A Home for Max Quiet Book

I've been contemplating making a quiet book for the grandchildren for a long time. When my darling grandsons, Miles and Vaughn, both had birthdays coming up, I decided it was now or never. There are lots of patterns and page ideas out there, but I finally decided on this one from LindyJ Design:

See pattern here

The story follows Max the dog through different scenes as he looks for a new home. They are a lot of work due to the detail on each page, but that's what makes them so cute.

The pattern was great and the instructions were clear. (She has sooo many other patterns that are adorable! If I made them all, I might be able to use up my felt stash. Or maybe not.) 

The designer offers a quick and easy method for applying the pattern to the materials. It's a freezer paper method and you can actually print the pattern on the freezer paper pages cut to 8.5 x 11. From there you iron the pattern right onto your fabric, which makes it easy peasy to cut those little pieces out. (Thank you LindyJ!) That saved so much time over tracing or laying the pattern pieces on the various fabrics and felt. My poor printer struggled to pick up the pages when I loaded them all at once. When I fed them through one at a time though, it worked like a charm! 

I made a few modifications to the pattern. I'm fussy about unfinished edges, so I bound the edges of the finished pages with a continuous binding that I fed through my handy dandy bias tape maker. (There is a tutorial here. Let me tell you, when you start cutting you won't believe your eyes when you see how much binding you get.) I found the binding fabric at Hobby Lobby. Because I bound the pages, I had to adjust some of the background pieces so they extended all the way to the one alternating side and the top and bottom edges of the felt.  

I also used extra-large Dritz eyelets to loop the binder rings through because I didn't want someone pulling too hard and ripping the page after all that work. 

I hope my grand-babies love them for a long time!