It started back in August. I truly felt it was an inspired project. Children in orphanages would have cloth activity books and LDS women would learn to hand sew and also to use their machines. The goal was fifty. It seemed reasonable until a few weeks later.
Friday the 20th of November I delivered 48 quiet books to the LDS humanitarian center. The lady oohed and aaahhed over the books, and the little ladies working in the humanitarian room did the same. It was gratifying to know this labor of love was finished.
It was a tremendous project. Imagine fifty books, that is fifty 24 " cloth cuts for covers and one hundred 21 "cloth cuts for the inside pages. The church rules mandated ten activities per book with no words or letters. Numbers on clocks were okay though. That is 500 activities plus cover sew ons and two handles per book. The clock page was quite detailed and the shapes and color page took an extensive amount of time, as did the shoes and, well and all the pages.
It took me awhile simply to research quiet books and find the activity designs that I felt best about. These were revised as the book project continued. Some activities simply took too much time and some ( like the weaving page) looked too difficult for the child to do afterall.
Several die hard sisters in the ward worked on Wednesday mornings hand and machine sewing. Two new converts to the church endlessly cut out felt horses, cupcake bottoms and tops, clock hands, shoe leather, and on and on. Some sisters came to my house during the evening and worked. Several came in the afternoon at church. We did have a Fabulous Friday night where we worked from 6pm until midnight. Julie B. was there the whole time.
Some people were not able to attend any work meetings and gave notepads, pencils, combs, snaps, buttons, felt and many other materials.
I learned much from this project. (One of which came after cutting out the 150 pieces of page fabrics- it sure was nice to have someone help with the ironing of those pages.)
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