I don’t have children myself, but I’ve got a niece and multiple other kids in my life for which I have the occasional need to make or buy presents. I love being the “cool” aunt, and I love to give presents that are not only fun and educational, but look good too.

If you’ve also got a thing for well designed children’s toys and books, there is a great series of board books available for very young children called BabyLit. They take adult classics and adapt them to be visual portrayals of simple concepts like colors, counting, animals, and opposites. Fun for kids, fun for parents.

While the publisher makes a few tie-in products, they’re mostly geared for adults. For my niece Alice’s first birthday, rainbow themed, the Alice in Wonderland colors primer was perfect, but I thought a few plush toys that were child safe would be really make it extra-special, and I decided to pop them out quickly on the sewing machine.

Of course there is always a hang up, and the hang up was that at this point (Fall 2012), I hadn’t actually ever used the sewing machine my sister bought me for Christmas the year before. Or was it two. My craft project may have exploded all over my living room while I figured out how to create what it was I saw in my head.

The best part of using a children’s book for inspiration, is that the characters and illustrations are usually very simple. After learning the basics of how to use a sewing machine from YouTube videos and the included owners manual, I felt comfortable with loading the machine and producing the few stitch types I thought I would need to make it happen.

I only needed to cut out some very easy shapes from basic craft-store felt and run a few straight stitches on the machine. I was able to put together most of these figures in less than an hour a piece, even though I previously only had hand sewing experience.

Once I got the hang of it, I was also able to add some embellishments and hand sewn accessories to really finish the pieces off.

So while this isn’t a detailed how-to with patterns and sewing steps, I hope that this might be a good project inspiration for you to take a simple starting point and put together something extra special and extra fun for the extra-special, extra-fun kid in your life.