The Quiet Book, of course, needed to have a greenhouse page to show some well deserved botanical love and give a little nod to our beloved head of Hufflepuff House, Professor Sprout, who teaches Herbology. So here we have Neville donning his ear protection in order to transplant the infant mandrakes.

I started with a SUPER simple sketch (see above) that I then tried to make look less awful 😉 I ended up cutting out the sketch from the tracing paper and using that as my pattern pieces when cutting the felt. It was a bit tricky getting the pots both big enough to hold a decent sized mandrake, whilst being significantly different in size and also both fitting on the bottom of the page… but in the end we got it!

Some thin elastic makes sure that the mandrake doesn’t go missing…. i.e. added to the hidden horde of odds and ends that my toddler stashes away in the seat of his riding/push car and other sundry places. It also gives a fun little boing! when you pull it taught and let go 🙂

I’m pretty proud of how the mandrake turned out! I embroidered the outline onto thick, stiff felt and then embroidered and sewed down the leaves on top of said felt. I sandwiched the elastic between the embroidered layer and the back piece, helping it to end up really nice and sturdy.

The next page was the beloved “manky boot” portkey that whisked the witches and wizards off to the Quidditch World Cup. And it will function as a shoe-tying practice page once my bebe’s manual dexterity progresses that far 🙂

I used scraps from my fabric stash for the body of the boot, using a black corduroy. The sole of the boot and the grey accents were basic felt. I cut out two flaps and added metal eyelets. I hemmed around all of the edges so that the flaps wouldn’t fray and then sewed them down on the outside edges. I also took the precaution of tacking down the middle of the shoe lace so that it can’t be completely removed and subsequently lost… or stashed in the previously mentioned push car!