craftgrrl | felt book with letters and shapes

I made this adorable felt book for my toddler.

I started with two pieces of cardboard that were the same size. I printed letters onto cardstock and cut them out with an X-acto knife. I liked the font Futura for this, but it's worth noting that Future doesn't have a hook on the lowercase j or q so I freehanded those onto the stencil.

I covered each piece of cardboard with duct tape on both sides and attached them with duct tape along one of the short sides. Don't attach them right next to each other--you'll need a little space if you want your book to fold in half.

I covered one side of the cardboard using black felt. I also cut a small strip of black felt and put it down the middle of the opposite side, where the book will fold in half. I just used hot glue to attach the felt.

I added white felt to the inside, and I had to add another black strip in the middle since the white felt covered some of the last one. If I did this over I'd add the white first, then a single black strip in the middle. This next part is hard to explain, so forgive me: some of the edges of the white and black felt were a little off around the outside of the cardboard, so I put a stripe of hot glue all along the outside in between the black and white pieces, then once that dried I cut all along that stripe so that the white and black pieces were even and glued together. I hope that makes sense.

I added two thick strips of black felt to the outside and glued velcro to them so the tabs would keep the book closed. I only added velcro to the tabs themselves since velcro hooks nicely to felt.

Then the time-consuming part! I cut out all my cardstock stencils and stenciled each letter and shape onto various colors of felt. I used a marker because pencil didn't show up well enough for me to see to cut it. If you look closely you can see some letters where I forgot to trace the stencil backwards, so the black marker is visible on the front side of the letter.

Here's the book closed up! You'll see it's not perfect, but it does close up nicely enough.