I recently became an aunt again! As a gift I decided to make my new niece a cloth baby coloring book.
I know how much my kids loved soft cloth books as babies, and I thought if I padded the pages, the gift would also have a sensory element of texture.
You are reading: Cloth books for babies pattern
p.s. Sometimes you may find that these baby cloth books are called “quiet books” because they are meant to keep children busy and engaged.
my version is for a very young baby, so there are no shoelaces or doors to open, just colors to look at and textures to touch. which also means no small parts, like buttons, to worry about falling into a baby’s hand and becoming a choking hazard.
This post originally appeared on our sister site scrap fabric love.
materials needed – DIY cloth baby book
- fabric scraps in all the colors you want to make pages for
- wadding scraps or fusible fleece
- heat n’ bond
- velcro
- sewing machine (or the patience to do it by hand!)
- thread
improv style
I didn’t start with a pattern.
My basic idea was to make an equal size (6″ x 6″) improvisation block for each color, add some fusible fleece, pad the pages, add a cover, and stitch it all together.
When I started, I didn’t know exactly how all that was going to work, but I managed it and I’m pretty happy with the results.
Don’t get me wrong, I can see a lot of flaws and things I’d do differently next time, which I’ll talk about as I go along, but this is a baby gift so I’m pretty sure. she won’t notice the flaws!
and her parents will be grateful for anything that entertains her long enough to let them go potty (I speak from experience!)!
sorting my waste fabrics
I started by deciding which colours I was going to put in my book and then sorting my scraps in to piles of those colours.
Now, different people have different definitions of what junk is. I’ve even heard some people refer to a fat room as junk!
but in this case I used the types of debris that are generally known as “crumbs”:
- squares or rectangles no more than 2″ or 3″ at any point;
- some thin strips, approximately 1 to 1.5″ wide;
- also as some slightly larger squares & pieces that I cut just to give it color.
I went for fairly standard colours as well as black and white.
my baby coloring book has pages for:
- red
- blue
- yellow
- green
- pink
- purple</li
- orange
- white
- black
- brown
In addition to my fabric scraps, I also had a flip pack of unnecessary thin fabric swatches, a kind of cotton canvas material.
I used some of these for the color name tags on each page, but could easily use another cutout for those.
making the pages – crumb splicing
I decided to make each color page a 6″ x 6″ square.
I chose this size because it’s big enough to work with and yet definitely small enough for a baby to hold comfortably. I also have a square ruler that size, so it made squaring them up easy!
I improvised the pieces using the cutouts I had.
If you’re new to piecing improvisation, or “crumb quilting” as it’s sometimes called, you basically start by sewing two scraps right sides together along one edge.
then, open them up, press, trim (some people do this, some don’t, I do), and sew another piece along one of the new edges of the piece, again right sides together.
>
It’s a similar concept to sewing a log cabin block except that you can add pieces on any side.
so, for example, you could have many short snips by creating a strip and then make it a square by placing a longer snippet along the top edge of that strip of smaller snips.
You just keep sewing until the piece gets so big that when you put the ruler or template on top of it, the fabric sticks out on all sides.
then crop it to a square and suddenly it looks a million times better!
I tried to find different shades of each colour from my scrap bin and I also consciously decided to include a few patterns and prints even when they had other colours in them as long as the dominant colour was still the one the page was meant to be about.
The whole project took me a little longer than I anticipated because I didn’t have very many brown or purple scraps and I really. had to go hunting around.
In the end, I used more fabric swatches for those pages, since they’re basically “crumb” sized anyway and I have a lot of them due to my day job.
Quilting the Pages
I wanted my baby coloring book to be fluffy and soft, but also have some texture.
See Also: Self-Growth Books: 15 Best Personal Development and Self- Improvement – Intelligent Change
To put the book together, the idea was to sew the pages right sides together and turn them over. however, see below for the binding part first!
but before I did, I put fusible fleece on the back of each page and then quilted them all individually (you can use any type of batting, but this way I didn’t have to baste before quilting either!).
I wanted a different quilt pattern on each page to give my niece another layer of interest, something for her to run her fingers over.
I’m still new to quilting and still not very confident with free motion quilting, so I decided on this project to see what I could do with my moving foot.
my quilting designs
Some of my quilting attempts were more successful than others.
My favorite was the random/mountain zig zag I did on the white page.
I also liked how the leaves on the green page turned out.
I made basic guilloches on the purple page.
for the yellow page i did something with sun rays/stars which i am also very happy with.
I liked the middle of the design on the orange page, but it got a little fun as I went along!
The black is hard to see but it is a spiralling square sort of thing.
The red was a mix of zig zags on the fabric in zig zags, a wavy line in the middle, a cross in the bottom corner, and then I outlined the flowers on the fabric at the top. probably a bit excessive, but I was messing around a bit!
and yes, i went to town and matched my thread to each page!
binding of my cloth book
After all the pages were padded, I figured out how I would join them in the middle (ie the spine of the book).
I struggled a bit with this at first, as I wanted the book to be able to lay flat during “face down time” and stay closed the rest of the time.
What I ended up doing was sewing a 2 & 1/2″ strip of white cotton drill (a fairly heavy cotton) in between each set of two pages.
I sewed the strip from right to right along the edge of the page that I wanted to be closest to the spine.
then, with the same strip on the other side, I sewed a second page from right to right.
That left me with two-page long pieces of color with a white stripe down the middle.
I had to do some thinking about which colours I wanted where in the book while I was doing this and thinking through which sets of pages would be back to back.
see below how all the pages are linked together.
creating the cover
Once I had my two-page long strips, I measured the size I thought would be right for my cover.
This was my first mistake.
basically all I did was lay my two page strip on top of a larger piece of fabric and traced around to find my cover size, so it was one piece of fabric for the front and back cover, as well as for the loin. .
It turned out okay but it was a little bit tight because I didn’t account for the bulk of all the pages.
so if I were to do it again I would add an extra inch around to make sure the cover fits generously enough.
decorating the cover
I had some very small triangle shapes in lots of rainbow colors left over from another project, so I decided to apply them to the front and back covers.
I used heat n’ bond and arranged them in a kind of curve in the front and a bit more random in the back.
if you’ve never used heat n’ bond, check out this knack mak youtube tutorial.
I used heat sewn light n’ bond.
See Also: The 20 Best Books for Entrepreneurs Starting a Business in 2022
I actually used scraps from another project, so I ended up deciding to make triangles instead of some other kind of shape!
I sewed the pieces together after joining them with a zig zag stitch.
I also used the fancy letter stitching on my new sewing machine to write a little To/From note on the back.
Lastly, for the cover, I used a fabric swatch and that fancy letter stitching again to add a “my colors” title on the front.
assembling the cloth book
To put everything together, I started by placing everything as it would be if the book was already put together.
So I laid the cover right side down and then one strip of two pages right side up.
then another set of pages right side down and another set right side up, etc, etc.
When I had everything laid out like this, I took the top two strips and sewed them right sides together with a 1/4″ seam leaving one side open to turn.
apologies for the blurry photo below, but basically you should have a four-page inside-out tube open at one end.
I used a chopstick to poke out the corners before turning the set of pages right side out.
I then folded in the raw edges and top stitched all the way around the edge of the piece – which also closes the open end.
This is the next place I found a little mistake I made.
When I attached my fusible fleece, I cut it exactly the same size as each page, but that made it incredibly bulky to stitch around the edge as my seams underneath were so bulky.
If I were to do this again, I would cut the fusible fleece 1/2″ shorter on each side than the actual page of the book to allow room for more comfortable sewing.
I repeated the same process for each set of pages.
put the closing strap
Once I got to the last set, where one side was the color pages and the other side was the front and back covers, I also added a little strap closure.
To make the strap, I found a strip of fabric long enough to stretch from the back to the front of my book (with a seam allowance too!).
I then folded it the same way you would if you were doing a bias and stitched around the edges.
once everything except the final seam was closed, I sewed a square of velcro to the front cover and then sewed the other side of the square of velcro to the closure strip.
When I turned in the raw edges of the open side I slipped the raw edge of the velcro strap inside before top stitching it in place.
To be honest, the strap was a bit fiddly and I struggled to make it look neat. but keep the book closed!
merge all pages
The last step is to attach all the finished page and cover sets to each other.
To do this, I secured all the pages of the book where I wanted them (with the seams aligned) using my wonderclips.
then, using my walking foot again, I sewed down the middle several times. this attached the pages and gave my book a spine.
Remember there is no fusible in the cotton drill strips I put in between the pages – so although it was a lot of layers they weren’t overly bulky.
I didn’t sew to the edge either. I started just above the bottom edge seam, stitched, stitched to the other end just before the top edge, and stitched again.
then I repeated this a couple of times just to make sure!
fabric baby coloring book finished!
This fabric book has now gone out in the post to my little niece.
I had fun making it and used a good chunk of my fabric scraps too!
If you like this idea and want to come back to it later, don’t forget to pin it!
See Also: 8 Best Japanese Tattoo Books (2022) – That You Must See!