Are you wondering whether to buy or take the time and make a quiet book yourself? I’ll try to help you decide what’s best for you in this section. Either has pros and cons.
Buy a quiet book
You can buy a quiet book. The advantage is you don’t have to go through all the process. And you can get it fast.
There are quite a few sellers, and some of them even offer tailor-made quiet books.
Usually, you’ll find quiet books where you can’t choose which pages will be inside. So to buy a quiet book, you will need to make a compromise – probably not all the pages will be exact ones you would otherwise choose for your kid, but try to find what’s closest to it.
The truth is, finding a high-quality book can be hard and not cheap.
If the budget allows you to buy a quiet book that comes as close as possible to your desires, this is a great option.
To Make a Quiet Book
The advantage of making a quiet book on your own is you can do whatever you can think of. There are almost no limits, and you can create it specifically for your child. You can create activities that will help your child develop the most.
Only you know your child best, and you know what would be best for her.
The downside, though, is that it will take you quite a while to make it. It’s hard to tell exactly how long it takes to make a quiet book. It depends on so many things.
For example,
- how many activities do you want to include in a quiet book?
- Are they difficult to sew?
- Will you try the no-sew method?
- Do you want to draw the pattern for the activity yourself, or do you need to find it first?
And when you think you only need to find the right material for your quiet book, the “fun” has only begun.
Luckily for you, I already went through this process, and I want to share it with you, to make it more straightforward. You’ll find free instructions and patterns in my Quiet book patterns library. I will tell you more about the materials in the next chapter.
Now let’s check estimated times, so you’ll have a feeling, how long it will take to make a quiet book.
To give you a rough estimation on time, here are the hours I spent on some parts of the process for the 10-activity quiet book:
• Finding and buying all the materials: 8 hours
• cutting the patterns and drawing them on the felt: 2,5 hours
• cutting the material (cotton fabric, interfacing, felt): 2 hours,
• sewing the activity pages: from 30 minutes up to 2 h for one activity page, depends on activity page difficulty;
• gluing the activity pages: from 15 minutes to 30 minutes for one activity page;
• Binding (sewing): from 2 h up to 5 h.
These are just core parts of the process.
Remember, these are my current times. I systematically tested a few methods of sewing to speed up the creation time.
My first sewn busy book took me about 40 hours (but I didn’t have any instructions on how to make pages), and my first glued quiet book took me about 6 hours to make to give you something to compare with.
With our Quiet book patterns library, where you can get patterns and detailed instructions, you can be quicker, but still – you will need some time to make it.
A Good Compromise – Buy a Quiet Book Kit
I would like to mention the third option, which pulls together the pros of both categories, buying and making a quiet book.
It is to buy a quiet book kit.
It is basically a package with all the materials, and usually pre-cut felt for every activity page in the kit.
The big advantage of those kits is that you can see what the final book will look like, but you choose the activities that you believe will give your toddler the most.
Also, in addition to all the material, there are complete instructions on how to make a quiet book from A to Z (including book-binding and proper closure for the book). Your job is just to follow the instructions and you’ll make a beautiful quiet book!
If you are creating your first book, this process is easier and faster.
Quiet Book pre-cut kits are a great alternative instead of deciding whether to make a quiet book all by yourself or to buy it and be deprived of the whole creation process.
Save Time and Create a Quiet Book With Ease
Choose quiet book activities and get a custom DIY Kit – the best compromise between creating and buying a quiet book.
In the first case, just planning, searching for materials, printing, drawing, and cutting the felt will take you a long time before you start sewing.
To some, choosing the right materials is so overwhelming that their process, unfortunately, stops at this point. Which is a great pity, since their toddler will be deprived of a great educational toy.
It is also a misconception that finding and buying all by yourself will be cheaper than a purchased DIY pre-cut kit. If you want to use only quality materials with child-friendly certificates and produce only one quiet book, it can cost you as much or even more than the average DIY pre-cut kit.
Because for some materials it is impossible to buy it just as much as you need it to make a quiet book. So, spending more of your time and nerves, this way you can also spend more money, and when finished, the leftovers will make you cram in your craft room.
On the other hand, when you buy a busy book, you are deprived of the fun of creating the book yourself. Quiet books from quality materials also have higher prices.
If you do not have the time to sew a book or the sewing is not for you, and the price of the quiet books does not hinder your budget, buying a quiet book is also a great option.
If you want to check out, you can find my quiet books for toddlers in my shop.
In general DIY kits are more affordable than an entire busy book. But it is the perfect ratio between money invested and time to create a quiet book.
Summing up
Both buying and making a quiet book, have pros and cons. Buying a quality quiet book can be expensive. And usually, you can’t decide which activity pages you would like to have in the book.
When making your own quiet book, you can make the quiet book with activity pages you want to have. Still, it takes quite a lot of time to find all the materials you need, and after to make the book itself.
A great compromise between those two options is to buy a DIY quiet book kit, where you will get all the materials you need for specific quiet book pages. Felt usually is already cut, so you won’t spend time cutting patterns and all the material.
In the next chapter, I will describe what you need to know and be aware when picking the materials for your quiet book.
