Quiet Book - Matching Shapes

I thought this would be a great time to introduce my new project. For O's second birthday I'm making him a quiet book or like some people call it, a busy book. I've been looking around online a lot and there's a lot of info and inspiration around.  I've never made anything like this before but I'm pretty crafty so I'm not too worried. Plus I've managed to accumulate an impressive amount of materials. Ebay is excellent :)

I've been working on several pages simultaneously while waiting for certain materials to arrive, but yesterday I managed to finish the first page. I'm not a great planner. Well, actually I love the idea of planning but I'm not that good at following a plan I've come up with. So, at the moment I'm just working on pages as they come to me (inspiration wise). I have no idea how many pages I'm going to end up with. And since there is no set plan I also don't know in what order they will be in the book. So, I've decided to work on the pages first and worry about order and finishing off later.

This is the first page I've pretty much completed. At the moment it still needs some large beads to stop the rope from sliding out of the eyelets, but other than that it's finished.

I knew I wanted to make a shape match up page but I didn't want it to be completely plain. I couldn't really use a patterned backing as I didn't want the shapes to get lost in the background. As a compromise, I left the calico plain and dressed up my shapes a bit. As monsters. I think they came out really cute.

I think the one thing that i should have thought about before hand was how fidgety they were going to be. I managed to squash one of the eyes on the triangle with my sewing machine.

I decided to use resign snaps for this page, but I'm regretting that a bit now. Some of them are really easy to snap into place but, for instance, the triangle, is much harder and I really doubt O's small hands are ging to be overly careful while handling it and it might tear...eeek. Let's hope it doesnt.

The reason I have some random fabric running at the bottom is so the eyelets would have some backing. It also feels nice. It's a fabric swatch from upholstery.

I've never worked with eyelets before and I was rather intimidated at first but after a few Youtube videos I was setting them like an old pro. The noise of my hammering the eyelets in didn't bother O. one bit and it was much easier than I thought it was going to be.  I'm glad I ordered them as playing around with button holes would have been just plain annoying and time consuming.

Hardest part: Deciding what to sew on first and planning. I managed to set a few snaps wrong before I noticed and it was just a waste of snaps, fabric and my time. Also, O. isn't exactly thrilled that I'm doing something without him so I had to sew standing up in my kitchen. I did bribe O. with some yogurt but all he did was dunk his truck in it and leave nice yogurt tracks on my kitchen floor.

Best part: Snaps and eyelets. I like setting them. The snaps are really pretty and colorful and the eyelets look fantastic.

I learned a lot with this first page. Plan, plan plan, don't just try to wing it. Also, the internet is so good for all sorts of patterns. If in doubt use it. There are so many excellent blogs willing to share cute quiet book patterns out there. I will be referencing a few as I keep introducing my pages.

Experimental gardening

Ever since I was a little girl I've watched my grandmothers and even my mom garden. They love it. I didn't! Weeding was a chore and picking berries a torture. Now I wonder what has changed? Is it the fact that I'm finally living in a house with a garden or are my nesting instincts taking over?

When we moved to this current rental property the first thing I noticed was the greenhouse. I knew immediately that I'd like to grow tomatoes, however, it was late August and realistically way too late for any sort of produce. As the new year came around so did a notion that we'd be moving back to my home country. So we didn't really think about prepping our garden and the greenhouse. When we decided to stay another year it was way past the time to propagate tomato plants. Luckily a nice lady in the village sold me some tomato, aubergine and pepper plants.

The first problem I encountered was the inhabitable soil in the greenhouse. It was completely dead, not a weed in sight. That didn't deter me of course. I dug the ground up... several times. We could have ordered some new soil for the greenhouse but that was a bit too expensive. So instead I decided to experiment.

At first I wanted to use tomato grow bags but a friend suggested digging holes in the dirt and filling them with new soil, like pots. I thought why not. I had plenty of plants to spare. So some of my plants went into the dirt in the greenhouse and a few of them are growing in bags and two are currently in my DIY hanging planters growing upside down. One of them is looking rather dead, but I haven't lost hope just yet.

I've rescued my sad looking windowsill thyme and hopefully it will flourish outside

O. loves to help water the plants

I guess my main objective is to find out if I can garden. I've never had much success but that doesn't mean that I'm nto having fun. I'm hoping that by the end of summer I will have lots of tomatoes to can and eat. Fresh, home grown produce is the best.