Another quiet book set - road scenes and pizza restaurant

For my general thinking about quiet books, and more ideas, please see this earlier post. Most of my efforts have been double page spreads with two singles, so they can be removed as a set from the book so they can be doled out. I've described how I did this in a separate post, together with some links to other pages I really like, and other pages I'd like to have made, if I'd ever had time!

This post covers a set of four pages, one double page spread and two singles. The double page spread is a small town scene or road layout. This is to my own design, but is loosely based on Peatblogger's design. (There are several other versions of this, so I don't know if Peatblogger's is the original.) To the basic street layout, I added a river and two bridges; a station and railway line; a hospital and supermarket with its car park; a playground with a swing and slide; a park with a duckpond; a petrol station and a car wash. With the possible exception of the car wash, these were all places I thought the girls would be familiar with and would want to take one of my little cars to. (More about the cars below.)

I

had bought a little set of metal cars from Poundland for a pound. I thought they were good value - several different colours, and styles: a pickup truck, a two door saloon, a taxi etc. My other half drilled tiny holes through the bumpers to which I could attach thin string. My original idea was to make a strip of little pockets to attach them to, so they wouldn't get lost. This would be their 'garage'.

However, I found that they wouldn't stretch far enough to go everywhere on the road layout, and quickly got tangled up when out of the pcokets. I didn't like the fabric I'd chosen, either. 

So I made a new strip of pockets in a grey knit fabric, so a bit stretchy, and a suitable colour for a car park or roof of a garage. The cars now sit in their slots in this garage, with the bits of string sticking out to help retrieve them. But they are no longer permanently attached to the garage. (Sorry no pictures as yet of the new garage.)

Above, the yellow car is about to fill up with petrol, while the white car is going to visit the hospital. One of my sons-in-law works for BP, hence the petrol station has the BP logo, which will appel to his children.

And not to forget their cousin, I've included the supermarket she will be most familiar with, Aldi. Interestingly, while she wouldn't have been able to recognise the letters in the name at the time I made this, she immediately recognised the logo. So worth the little bit of extra effort.

This double page spread did take a long time to make. I didn't count the hours but it was certainly a number of days in the making. Of course, you could make it with less detail, but here, it was the details that made it appealing (that and the cars. I swear they had almost as much fun just racing the cars round on the floor.)

On the back of this double page spread I had two single pages. One of them continued the traffic and roads theme. This was intended to have a semi educational purpose (as well as being fun). The girls need to become traffic aware and to know when it is safe to cross at a pedestrian crossing. So this page has traffic lights they can change with a little lever.

In the first picture, the light for the car is green, meaning the car can go. The pedestrian light is RED, so the little girl cannot cross to go to her school. She has to stand safely on the pavement.

However, once the lever has been moved to the top position, the car has a red light, and the little gilr is faced with a green light, so she can go across the crossing.

(Sorry she's fallen flat on her face - normally she would have someone helping her across!) There is also an intermediate position for the lights, with the light for the car at amber, and the pedestrian light still at red - so no crossing for the little girl.

This was fun to make, but did require a bit of trial and error to get the lights to work. The way I made this page was as follows. First, I made the background, sewing the sky, pavements, road and grass. Next, I added the school, the tree, and the crossing, and the road markings. Then I made two holes, through which the traffic lights would show, and the curved slot for the lever to move. I button-holed around these by hand, but if you have a cleverer sewing machine than mine you could probably do this by machine. Then the tricky bit. I made a dial out of thin cardboard, with the traffic light colours and images printed on, and the lever. This had a hole punched in the centre with a grommet through it. It was, as I said, trial and error, but you can see what I ended up with.

This piece of card was placed behind the picture, with the lever through the slot. I added a button in front of the picture, and another thin one behind the card, and joined them with thread through the grommet hole, so the dial could rotate. (It can't rotate through a full revolution because the lever can only move within the slot.) Then the whole page was attached to the backing.

Finally, I sewed the car and the doll to either side of the page, and a taut piece of green elastic to the bottom of the page to hold the car and doll when not active.

Although I've described this sequentially in the order I put it together, I had experimented first with paper versions of the slot, holes and the dial with the traffic lights and lever, to get the positioning right.

This has been quite popular with the grand-daughter who has played with it so far. I think after a few goes it will have lost its appeal, but if they learn to recognise traffic lights and how they work, it will be worth it.

Now for the final page of this set. I wanted another educational page, and on the theme of "Our Town", I thought - all the girls will know a pizza restaurant. Not that they eat pizza a lot - but they do know what pizzas are! So, Pizza Express it was.

A Pizza Express logo printed on paper and attached to felt  was in turn covered with a piece of perspex to reinforce it. It was attached to the backing on three sides, forming a pocket to store pizza pieces. The children at this stage were 4, nearly 4, and nearly three. So one could recognise numbers, the youngest could see with help that some slices of pizza had more salami dots than others, and the middle one was in between in her development.

So the oldest one can now manage to match pizza slices to their numbered position, the middle one can do so with a bit of help, and so can the youngest. The important thing is not just to be able to recognise the numbers, but to recognise that one pizza slice has more dots (or salami pieces) than another one. So far, this is still fun. Soon, when they can all match without any help, it will have done its job. (But then, I've still got a fourth grandchild coming along. It will be her turn next.)