Quiet Book Pages with Spray Paint {and a neighbor page exchange!}

A few years ago a neighbor friend asked if I wanted to participate in a quiet book page exchange. I had never heard of anyone doing this and I instantly loved the idea.

I love to create. I love to collaborate. I love to teach. I love kids.
It was the perfect project for me.

One of the other moms in our group went to Joanns and got a giant piece of white felt (using a coupon to help cut costs) and I volunteered to cut it in 8.5"x11" pages for everyone, then we distributed the appropriate number of pages to everyone. I think we had six people in the group and each person made duplicates of their own two pages for a total of twelve pages total, six copies of each page.

I liked to sew, but I wasn't crazy about sewing elaborate details over and over again since we were each making several duplicates. I also didn't want to glue my page pieces together because I was confident in my kids destructive abilities 😆 and knew if I invested the time and money into making it I wanted the pages to last.

I also didn't want to add extra cost purchasing several sheets of several different colors of felt for each page (in hindsight at about $0.50 a sheet this seems like a small expense, but at the time I guess I was feeling frugal 😄).

I had lots of spray paint on hand already from several various projects so I decided I was going to try spray-painting felt. I had never seen it done before and honestly, wasn't sure how it would turn out, but in the end, was really happy with the unique results!

Solar System Page

Space has always been one of my favorite subjects to teach. There's something really mysterious and exciting and intriguing about this vast, expansive world beyond ours that we know so much and still so little about. When I taught preschool and elementary I had a set of glow-in-the-dark planets that hung from the ceiling, and I always found a way to squeeze space into our curriculum, so when I contemplated what pages I wanted to make and exchange with our group it was easy to settle on a Solar System page.

How I made it: 

First I collected circular objects of various sizes from around the house - a water bottle lid, a milk lid, a mason jar lid, a plate for the sun, etc. Then I laid out all my circles on my white felt page where I wanted them. With my circles in place I sprayed the page with black spray paint followed by a few mists of white and glitter spray paint for star galaxies.

Next, using my collection of circular items I traced a bunch of circles on my extra white felt and cut them all out by hand. I sprayed all my duplicates, 6 Earths, 6 Jupiters, 6 Mars, etc. at the same time. I added velcro to the page and each piece, hand-wrote the name of each planet for emerging readers, and viola! Easy-peasy.

Shape Matching Page

The concept behind this page was similar to the solar system planet matching page, except instead of simply matching to the correct size circle I wanted to add in colors, shapes and shape names.  I noticed it was easy to practice common shapes like circles, squares, and triangles with my kids because they are easy to spot in our environment, but less popular shapes are trickier, so I was excited to incorporate a page with other shapes too - kind of like those wooden-shape-sorting block-boxes. 

How I Made it: 

First I cut all of my shapes out of cardstock then I laid them out on my white felt pages similar to how I did the solar system page. Then I simply sprayed the page gray with spray paint. 

Botta bing, botta boom! 

Next I cut my shapes out of felt, using my same cardstock pieces as my template for each shape. I double layered each one, stitched them together and added a smile and two buttons for a face. How fun would it be to make all different expressions on each shape?! Then I used whatever craft or kids paint I had on hand and a set of stamps I had for my preschoolers to stamp the name of each shape in a corresponding paint color. I messed up on the spelling on trapezoid and had to fix it by sewing a white trapezoid over the top of the mishap. But that was only 1/7, not too bad. 

 

Camping Pretend Play Page

Back in my sewing days (I sold my sewing machine, custom-made sewing cabinet that Colby made, and serger before our world travels) 😓I used to always shop the remnant fabrics. They're like 50% off and an additional 50% off that. They're small pieces of fabric, usually less than a yard, but since I usually didn't have projects in mind, I would just go browse and see what I fancied. It was like a treasure hunt for hidden gems! I think that's actually how I came up with this page design - I found the fabric and it made me think 'tent material' and it all exploded from there. 

How I Made it: 

I used my same cardstock overlay technique for spray-painting this page. I cut a page in half using an uneven zigzag and then laid it over the bottom half of my page, spraying the sunset sky first. With my "mountains" in place I placed my mini start stickers and then sprayed away with orange, pink, purple, whatever colors I had on hand that fit a sunset. It was fun! 

Then when that was dry I removed the star stickers and covered up the top half with the opposite zig-zag jigsaw piece and sprayed the bottom. From there it was just a matter of sewing my detail pieces - the tent, rocks, campfire, etc. There was a little person with a roasting stick and sleeping bag at one point that they kids loved to put in and out of the tent, but those have long since gotten lost. 

Buckle the Dog's Collar Page

Are all little kids obsessed with doing buckles, or is that just mine? As I thought through various skills I wanted to incorporate in my quiet book I settled easily on a buckle page. The dog was just a fitting afterthought. Feeling thrifty again I hunted through my house for a buckle I could use and found one on an old, dilapidated backpack I was ready to donate and repurpose anyway. 

How I Made it: 

I sprayed my page green first, using a letter D cutout to leave a silhouette of the letter behind. Then it was just a matter of cutting out all my dog pieces and sewing them together. I intentionally left my pup's tongue and ears flappy so he could give some slobbery kisses or bashfully hide his eyes and play peek a boo. 

Truthfully I wish I had thought of more skills or activities to incorporate with this page, but my kids definitely didn't care. They love to do the buckle time and time again and as my older two have gotten older I've celebrated that they're able to undo it themselves and don't beg for me to undo it every 2.5 seconds. 

Feed the Monkey Page

When Crew was a baby he had a little sock-monkey carseat toy that stretched and vibrated and I thought the thing was adorable. Maybe it inspired this feed-the-monkey-page, I don't remember? But I also loved the idea of feeding the monkey fruits and it brought back reminiscent memories of wild monkeys jumping on my kayak to steal our fruit as we rafted through mangrove forests in the ocean in Thailand so many years ago. 

How I Made it: 

Making this page was much like the making of the dog buckle page - I sprayed painted the page blue but instead of adhering a D to it I painted over a stencil of the letter M in pink to coordinate with the monkey's polka-dot shirt. I was sure to include a few more skills on this page than I had with the dog buckle page too. I cut out all my monkey pieces, sewed my zipper, pocket, and button holes for her shirt, then layered everything and sewed it in place. The fruits I included - an apple, an orange, and a banana, I made out of scrap pieces I had laying around. I put some velcro on her hand so she could hold them or they could be stored inside her mouth. All three gives her a nice big mouthful. 

Piggy Bank Page

This page is one of my favorites because it's so interactive, educational and you can shake up your change and hear it rattle inside just like a real piggy bank! 

How I Made it:

This was one of the few pages I left white. Making the pig was fairly simple, just a matter of cutting and stitching, with a button-hole for the coins and velcro on his underside to remove them. I added some of my trademark spray paint for a finishing touch and left his curly piggy tail loose for little fingers to twirl. 

I didn't make this apple-picking page with snaps on the back, but it's also one of our favorites. I had wanted to incorporate a page with snaps, but silly enough, was too intimidated by them to do it! I'm amazed we still have all five apples almost five years later. A neighbor friend made it and I had to include it in our roundup because it's SO dang cute.

To see more of the pages my neighbor friends made (minus the ones we lost in our latest move), plus a demo of my pages and tutorial for how I made them check out the YouTube video below:

https://youtu.be/ePfbJKiX0k4

If this post inspires you to make your own quiet book pages I would LOVE to see yours!!!
Please leave me a comment, send me a message with pictures or tag me if you post about it. It makes my heart happy to share with others.


xoxo,
Emily

PS - Looking for something else? Check out my Teachers Pay Teachers store with 70+ educational resources for parents and educators with hundreds of reviews, many of them FREE.

Becoming a Student (of life) Again & My Hardest Test Yet

This might be a new record for the last five years; I'm updating this blog TWICE in one year! The last time I wrote we were traveling full-time as a family - living in a new country each month, sometimes moving locations every two weeks and all five of us living out of four suitcases. It was a wild time in our lives, one that we look back on with so much fondness and nostalgia now. (Check out our videos here).

Just to recap, one year ago we left our home of five years in northern Utah, with our three little kids, ages barely five, three, and five and a half months. 

We flew to Florida where we said hello to some friends and spent a few days before settling into an Airbnb in Punta Leona, Costa Rica. After celebrating a sunny and very sandy Christmas we headed back to the runway and landed in LA for a few days. 

Then it was off to Hawaii for a month.  After celebrating Crew's fourth birthday and spending a month basking in aloha and cherishing ohana we skipped over the international dateline to time travel and flirt with Fiji for a month. It was our hardest month yet, but we fell fast in love with the people. 

Next, settling into beautiful New Zealand was like bobbing to the surface after a storm for a welcome breath of fresh air! Our hearts were won over instantly. We split our time on the north and south island and dream almost on the daily of one day relocating there. 

After New Zealand it was Australia (Melbourne and Brisbane) that made us feel at home. Our time there passed too quick before it was time for another long redeye flight to Taiwan. 

Colby and I were delighted to be back after 11 years since I lived there and he came to visit. The owners of the school I taught at were so gracious to host us for half of our month there and the other half of the month we stumbled through the culture and Chinese. 

The next month we were happy to be back on US soil on the big island of Hawaii and soaked up the sun after a few weeks of being sick in Taiwan before heading home to Utah for a happy reunion with my little brother, affectionally known as Uncle Jake, who was returning from serving a two-year mission in Mexico.

We planned to continue exploring the world, hopping country to country, carried by the wind and following wherever our hearts pulled us, Colby working remotely and all of us constantly adapting to a new home with eyes full of wonder, but God seemed to have other plans when I was diagnosed with breast cancer just a week after our return to Utah. 

I had felt a mass in my breast change and grow during our travels (especially after our brutal month in Fiji where we all got fifth disease and parasites) and getting it checked upon our return was one of my first items of business. Our world came crashing down as we faced the unexpected and learned that life goes on even after a cancer diagnosis.

So what next? The question we have asked ourselves time and time again and are still asking. We have learned a few things through our travels and my diagnosis though. Here are 7.

1) Faith over Fear. Fear = What IF thinking. Faith = EVEN if thinking. Whatever country we're in, whatever path we're walking, whatever obstacles we face we want to choose to face them with faith!

2) Power is in the Present! The only thing we really have power to change this the very moment we're in. We can heal the past and learn from it and we can create the future but we do it all by living in THIS present moment! So we don't need to know what we'll do in one month, or three months, or six months. We just need to know what we're going to do today.

3) Our bodies are miraculous with amazing potential. Our minds are powerful tools. We dishonor both when we allow destructive, critical, thoughts to control us. Instead, we can choose to love ourselves and heal from shame, grief, guilt and feelings of inadequacy. Loving ourselves will bring peace to our hearts and quicken healing.

4) Forgiveness is a gift to ourselves! Forgiveness is definitely a process and it's not something that can usually be achieved overnight, but even the desire to forgive will put us on the right path to actually forgiving.

5) Gratitude is transformative. Gratitude literally changes our brain and the way we think. It can heal our hearts and minds. Focus on the good in your life - are your eyes reading this for you right now? Is your heart pumping for you? Your lungs breathing? Do you have a roof over your head? Is your belly full? Is the sun shining? Do you have parents who love you? Children? A job? Talents? Friends? There is SO much to be grateful for!

6) Less is more. We lived out of 4 suitcases in small 2 bedroom rentals with just enough food in the fridge for our family. Living simply and intentionally showed us what we REALLY needed and helped eliminate the distraction of the things we didn't. We also found that the people we met who had the least seemed to be the happiest and the most generous.

7) God is in the Details. The more we look for evidence of his hand in our lives the more we see it. Seek and you shall find. God is still a God of miracles.

Writing is therapeutic and I do it for myself as much as I do it for anyone else. Truthfully I have no idea who will stumble across this blog, but I hope it can help whoever does in some way.

If you're interested in the latest updates find us on Instagram @lostbells or @tangledwithtinkering and read my more regular musings about my diagnosis and our travels on Medium or visit our website www.thelostbells.com.

Thank you for being here!!!

The Lost Bells - That one time when we left everything we loved to travel the world with our 3 little kids...

Holy Cow. Where does the time go!? This poor, sad, little neglected blog. Once upon a time I put so much love into you. Sorry little buddy.

If you are reading this THANK YOU for being here!!! I have loved being able to share my love and passion for teaching and creating through this little blog.

Since the last time I posted here we:

1) Had another baby!!! We love her to absolute pieces. She is a little miracle baby and her birth is SO near and dear to my heart.

If you want to watch her 3 minute birth story you can find it here. 

If you're interested in reading ALL the details, including the journey to conceive her and then the difficult decision to labor unmedicated again and some of the miracles along the way find that here.

2) Started a YouTube Channel for my cookie & cake decorating business hobby - See my artistic creative outlet come to life on my Instagram @tangledwithtinkering ...

...Or on my YouTube Channel - TangledwithTinkering

3) We went mentally insane decided to abandon the sweet sweet comforts of home to travel the world. Colby is still working full-time while we travel and I care for our three little ones, all under 6 years old.



The first stop on our adventure was Costa Rica where we spent all of December 2018 living. We celebrated a sunny, sandy Christmas there that we will never forget. Our 18" tree branch was bare but our hearts were SO full as we got to know some of the people in the community there and were able to provide a modest Christmas including food, clothes and a few toys for several families. See some pictures on our Instagram here.

Our second stop has been Oahu, Hawaii where we have spent the last month and where we were able to get a tiny glimpse into the lives of some of the homeless community here and make a small donation. We have loved it and are looking forward to heading to Fiji in just a few days.

Does it sound like a dream? Well the warmer weather and proximity to the ocean has been! But my goodness it is A lot of work and a huge challenge too. Sometimes living in paradise isn't always paradise and parenthood is never easy, wherever you go!

But challenges aside, we are determined to see the beauty and magic of the world hand-in-hand with gratitude in our heart, love for each other, and a resolve to see the good around us and strive to be the good as we go.



If you want to know more about who we are come follow along with our journey -- you can read more and find everything on our website www.thelostbells.com or look us up on Instagram @LostBells or on YouTube - The Lost 
Bells.