Forklift Quiet Book Page

This quiet book page is a special request. If you have a request, leave comment on my Facebook page and I’ll see what I can do.

I knew nothing about forklifts when I started this page, so I had to look at a lot of pictures and figure out how to simplify it down. The basic mechanism on this page is a strip of felt matching the background that a sleeve of clear vinyl slides up and down on. The vinyl gave me a place to sew down the forklift platform and some snaps to attach the pallet and boxes. I added spinning wheels, numbers and the words “Up & Down” to add to the educational elements.

Here is what I used: a 9″ square dark green felt background, felt (in dark green, brown pebble texture, gold, light blue, tan, natural, gray and black, clear vinyl, green ribbon, sew-on snaps, two grommets, two buttons and embroidery thread. I sewed this page by hand, with the exception of sewing it down to the actual page.

I started by pinning everything down to get placement (don’t pin into vinyl – it leaves holes) then sewed down the light blue window the gray steering wheel and the brown ground (cut that out freehand.) Take your strip of felt that matches your background (dark green in my case) and sew the gray bar along the left side. Pin it in place on the page then sew down the gold cab of the forklift. It will overlap the bottom of the gray bar. You can then sew down the bottom of the background strip.

To make the wheels, cut them out just outside of the circle template using pinking shears. Insert a grommet into each wheel and sew a button to the page through the grommet hole. The wheels will be able to spin around but will be held in place by the buttons.

To make the sleeve for the forklift mechanism, start by sewing the gold forklift platform to one piece of clear vinyl. See the pattern and photos for placement. Sew down some snaps for the pallet and boxes to attach to. Sew a loop of ribbon to the top center and another to the bottom center. Place the second piece of vinyl behind the first and sew them together along the sides only. Slide the sleeve onto the background strip then sew down the top of the strip to keep it in place. You should be ale to slide it up and down to look like the forklift is lifting.

For each of the crates, I freehand stitched the numbers to the front and a snap to the back, then sewed the two sides together. For the pallet I sewed a line across the front to add dimension, sewed a snap to the back, then sewed the two sides together. I added more snaps to the ground to give the crates and pallet somewhere to go when they aren’t on the forklift. (I ended up using 1.5 small snap sets per crate and 1.5 medium snaps for the pallet.)

The final embellishment was the words embroidered at the top. To transfer the writing, I pinned my pattern down and basted over each latter with one strand of thread. I left 2″ tails at the end of each letter instead of knotting. I then cut the paper away from each letter and puled off the remaining bits. This left me with a basted pattern to stitch over using stem stitch. When I was done, I pulled out the basting threads, clipping them wherever they were caught in the embroidery.

I am currently working on a dump truck that will be the other side of the two page spread. I think they’ll be really cute together!

Let me know i you use this pattern. I’d love to see your version!