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.

Supplies Needed

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 I was happy with how my giraffe looked I cut it out and used it as a pattern piece. Using the pattern piece, I traced around it on yellow and cut out the body of my giraffe. I sewed down the giraffe onto some dark blue felt. I cut off the nose from my pattern piece and traced it onto some peach felt. I sewed this piece over the nose on my giraffe. To finish up my giraffe, I gave it two button eyes and then added some brown buttons to top off the horns.

2. Creating the Bow ties

The first time I made bow ties, I attempted to make them free hand. The results were passable. So I decided to remake them. This time around, I searched Pinterest for bow tie coloring pages. (And I was surprised to find there were a bunch of them!).

I like this one the best:

(You can find this and other coloring pages at Pasticke Family Portals)

To get the right size, I printed a copy at full size and then I recopied it at 75% of the actual size. I then used one as a pattern piece and cut out bow ties in three different colors. (I went with red, blue and green.) I cut out two pieces of each color and used a simple stitch to sew them together.

I then cut a slit horizontally across the middle of the bow ties. This way they can buttoned on and off the giraffe.

After I had the bow ties finished, I moved on to making a space for them on the giraffe. I copied the original page idea and added three different color strips across the giraffes neck. (! red strip, 1 blue strip and 1 green strip).

I decided to use heart buttons for my main buttons because I had three of them in my button bag. (And because I love hearts and was dying to use them!)