One...two...tie my shoe?

I was thinking of this cute little pair of pink tennis shoes that my oldest daughter had when she was approximately two years old.

She looked so cute in them. When she outgrew them I decided to try my luck at making a little activity book with them. Actually I only used one shoe and I use the other one to decorate for Valentine's Day or for summer.

This was my first attempt at making a book....back in the day. Mind you that I didn't have a very good sewing machine and had never done one before and didn't even have a pattern. It was all in my head. This book is looking a little rough, but it is almost 16 years old. It gives you an idea of what it could look like. I remember that she loved this little book. I traced her hand for the 1..2..3 page. The grass on the cover, under the tree has velcro on it so she could take it on and off. She had to button the clowns coat and his clothes were made from an outfit of hers.

I made two large rectangles for each section....the full width of the two pages. I put any embellishments on that I was going to do, before I sewed them together. If you have a fancy machine, you could actually embroider the words on there or you could print it out on the computer on fabric/paper sheets and fusible web them on. I didn't know about any of that stuff back then and just wrote it on with a machine washable marker.

I sewed them together kind of pillow case style and left a small opening to turn them right side out. All together there were four rectangles that made two sheets that I laid on top of each other and sewed down the middle. So there are four pages.....do I have you thoroughly confused yet? So the image below is one set of the rectangles and sewn down the middle to look like separate pages.

make sure if you decide to make one that you put on it somewhere your name and the date you made it. I had every intention of making one for each of my kids, but as everyone knows when you start having more kids, your time seems to disappear a lot quicker. :-)

Have fun crafting and keep checking back to see what else I pull out of my "archives".