we just arrived home from a 12 hour drive home (and the same drive going there a few days before that, but split into two slightly smaller stretches) and i have to confess to you that i pushed myself to get a number of “quick & easy” pages done before our trip so that i could do some field testing, so i now have a stash of pages to pull out for posts for the next few weeks. of them, my favorite (and one of the ones he spent at least a little bit of time playing with*) was this “hide + seek” page. i got the idea, via pinterest, from the blog, “little hands, big work” but altered her design by creating only one row of buttons and scalloping the edge of the felt before cutting it into fringe (straight rows of felt in these colors looked too much like a flag). the page concept here is that there are two identical copies of each button. one of the pair is up at the top and the other is hiding in the fringe/fur below.
i wasn’t sure if this page was going to be too easy, but it took him awhile to find all the monsters and we had some nice discussions about matching and colors and same/different. plus, i think it’s a great use for these awesome “super freak” buttons my mom gave me for christmas (such a smart woman to buy me two sets!). i actually left out two of the buttons because i ran out of room. i will note that the package says in large letters, “not a toy! choking hazard!” and i’ll vouch for that because one of the first things he tried to do was pull the buttons off the page and the front half of the button detached from the back half (it’s how they’re constructed to have two colors…). if he tries it again, i may apply some super glue, but for now, he’s figured out the whole peek-a-boo aspect and he seems to enjoy it. you might want to choose less dangerous buttons for your book if you do this page.
i won’t include a pattern for this page unless someone requests it. i will say that sewing on ten buttons does take some time as does cutting the fringe, but it went faster than i’d thought it might and was easy to do while watching a movie (the new muppet movie!).
by the way, someone asked a question in the comments section last time about how i made the two-page spread for the three little pigs. i threw together a reply in the comments to answer that, but if anyone is still a bit befuddled, leave a comment there or here and i’ll put together a post about it with pictures to explain more clearly.
oh, and i didn’t bind my pages into a book for this trip (there simply wasn’t time!) but i am pondering a whole new binding style that i think will work well. i’ll wait until i’ve done more field testing before i share it with you, but i’m excited to try it out!
*my expectations about how long he would interact with each page were perhaps a bit generous originally. he played with this one for maybe 10 minutes today? and that was longer than some of the other pages. field testing is good.
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