Helloooooo… anyone there? Sorry I’ve been MIA for the last few weeks, my day job has been keeping me quite busy and I just haven’t had much time to be working on projects (or writing blog posts for that matter…) but I’m back! And I have one last Christmas gift that I want to show y’all.

Last week I showed you guys my mom’s awesome soft book that she made my niece Juliette.  Well it being her first Christmas and all, I wanted a special gift for her too, and I had this idea back in the summer before she was even born!  My family is all spread out and none of us live very close to Juliette, but I wanted her to have a piece of us in her life as she is growing up and learning voices and people.  So I came up with the idea to make a video library for Juliette.  I had each member of my family pick out one of their favorite children’s books to read on video for Juliette.  Then I edited them onto a DVD and sent it to her along with a copy of each of the books.  That way as she is growing up she can pick a book and follow along as one of us read’s them to her.

Everyone else’s books I just had read in front of the Christmas tree in the weeks before Christmas (I knew I would be seeing the rest of my family members in the weeks leading up to Christmas, so we just arranged to record each of them then.) But I wanted to read the book Goodnight Goodnight Construction Site and decided that it would be really cool to read this in front of some construction equipment.  My day job is for a construction company that has several of the pieces of equipment mentioned in the book in our construction yard.  So one beautiful (and FREEZING) December day in Kansas my mom recorded me reading the book on both a crane and an excavator and then I edited them together.  Wanna see it?

Marynell from Marynell Popst on Vimeo.

I highly recommend this as a gift idea for any nieces/nephews/grandkids that live far away! And it encourages reading for little kids, which makes my nerdy little heart happy!!

Okay I know I know, Christmas is over (although if you are following the liturgical calendar–all you preachers and preacher’s wives out there raise you hand–you celebrated Epiphany yesterday, so I’m only a day late).  But probably many of you are taking advantage of this time at the beginning of the year to un-Christmas your house, sweep up all the pine needles and prepare for 2014 (!).  However, I couldn’t share this project before Christmas since it was a Christmas present, but it is TOO GOOD not to share.

My older brother welcomed his first child this year, her name is Juliette and she is the first grandchild.  Needless to say, we are all madly in love with the little one, especially my mother.  And really… she is beautiful, so what’s not to love! Mom and I decided to each do a special gift for Juliette for her first Christmas.  I’ll share mine tomorrow, but today is all about the labor of love my mom made for Juliette.  She got this idea to make a soft book out of cloth for Juliette.  At four months old she is hardly ready for real books, but a soft book that she could put in her mouth is perfect! Mom got her inspiration from this book: (if you click on the picture it will take you to amazon where you can see a few pages of it)

As I’ve mentioned before my mother LOVES Christmas (if you missed her house at Christmas, go here, here , here and here) and this is one of her most favorite Christmas songs and books.  And just in case you were wondering… I get all my craftiness from my mother.  She doesn’t do projects quite as often as I do, but when she does she knocks them out of the park! And this one was no exception.  Are you ready to see her project?

She cut out two cloth squares for each page and printed off copies of the book to use as a template cutting fabric out for each part. She had a friend who owns an embroidery machine to embroider the words of the book.

She then used iron on interfacing to applique the cutout pieces then used a zigzag stitch to secure them on there.

Once she had all of the applique done she put two right sides together, added a layer of flat quilt batting (similar to this, but obviously my mom didn’t buy it in 90 yard bulk, so it wasn’t nearly that expensive) and then sewed around three edges: top, right side, bottom.

Once she had all of the pages sewn together and turned,  she added a strip of fabric on the left hand side to make a binding, which you can kind of see in the first picture.

Some of the fabrics she used are furry or have different textures so they will be more fun for Juliette to play with.

She worked really hard on this project and it is too cute for words!! I think this is a great labor of love gift for any young children.  Its a totally quiet book, so its great for kids to take with them to places where they need to be silently occupied. Click on the picture below to see all the different pages: