One week ago, I launched Drawn Together, a creative effort to bring healing to the children and families of  Newtown, Connecticut. If this is your first time hearing about it, Drawn Together is a project that will provide tote bags filled with brand new art supplies to the children of Newtown, CT and the surrounding communities. Research has shown art to be a valuable therapeutic tool for working with children as they process grief and trauma. There are still several ways to get involved with Drawn Together. You can read the original post HERE and the updates HERE and HERE.  For minute to minute updates on the progress on this project, join me on Instagram and Facebook for photos and more.

For today’s Style Watch, I thought I’d share a project that I completed a while back, and it’s perfect for little hands. I combined some of my sewing skills with papercrafting to create this portable busy book, complete with printable templates for the pages.

I started out but stitching together two rectangles of canvas with a firm interfacing between, to give the folder some stiffness. It’s worth mentioning that I am far from an expert seamstress! I can sew in a straight-ish line, and that’s it!

For this busy book, I designed 4 different busy book worksheets and customized each with my Clear & Simple Stamps.

{1} Fruit Shape Matching: I die cut the fruit shapes using the Mini Fruit Dies with black cardstock, then arranged them onto the worksheet, which I then laminated.  Next, I stamped and die cut the same shapes using the Perfect Harvest stamp set, which I also laminated an cut out. I placed a piece of adhesive velcro on each to make them interactive.

{2} Mia’s Lemonade Stand: Using the Well Preserved: Large stamp set, I created a rainbow of jars, with separate, laminated lids that can be matched up!

{3} Pirate Treasure Hunt: I simply added a fun treasure hunt image to this worksheet using the Ragdoll: Pirate stamp set which I colored with markers.

{4} Letter Matching (not shown): Using the same shapes for the Fruit Matching worksheet, I die cut and laminated letters from Uppercase Alphabet .

To create little storage cases for all the little die cuts that make up this busy book, I used the Mini Tri-fold Die to create little envelopes! By cutting them from felt,  stitching up the sides and adding a button hole closure, I was able to create perfect envelopes for holding the pieces.

And just to be sure this busy book was a hit, I gave it to one of my friend’s daughter…she loved it!

BUSY BOOK WORKSHEETS DOWNLOAD