Activity Book: B is for Button

All right here we are again with the next page in my Activity book! This time I went with the letter B and decided it was time for a page to help with fine motor skills. So I went with a B is for Button theme. 

Originally I inspired by this page here:

(Photo Credit: The Montoya Family)

And I thought it would be nice to put button holes in the shapes and have them button into place. That way shapes could be learned and matched up. My downfall was that I've grown weary of always sealing up my edges with a blanket stitch, so I tried to sew the sides together and then flip it right side out and slip stitch the rest together. I ended up with some wonky looking shapes. And only my heart ended up looking like it should have.

So I went back to Pinterest and began looking at various quiet books. Eventually I found this page right here:

(Photo Credit: MjsFeltCreations)

I thought it was really charming and an interesting way to use buttons without being a literal button page. And I knew instantly this is what I wanted my button page to look like.

Here's What You Need:

• Assorted Buttons
• Yellow Felt
• Brown Felt
• Peach or White Felt
• Large Piece of Blue Felt (or whatever color you want your background to be)
• Green Red and Blue felt
• Needle and Embroidery Thread
• Scrap Paper

Here's How You Do It:

1. Create The Giraffe

I'm sure you can find giraffe patterns if you search Pinterest, but I decided to free hand a pattern using a plain piece of paper. Here's roughly what I came up with:

Once you have your pattern, use it to create a giraffe out of yellow felt. And sew that down onto your blue felt. Cut out some brown felt spots and sew those down. Cut out a peach felt nose and sew that onto the giraffe. Using brown embroidery thred, backstitch on some nostrils and a mouth. You can either embroidery on the eyes or I used some small white buttons (small black buttons would also work if you've got them). Then  add some small brown buttons on top of the horns.

2. Creating the Bow ties.

Using your red, green and blue felt (or whatever three colors you like) create strips as long as your giraffe's neck and about 1/2 to 3/4 inch wide. Sew those down onto your giraffe's neck. Sew down a button into the center of each strip.

It'll look something like this:

To make the bowties you can once again either find a pattern on Pinterest and then size it to the side you need or you can use part of your scrap paper to make your own pattern. Overall it should be slightly larger than the strips you made that cover the giraffe's neck. Once you have your pattern cut out two pieces in the each color. Sew the two color pieces together using either a blanket stitch or just sewing around the edges. Cut a line slightly larger than your button down the middle of your bowties lengthwise (I did mine down the width and now my bowties are really flimsy). Once again stitch up your new edges either using a blanket stitch or a running stitch.

3. Finishing Touches.

Now that everything is in place for your giraffe, its time for some finishing touches. First step is to cut out a letter B out of some scrap fabric and sew that down onto the page. Next is to backstitch on the words 'is for Button'.

Here's What The Finished Product Looks Like: