making our own coloring books

This morning as the baby girl was waking up she talked to me about her latest obsession - panda bears. An idea popped into my head and I asked her if she'd like a panda bear coloring book.

So we made one.

I used the swagbucks search engine to search for panda bear coloring pages and panda bear clip art. If you don't know about swagbucks yet, you should give it a go! You earn points for ordinary web searchs. Since I've started using it about a year ago I've earned enough swagbucks (the points) to redeem for sixteen $5 Amazon gift cards. That's $80 worth of free purchases through Amazon for just using the Swagbucks search instead of another search engine!





I found an online tutorial showing how to draw panda bears.



And I made a simple title page using MSWord.



I printed out the sheets - 10 in all including cover page and a plain back cover.

Then I used my sewing machine to sew the pages together. You could just as easily staple them, but I thought it would be fun to have the binding run the entire length of the booklet.

I used a wide zig zag stitch and white thread. In retrospect I wished I had changed the color of the thread to have it show up a bit better, but in my typical lazy fashion white was already threaded on the machine so that's what we went with. ;)








Of course I couldn't leave the big girl out. She selected the unicorn and we went through the same process with her. I used the swagbucks search to find unicorn coloring pages and images.







I found this cool tutorial on drawing a Pegasus unicorn, too.





While I gave the coloring books to my kids right away to use, this simple coloring book idea would make great stocking stuffers!