A crafty post!

If you have little ones who are into Thomas The Tank Engine then you know about these little mini catalogs that you get with each and every item that you buy.  Well my son just loves loves loves to sit and read them over and over and over. He sits there and “reads” them like they are the Wall Street Journal.

It is one of the cutest things he does. It is especially sweet now that he has more words everyday, if not every hour, and he can now sort of talk to himself about them. He knows which ones he has and which accessory pieces he has too. It is great.

A while ago I took one of the catalogs and cut it apart. It comes tri-folded see, so I just cut it to three pages. I then matted each page in some colored cardstock to make it a full 8 1/2 x 11 size sheet. I decorated those colored matts with some Thomas stickers from the dollar store and put each page in its own sheet protector.  Then, I tied the sheet protectors together with some yarn, so it was now like a bound book. OH and I put some packing tape across the top of each protector so that the pages couldn’t be taken our or fall out or lost.

So that wonderful little catalog has gone many places with it. Since it is in a sheet protector it is pretty durable. I just throw it in the diaper bag and away we go. Everytime he looks at it, it’s like the first time all over again. He just loves it. It has come in quite handy at doctor offices, the car, waiting for a table at a restuarant, table time at the restuarant, well you get the idea.

For a while he was getting the same catalog over and over, that is from the same year I guess. So they were all exactly the same. Well recently he has been getting some newer trains so the catalogs are newer and finally have different stuff in them. So I was itching to be crafty and itching to make him a new book.

So here is what I did.

disclaimer: Any crafty blogger worth her salt I suppose would have a proper photo tutorial.  And I for one would probably not look twice at something that called itself a tutorial but didnt’ have any pics of the process. So let me straight up say that I didn’t intend to do a tute for this. My friends on FB who were listening ot me bemoan picking out the stabilizer and whining about getting back in a grove for stitching letters requested pics of the finished project. So when I put the pics up on FB I thought, hey, I shoudl put these on my blog too! But then I thought, well I can’t just put them up, I shoudl explain why I did it. And then I thought, well I shoudl at least tell them a little bit about how I did it. And then…has any one read If You Give A Mouse A Cookie??? do you see where I am going here… so anyway, here is the, description of how this little book came to be.

I gathered up all of his catalogs and cut them on their fold lines so they were now three pages, with trains on each side.

Then I measured a page, and cut some heavy chipboard type material to size. Actually what I used comic book storage backing boards. They are excellent. I bought them not to store comic books, but because of these posts: 

http://www.splityarn.com/split_yarn/2005/09/fabric_justice.html

http://featheredfibers.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/fabric-stash-organization-and-tutorial/

Those boards have come in handy so often in my craft room I tell ya. First of all they are excellent for the fabric folding. But they also work great to make templates/patterns for smaller things, like little fish or the pieces to make fabric beach balls (remind me to show you the two I made…they are great and I made them to match characters in books!) but I digress…..

SO I used those comic book backing boards and made a front and a back cover for the little catalog.

then I cut a piece of blue felt to size as well.

But this was too plain. So I googled for a Thomas the Tank coloring page and sifted through the results until I found one that I thought would make an easy embroidery project. I followed the fantastic tutorial on embroidering on felt by Future Girl and got to work on Thomas’ face on some gray felt.

I finished that up and did a quick running stitch to sew the face to cover.

But that still looked plain and I kind of liked the soothing quality of the needle and thread action. so I decided to fart around with lettering and put the name THOMAS on the cover too.

When I got it all done and got done picking all the mf stabilizer out of the stitches I stacked it all up, alligator clipped it together and used a Fisker’s 1/16th hole punch and put three holes along the spine edge.

some time ago I purchased these little tiny rings at a school supply store and they came in perfect for this.

they are like this, but not. they are not from staples and they are NOT 1″ they are more like 1/4 or a 1/2 inch.