Hadi's Busy Book

...is quite possibly the 2nd most time-consuming craft project I had ever taken on after Kimi's felt ABC book. 

The idea came after my friends, Ain and Bibah (who goes by Beba post-SMSS) started talking about making busy books for their little ones.  I initially wasn't interested because I didn't know what they were talking about. It finally caught on when I found out that that's a whole lot of crafting in there! 

I was on board just like that. 

But then it wasn't an easy project, not at all. Being a perfectionist (I was diagnosed as one, but really I don't think I am, at all), I made a book out of used papers, making mind map of the book - concept, what kind of skills I want to teach from the book, and what kind of activities would achieve that. 

Pinterest helped a lot. I spent hours of hours day dreaming of what the final book would look like, browsing through one after another pins and boards on pinterest. Really, that site is a poison to your productive hours. 

Once I have a concept of the book, I made a template book of 8" x 8" on grid papers and used it to draw the pages. It served as patterns that I would later cut and trace onto felt.

Long process, too lazy to describe. 

Took me 3 months (and more than RM100) to complete it, 10 pages including front and back covers. Fun? Yes. Tiring? Definitely yes. One of those projects that you eagerly start but then wears you out mid-project and you just started racing towards the end because you just want it to end. 

Hadi liked it. At least for the first few weeks.  He still plays with it occasionally though. I found that 2-player-pages and real-life pages, like the ice-cream cart and tic-tac-toe) interest him more than the match-the-shape pages. 

I'm considering to add more pages. We'll see.