soft book

Good morning ladies.  I'm home from work ill today.  I've got a cold, but it is one hell of a cold, my entire face hurts... sympathy please!  I was too uncomfortable in bed so I thought I'd sit on the sofa and watch the Craftsy QuiltCon lectures... hmmm, not exactly exciting are they!

Onwards!  Remember this panel I bought?

One day a couple of weeks ago I was overcome with the NEED to make a soft book for my nephew, I have no idea where this urge came from but you have to listen to yourself when it comes to gratuitous shopping, don't you?  There was a surprising lack of book panels, but I finally found this one.

I picked out all the squares that had "what sound does the XXX make" and laid them out as if they were a book.  I then sewed them all together completely wrong as the pages that were supposed to be next to each other, I sewed together!  I could also have done with leaving myself a bit more room round the edges of the squares.

I cut squares of wadding and stuffed each page.  I knew I needed to quilt them to keep the wadding in place but clearly I hadn't thought this through - I should have quilted each page individually before sewing them together.  Ah well, I went with a simple zig zag around the edges of each central panel - or thereabouts as they didn't line up very well front-back!

I zigzagged the inner edge of each page to stop them fraying too badly, then all that remained was to sew some kind of spine on. 

No, I don't have a photo of the finished book.  Being Mrs Last-minute, I sewed the spine on at 10pm in our B&B room the day before Jacob's birthday!

Here, however, is a picture of the spine before I sewed the binding on.

And here is the book.  Jacob loves books, he immediately put this one in his mouth - that means it's a success in the eyes of a 1 year old, doesn't it?

Right, I'm going to see if Jeremy Kyle is on, clearly I'm not a real quilter as I'd rather watch trash TV that this stultifying video...