even more ways to play, she convinced me to make that version rather than the very simple version I had shown her photos of.

I would like to show you both versions!

Easy No-Sew Chicken 

This chicken is very basic, but still such wonderful fun! It consists of three main pieces of felt hot glued together, plus the wings, comb and wattle. You can hot glue them on too. Just use a colouring page of a large chicken like this one and use it as a template to cut out your pieces. You may have to print it out a couple of times to get all the pieces.

Here is a diagram showing the names of the various chicken parts:

Image Source

Depending on the colouring page you choose, glue the two side pieces together to about an inch under the wattle, and a couple of inches down the tail. Perhaps on the one I suggested, you might want to only glue to the edge of the wattle and the tip of the tail.

Once it is dry, spread the sides out and sit it on a piece of paper so you can tip it back and forth and mark some beginning, end and middle points so you can draw a rough eye/segment shape on a piece of paper for the bottom section. It may help to stuff the unfinished chook first to get a more accurate shape. When you are happy with it, cut it out of felt and hot glue it to the bottom edges, leaving room so you can stuff it if you haven't already. Then complete the gluing.

Wait until it is stuffed to glue on the wings so you get a better idea of where they look good. You can glue on the wattle and comb now too, and add eyes if you like. Or you could just draw or paint them on instead.

Collecting the eggs was tonnes of fun!!

Here is a YouTube demo of how to blow eggs out of their shells so you can use them for collecting:

Egg-Laying Chicken:

The pattern is available to purchase from ikatbag. Here are a couple of her photos:

Her pattern comes with a pattern for a chick too!

The pattern recommends you use knit material. I made mine out of felt, and am regretting it. It is started to pill immediately. And as you may already know, I like to double my felt whenever it is not attached to anything else, such as the collar and tail.  Because of that it was rather difficult to sew some sections together, particularly where the the tail joins the body. I did get a little confused with the egg channel - don't try the more difficult sections late at night when you really just need to go to bed! Go to bed!!!

I used a cardboard glad wrap tube to fill the egg channel while I stuffed the chicken so it would leave enough room for the eggs to fit through.

My friend who convinced me to make this version made the orange one...

Why not add a duck in there too!

I made 'hay' by ripping up some calico off cuts into strips. I think it would have made it easier for the chicken to sit on the eggs better if I had made some more.

I bought some rubber bouncing eggs after Easter - they bounce unevenly and are hard to catch. They look very realistic until you touch them.

Relating Chickens In Church...

• Which came first, the chicken or the egg?? We know the answer to that one as God made everything mature in the Garden of Eden.
• Jesus said He wanted to gather the Israelite's under His wings like a mother hen, but alas they were unwilling. See Matthew 23 and Luke 13.
• Ask, Seek, Knock!  “Is there any father here who, if his son asked him for a fish, would instead of a fish give him a snake? Or if he asked for an egg would give him a scorpion? So if you, even though you are bad, know how to give your children gifts that are good, how much more will the Father keep giving the Holy Spirit from heaven to those who keep asking him!” Luke 11:11-13.

"Bok!"

Follow Faith and Felt Obsession on Facebook, Pinterest and You Tube

Can you think of any other ways you can use a manger during the year?