Blue Busy Book With QR Codes

With Christmas approaching, I was wondering what I could make for my little niblings (niece and nephew) and with these busy books becoming increasingly more popular I thought they might find something like this under the tree interesting. The books are not too difficult to make but are quite time consuming. The pink one took about 35 hours to make and the blue one about 22 hours. I’m not a professional by any means, so please excuse me if I used bad terminology 🙂

Materials And Tools

Materials:

12 A4 foam sheets
lots of felt sheets in different colours
12 pieces of fabrics at least 20cm x 20cm + extra for binding
threads in different colours
button
Thomas & Friends make-a-scene
finger puppets
Velcro hook and loop
eyelets
ribbons 3mm and 25mm wide
plastic joint for dolls
transparent plastic sheet

Tools:

scissors
paper binder clips
needle
hot glue gun
eyelet pliers
sewing machine
wire cutters

Template Download

Blue Book Page 1

Print out the template. Cut out 12 20cm x 20cm foam sheet squares, these will be the backing for each page. Glue the fabrics of your choosing to each page with hot glue (leave the edges glue free for easier sewing).

Cut out all of the pieces for minion (template page 1). Cut out the letters for the name from a felt of your chosen colour and glue them to the top of the page at least 1cm from the top. Glue the minion under the letters and stitch around the dungarees with an orange thread.

Use the hot glue sparingly as it might become difficult to sew through it later. Use the button hole stitch around the letters to make them stand out. Sew on a button.

Blue Book Page 2-3

Glue the foam squares onto the back of Thomas & Friends make-a-scene and cut out.

Blue Book Page 4-5

Cut out the pieces for the three little pigs (template page 2) and glue them onto pages 4 and 5. Glue the velcro hooks onto the finger puppets and velcro loops onto the pages.

Blue Book Page 6

Cut out the clock pieces (template page 3). Connect the clock arms and the clock circle with the plastic doll joint and cut off the leftover of the joint with wire cutters. Glue the clock housing and the circle onto the page. Paste the numbers onto the smaller circles. Glue the velcro hooks onto the number circles and the bird and the velcro loops onto the clock.

Blue Book Page 7

Cut out the shoe pieces (template pages 4-5). Take the top part of the shoes and attach the eyelets. Glue the shoes onto the page and insert ribbon shoelaces.

Blue Book Page 8-9

Cut out the letters and circles (template pages 1-6) and glue them together. Attach the velcro hooks onto the circles and the velcro loops onto the page.

My nephew lives in Slovakia and in our language we very rarely use Q and W, thus I decided not to include them.

Blue Book Page 10-11

Cut out the pieces for Red riding hood (template page 1). Cut out the grass and a piece of brown felt for the floor. Glue on all of the pieces. Attach the velcro hooks onto the finger puppets and the velcro loops onto the pages.

Blue Book Page 12

Cut out the pizza pieces (template pages 4-5). Back stitch the white circle so that you divide it into 8 pieces. Glue on the numbers and attach the circle onto the page. Glue the three pizza circles together and attach the little circles to the top. Cut into 8 pieces. Glue the velcro hoops onto the pizza pieces and velcro loops onto the white circle.

Blue Book Hemming

Glue the pages together (1 and 2, 3 and 4, 5 and 6 . . . . ) with hot glue leaving at least 1cm glue free around the edges for easier sewing. Hand stitch on the wider ribbon around the edges of each page. Machine sew the hems and remove the hand stitched thread.

Blue Book Binding

Take 5 pieces of the wider ribbon, fold in the ends and stitch in the middle. Hand stitch each ribbon so that it joins two pages together. Repeat for all of the pages.

Take a piece of 20cm x 20cm fabric, fold in the edges and sew together. Hem the edges and hand stitch onto the front and back page of the book. Take another piece of a narrower fabric, sew, hem and stitch onto the other side of the back page.

Blue Book Final Sewing

Machine sew all of the page bindings and remove all of the hand stitched threads. Cut two pieces of the wider ribbon for the handles and sew them on.

Cut a hole on the flap for the button and stitch around.

Pink & Blue Book QR Codes

Cut out the plastic windows (last page of the template). Cut out frames for the windows from leftover felt and glue them together. Glue three sides of the window onto a page, so that you can slide in the QR code from the top.

Find an audio or video you would like to accompany a page and copy and paste a link into a QR code generator (I used this one http://www.qr-code-generator.com). Print it out and slide into the window. Repeat for any page you desire. You can than use something like the Google Goggles App to read the code and play the video on a mobile device.

Download