doodles and noodles

Happy Halloween!

2011-10-31T12:39:00.000-04:00

Hope you have a day filled with treats and only nice tricks!
I'm planning to start blogging here again - I've missed all of you.

Children's Books Spared from Lead Law's Axe! Hooray!

2011-08-05T17:52:00.000-04:00

This post also appears on my group writing blog, Route 19 Writers.

Illustration by Arthur Rackham for Wagner, Richard (translated by Margaret Amour) (1911). Siegfried and the Twilight of the Gods. London: William Heinemann, New York: Doubleday. Public domain image obtained through Wikimedia Commons via Haukurth

Over the years, children's books have battled many dragons: censorship; competition from TV, video games, the internet, etc.; slashed library and school book budgets; changes in bookselling; changes in publishing. Oh! And horrid picture books by celebrities.

They sometimes emerge from these battles a bit singed or bloodied, but emerge they do.

Then a few years ago, another threat quietly crept into the children's book world and threatened catastrophe, especially for libraries and fans of vintage books. In 2008, in the wake of recalls of popular toys (made in China) for high lead levels, Congress nearly unanimously passed a law intended to protect children: the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act (CPSIA). This law, among other things, required that ALL children's products aimed at kids 12 and under be tested and certified to be (basically) lead-free. Lead is a known neurotoxin and children are especially vulnerable.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Well, the devil is in the details, and unfortunately the law failed (among other flaws) to exempt zillions of products that pose no significant threat to children. Like books. Which have NEVER been implicated in a single case of lead poisoning.

Not only did the law require expensive testing of each of the components of new books (which would have driven up the cost with no increased benefit to kids), it was retroactive, requiring testing and certification of previously published books. Here's why this was terrible for libraries and used books:

Testing is terrifically expensive (and hard to obtain) and libraries and used sellers were required to test every children's book in their collections or for sale.
The mandated testing is destructive testing - which means after submitting a book for testing, the library or bookstore would no longer have the book to circulate or sell.

To make things even worse, the Consumer Product Safety Commission discovered that a handful of children's books published before 1984 contained lead in excess of the new stringent limits. In some colors. On some pages. Never mind that a child would have to eat hundreds of books before raising his blood lead level noticeably, the law was inflexible, and the CPSC banned the sale or distribution to children of books printed before 1984.

Fearing lawsuits, some libraries and many used sellers did remove older books from their shelves. But the reason your local library may not have a nearly empty children's department is that the CPSC has issued a variety of stays of enforcement and temporary exemptions (plus there are bunch of feisty and renegade librarians out there) - but all these stays and exemptions were set to expire at the end of this year. And every attempt to amend the law or repeal it has failed.

Until this week!

Here's the start of the announcement of the amended law in Publisher's Weekly (written by Karen Raugust who has done a terrific job of covering CPSIA book developments for PW):

On Monday, three years after the August 2008 enactment of the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, publishers of ink-on-paper books and other printed materials suddenly received news they’d been hoping for from the outset. Both the House and Senate passed an amendment to CPSIA that exempts “ordinary” children’s books, along with a few other classes of products (e.g., all-terrain vehicles and motorcycles), from the law’s testing provisions.

It also removes the retroactive provisions of the original law, so old books are officially safe again!!! You can read the rest of the good news here.

Children's books win again!

Sadly, for people who care about kids, the battle to make CPSIA reasonable and effective is far from over. Many, many safe and valuable products were given no relief, including original wall art for kids, small batch handmade toys and apparel (made with all safe components), limited batch items aimed at kids with special needs, and many, many more. Get in touch with your congress-folk and let them know you want further changes! You can read more about how the law affects other products here on the blog of a producer of quality educational products for kids; warning: Rick Woldenburg who writes the blog is angry. Understandably.

I'll leave you with images of a lovely vintage book now spared from the toxic waste dump: Ameliaranne Keeps Shop, "Told in Words by Constance Heward; Told in Pictures by Susan Beatrice Pearse" as it says on the title page. My copy was published in 1928 by David McKay Company, and the story about the kind and resourceful Ameliaranne is as charming and fun to read now as I expect it was nearly a century ago.

Isn't it gorgeous? And though a few of the Ameliaranne stories are available as downloads, what a shame it would be to miss the visceral experience of holding this beautiful small book! And smelling it - it has a wonderful scent of bookcloth, glossy paper, and time. And love.

Because who could not love Ameliaranne? In this tale, she has to think on her feet and figure out how to thwart a nepharious imposter trying to make off with the shopkeeper's money.

Fortunately she is as clever as she is good-hearted.

It all works out! For Ameliaranne, the shopkeeper, and Ameliaranne's young siblings who want to go the picnic but need new shoes which their washerwoman mama can't afford.

Even the endpapers are breathtaking.

It is exceedingly hard to track down information about the authors and illustrator of these books, but you can read a little more about the series of Ameliaranne books on Jane Moxey's lovely blog Moxey's Musings here and find a list of all the Ameliaranne titles (which were written by a variety of authors but always illustrated by Susan Beatrice Pearse) on a Fairacre Wikia page here.

I'm jumping for joy!

Happy Valentine's Day!

2011-02-14T14:14:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid, my favorite part of Valentine's Day was not candy, getting tons of mail, or finding out that someone I liked liked me back (though of course I loved all those things), but making my Valentines. I spent weeks before the big day dreaming up different designs and then troubleshooting construction problems (my Valentines always had some complicated paper engineering thing going on, with windows or doors that locked with a lollipop stick, folded paper springs that made hearts pop out when someone opened the card, or other pop-up features). And then there was the making phase, parked at the kitchen table with my mom and sisters and piles of construction paper, doilies, and gobs of old-fashioned paste. I have conveniently forgotten the temper tantrums that traditionally accompanied my over-reaching projects.

The happy memories are no doubt the reason I often spent every February 13th when my kids were young once more parked at the kitchen table with mounds of craft supplies trying to coax my craft-indifferent sons to make their own Valentines too (and then staying up late finishing them up when the boys abandoned the project midcourse and I couldn't bear to think about some poor classmate being left out).

Fortunately for me, my daughter was a different story. She liked to make things too. And still does to my everlasting delight.

The little matchbox Valentines she made in first grade remain one of my all time favorite Valentine projects. (The little love bugs inside were NOT my favorite - too fiddly for little hands.) These Valentines were also a favorite of my middle son's, because not only did he do something similar, albeit simpler:

I let him keep the giant ziplock bag full of the matches we dumped out of the sixty-some little matchboxes! Which was a LOT of matches.

He spent the next zillion summers constructing elaborate if rather wobbly structures from the matches and glue and then setting them alight (under adult supervision, in the driveway, on low wind days with a bucket of water handy, but still). I am a terrible mother obviously.

These are very simple Valentines to make, possible to do at the last minute if you have a spare box of matches handy. Simply cut a paper strip long enough to wrap around the box, draw a design on the front (my daughter designed four different buildings - the flower shop and house shown at the top of this post, and I think a school and a library, but I guess I didn't save samples of them), and then glue it in place. For mass production purposes, I pasted up the four designs on a single piece of paper and photocopied them, and then my daughter cut out the strips and glued them around the boxes -- but one of kind designs work too.

I recommend putting some heart stickers, a sweet note or a little candy inside (as my son did) rather than spending a bazillion hours gluing miniature googly eyes and punched heart "wings" onto glass gems. Fewer frustration tantrums for everyone that way.

I'll close with a photo of my pug, Koko, who is celebrating her 11th birthday today. In style.

Cut Paper Christmas: Encore with a Solstice Slant

2010-12-21T23:48:00.001-05:00

My goodness, there has been a lot of Christmas-time paper cutting at my house over the years! Here are some more paper cuts that we've done in years past - some by my kids, some by me - mostly with a snow/winter theme. I'll add some tips for making your own.

The snowmen above were part of a large quantity of paper bag papercuts we made one year to adorn our packages, which were wrapped with either plain white or plain red paper. One of my kids did the cutting for the one above, following a free hand drawing I did on the back side of the paper. It was cut on a fold (sort of paper doll chain style, only with just a single repeat). I reused the lightweight paper bags the kids took their lunches in - they have enough body/stiffness to cut cleanly, but are light enough for small hands to get the scissors through two layers easily. The eyes and buttons were made with a standard circle hole punch. I let all my kids graduate to real scissors (often Fiskars embroidery scissors) at a relatively young age (6 or 7) and just supervised their cutting. No one ever got hurt, not even a smidge, though my guys did not have especially good fine motor skills. (I think kids are sometimes more careful when they're using real tools - and the results are definitely superior.)

The house above is basically the same method, but a single picture with no fold/repeat. Also cut by a child (though I may have cut the windows - don't recall). For interior cuts (like the windows and door), I usually (re)folded the paper so the kids didn't have to poke scissors into the middle of the paper to get the window or whatever started. Afterwards, I ironed the paper cuts on a low setting to get out the folds. (You can even mist kraft paper lightly to steam it and make it smoother.)

This was our Christmas card one year. I apologize for the crappy image - my cheap scanner seems to have a tough time with hard edges and it's made them look all uneven, which they aren't in the original. I cut this one, using a craft blade rather than scissors. The papers are thin origami papers, though a heavier paper likely would have worked equally well.

What I like about it is that the polar bear is a negative - I cut away part of the blue paper to leave the figure. The moon and stars are also negatives. It's somewhat trickier thinking the drawing through - and also harder to cut (you have to be careful not to cut away the lines of the legs and make an effort to keep the lines thin enough), but going slowly and holding the thin unconnected bits with a fingernail to stabilize them as you cut are the keys. I start first with the small interior cuts, like the space between his hind feet and the rearward front leg - it's easier to do those while the paper is still mostly whole. Then I cut the edges of the lines for the legs before cutting away the rest of the interior bear. Last I cut away for the snow and forming the outer edges of the polar bear's legs.

The shadow is a piece of gray paper added separately - though obviously I didn't think through the direction the moonlight would cast it!

This was also our Christmas card one year - made by my oldest when he was in kindergarten. We planned the picture together - and what was notable was his idea not to show the whole person, just part. That's an unusual approach for a child that age - but it shows the value of sharing good art and talking about it with your children. Just before we made this, we visited the Carnegie Museum of Art here in Pittsburgh. I have forgotten which painting served as his inspiration, but I clearly remember our discussion about cropping images and choosing what to show and what to leave out.

He cut the snowflake freehand (I folded the paper for him first). Making snowflakes was a constant winter activity for my kids in those days. Then he cut out the shapes for the mitten, sleeve, face and hats from white paper following lines I helped him draw on white printer paper. He also cut fringes from black construction paper for the hair and shirt cuff and we glued everything onto another piece of black paper. I cut the curves for the eyes and nose, and he made circles for the pupils with a paper punch. To make the cards and gift tags, I photocopied the image, reducing it to a variety of sizes and ganging them onto a single sheet so I could print a bunch at a time. This was pre-photoshop years! We cut and pasted the images manually onto white cards or manilla tags. They looked pretty sophisticated for a five-year-old's work.

The images above and below were cut by me from silhouette paper, using a craft knife. They look challenging (and were, because the originals were fairly small - but carefully planning and working slowly are again the keys to success.

Real silhouette paper is nice to work with - a good weight and reasonably strong. You can buy it here. For these kinds of images, I draw the image on vellum tracing paper with a soft drawing pencil (like an Ebony pencil - love those guys) because they make nice thick lines that are easy to leave behind as I cut. It's best to use a slightly dull pencil. I then turn the drawing upside down onto the back (white side) of the silhouette paper and transfer the image with a wooden stylus. This means the final image will have reversed back to the same as your drawing. Be careful not to press too hard or the lines will show through on the final silhouette.

Again, I always do all the interior cuts first.

I like how the pinecone and some of the needles "violate" the borders in these. I always like that in book illustrations too. The illustrator Tomi Ungerer often had elements in his pictures violating the borders.

You can often reattach bits you've accidentally cut away by taking a thin scrap and gluing it to the back side of the main piece and the cut away part. Touching up with a little permanent black ink will hide any telltale white lines.

Below is a Santa cut by my son when he was nine or ten. I did the drawing, and he did the cutting using embroidery scissors and silhouette paper. I cut the black frame for him with a craft knife - it gives the work a nice finished appearance, I think.

My son wanted to make a Santa holding a star like the one in this charming, quirky vintage Christmas book first published in 1956. It's by Mary Chalmers, one of my all time favorite writer-illustrators.

Elizabeth discovers the star for the top of her tree has gone missing, and she bravely sets out into the snowy woods to find a new one. This was a favorite holiday story in my family growing up. We always called the book "Wizbiss" - which was how my younger sister pronounced the protagonist's name.

Unfortunately, the original, which was lovely and just the right size for small hands, belonged to that same younger sister, and I wasn't able to steal it away once we were grown. For years I tried in vain to track down a copy of my own - luckily it was reprinted a while back, though in a larger, glossier format I just don't like nearly as much.

Sigh. Books like this that were scarce before CPSIA have only become rarer still. But if you want an old copy, you can hunt for one on sites like Amazon, Alibris and AbeBooks.

I'll leave you with one last snowflake blizzard - arranged into a wreath one year to fill the space above my mantle until I could come up with some art to put there. (We'd just taken down the damaged mirror that was there before and repaired the wall.) I think I got the idea from a magazine. (Martha Stewart?)

Sydney Taylor and the All-of-a-Kind Family Books

2010-12-10T00:11:00.001-05:00

First book in the series of five, first published by Delacourt in 1951

Poop! I started writing this ages ago and meant to get it finished while it was still Hanukkah, but life is hectic these days. Well, it's not too late really, because these books, although they center around a Jewish family, also make fabulous gifts for Christmas, birthdays, and other present-giving occasions. They're universal, timeless, wonderful. (If you can track copies down - only the first seems to be in print still, though some of the others are available new as audiobooks.)

When I was a young child during the early 1960s, I knew little about the Jewish faith or holidays - even though I now realize one of my best friends was probably Jewish (her mother was a Holocaust survivor). My family, though not religious, celebrated the standard Christian holidays, and at school, we only discussed and celebrated these Christian holidays or the official American ones like Thanksgiving and Memorial Day. The local stores and my community then (Arlington, VA) only decorated for them too, and so if there were Jewish kids in my midst, it just didn't come up. In short, there was little to expand my cultural knowledge - except books, which I was lucky enough to have in abundance.

The Stair-step Sisters checking out library books in an illustration by Helen John

The All-of-a-Kind Family books by Sydney Taylor introduced me not only to a Jewish family and the special days of their faith, they transported me in space to the Lower East Side of Manhattan and in time to the turn of the 20th century. But however long ago, far away, and set in a different culture these stories were, the characters rang absolutely true to my life and family. Although there were only three girls in my family rather than the five in the books, my sisters and I were also stair-step siblings with similar squabbles, alliances, and shared experiences - and a warm, close family. I particularly identified with Sarah, who, like me, was the square-in-the-middle sister, and who, also like me, wanted badly to be a good girl, but fell short periodically through carelessness or stubbornness. (I was particularly pleased to learn recently that the author, Sydney Taylor, was actually the Sarah of the books, which were based on her own childhood and family. She changed her first name during high school - kind of like I did for a while during junior high when I added a fashionable "e" to the end of mine.)

Second book in the series

My sisters and I loved the whole series of five books, but I think our group favorite was the first one. I do know that after we moved to Ohio when we were on the cusp of adolescence, our tattered copy lived in the crammed-full bookcase in the third floor bathroom. That bathroom boasted a deep claw-footed tub where we took turns soaking away our teen angst while reading voraciously. Over time, that collection of much re-read childhood favorites became known in our family as "The Bathtub Books," and we squabbled again as we grew up and left home over who could lay claim to which ones. Which was silly, since they were all utterly waterlogged, stained, and tattered to the point of falling apart. (You can read more about them and other ideas for encouraging a love of books in your kids in an earlier post here.)

Third book in the series

To me, these books exemplify the best in multicultural literature. They are never preachy or didactic; instead, they focus on characters that nearly any child finds recognizable and interesting and feature strong stories with universal appeal. Long before the American Girls dolls appeared on the scene, they provided a gentle, inviting path into history and caring about people who might come from different backgrounds. And I can only imagine how much they must have meant to Jewish-American children, who at the time had few role models in children's books.

Fourth book in the series

All five books were beautifully illustrated in detailed pen and ink drawings by Helen John, though many of the later paperbacks have illustrations by other artists. Despite searching every which way, I was unable to track down any biographical information about Ms. John, other than a reference to her having been an author as well as illustrator - but then I couldn't find the titles of anything she'd written. If anyone out there knows more about her, I'm dying of curiosity.

Her illustrations added enormously not only to my enjoyment of the books, they really brought the time and place to life for me, by providing information not necessarily clear in the text. Looking these over again made me sad that relatively few middle grade novels today include any illustrations - kids don't outgrow their pleasure and profit from pictures when they begin to read alone.

Illustration by Helen John from chapter "Rainy Day Surprise" in All-of-a-Kind Family

The image above shows a scene from one of my favorite chapters. Papa, who has a junk shop, has just gotten in a large collection of old books. Before he resells them, he allows the always book-hungry girls to sort through them and choose some to keep. Among the treasures they find is a book of paper dolls, a wonder they hadn't even imagined existed. Here's an excerpt from near the end of the chapter:

With the volumes of Dickens, the book of fairy tales, and The Dolls That You Love parceled out among them, they trooped back to the front of the shop to show Papa their finds.
"May we keep them all?" Ella asked.

When he said "Yes," they could hardly believe their ears. They never thought to own even one book and now they had twelve. It was too wonderful!

Fifth and final book in the series

Most of my family's copies of these books arrived wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with white ribbon in the giant boxes of Christmas gifts my grandmother sent to our family from her home across the continent in California. Most of the gifts were books obtained from the bookstore where she was a clerk and squirreled away all year until the holidays in a large sandalwood chest she owned. To this day, the sight of red ribbon against white paper or the scent of sandalwood sets my heart beating with anticipation.

Now for the sad part: as I mentioned in the first paragraph, most of these books are no longer in print, and even the old editions are hard to find. What's worse, many have not been in print for years. Most of my copies are pre-1984, the year of doom under CPSIA. Yes, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act continues to prohibit all children's books printed before 1984 for use by children, regardless of how miniscule the risk they might pose (see the links in the sidebar for more information about the law and the safety of books). Many libraries have already removed all these older copies from their shelves (and discarded or destroyed them); many used booksellers won't carry them for fear of incurring gigantic fines and criminal penalties; and they are getting harder and harder to find at prices families can afford. I thank God every weekend that the yard sale people still don't seem to have heard of the law.

I have hope that with a new chairman of the commerce committee (Henry Waxman, former chair, will be replaced when Congress reconvenes) that Congress will finally relent and revise the law (or at least hold hearings on it) - but meanwhile, these precious books continue to fade away. It would be a crime if they were lost altogether. After the holidays, please write again to your senators and congressional representative. (By the way, the stay of enforcement for testing of new, harmless books expires in February - so expect prices of kids' books to rise still further and choice to drop still more if nothing happens legislatively. See this Publisher's Weekly article here.) And maybe we can all persuade Delacourt to re-print them again...

Hope springs eternal in this season.

To end on a more upbeat note, it's clear that many adults still have strong and happy memories of these books. Check out the Amazon reviews about the books, and Anita Silvey's wonderful book-a-day blog post on the books here. You can also read a detailed tribute to Sydney Taylor, who lived a fascinating life (including a stint as a Martha Graham dancer), at the Association of Jewish Libraries here. Finally, much of what I learned about Sydney Taylor, I gleaned from her thorough biography in Children's Books and Their Creators: An Invitation to the Feast of Twentieth-Century Children's Literature (Houghton Mifflin, 1995), edited by the always fabulous Anita Silvey! (If you love kids' books, it's a great reference book to add to your wish list.)

St. Nicholas Day Paper Boots: For When a Paper Shoe Simply Isn't Big Enough

2010-12-03T10:44:00.002-05:00

Not-big-enough paper shoe - Needs more room for chocolate

My tutorial for making paper shoes for St. Nicholas Day is probably my most popular post ever, which kind of cracks me up, since I hadn't imagined there would be much demand for such a goofy thing as a paper shoe. It's so popular that this cool online magazine, InCulture, asked me if they could reprint it this month as part of their holiday issue. You can find it here - and check out the rest of the magazine while you're at it. Lots of interesting articles on multicultural issues for kids and parents.

Anyway, I've recently learned there is an even greater need out there: a tutorial and template for a paper boot! Because boots are also traditional to put out for St. Nicholas Day and well-worn ones tend to smell even worse than used sneakers do, if that's possible. More importantly, a paper boot can hold WAY more chocolates and other goodies than a paper shoe can. That's a need I can appreciate.

I didn't really have any idea how to make a paper boot, though, so I turned to my smartest, most trusted friend: Ms. Google.

And she let me down. The only templates/examples I could find for paper boots were really lame. In particular, they failed on the most important characteristic of a paper boot: capacity. This is because they were basically boot-shaped envelopes.

I have limited footwear engineering skills. Really, that paper shoe pretty much exhausted them. Though I do have these really, really cool vintage-maybe-antique children's shoe "lasts." (See, I even know the technical lingo.) They're iron and really, really heavy.

I bought them at an estate sale recently, even though I have no intention of becoming a shoemaker and don't have young children anymore. My husband says I'm insane. But he says it lovingly, so I forgive him.

So I was kind of stumped. Then I tripped over someone's boots in the hallway (oops - they were mine. It SNOWED yesterday. The nerve.) And then I had a flash of inspiration for how I could adapt the basic St. Nick paper shoe into a paper boot. And it only took me two tries to make something that works.

Here's how you do it:

You'll Need

Scrap papers
Cardboard from a cereal box (for making the original shoe, if you haven't already)
Printed templates (see below)
A pen or pencil
A pair of scissors
A glue stick (preferably the strong craft kind) or white glue with a toothpick or something to apply it.
A handful of unused tissues
A smidge of patience and frustration tolerance

Steps
1.Make the paper shoe from the template and tutorial here.

2. Print out this new template for the boot's upper, and transfer it to a paper of your choice.

I used the test print sheet my stupid printer wastes ink on every time I install a new cartridge. Cut out the two pieces. (Mine has nice decorative edging because I accidentally got Sharpie all over it when I was tracing it to make the printable template. I'm pretending it's a design feature.)

3. Stuff the shoe with the unused tissues. (You can reuse them later, so just sniffle for a bit until this is done.)

Stuff them loosely. You're going to need to extract them from the finished boot later.

4. Slather some glue stick on the piece that attaches to the heel and stick it on. Be patient. Wait for the glue to dry.

5. Now glue the sort of pointy part of the other piece of upper onto the top of the shoe. (There are probably fancy technical names for these parts, like "flange" or "gasket" or "whippersnapper," but I don't know them.) BE PATIENT. It will be much easier to do the next, a-little-bit-fiddly step if you let the glue dry.

6. Pressing hard, run the glue stick along the edges where the boot part will attach to the rest of the shoe upper and turn the corner to run glue along the part that will stick to the piece you already attached to the heel of the shoe.

Then stand the shoe up and stick everything together.
This is easier said than done. In truth, it is a bit fiddly. It might not be perfect. I have a little gappy place in mine. That's okay. This is a paper boot, people, not a pair of ridiculously expensive Frye boots like my daughter wants for Christmas. Just pretend you're one of the little elf guys in this story.

Only with less hammering. You won't have much boot left if you break out the hammers.
Do one side at a time, because otherwise the glue on the other side will dry out before you finish attaching the first side.

Here's a closeup of the attached bits.

7. After the glue dries, pull out the tissues, wipe everyone's noses, and dispose of them properly. Not in recycling, even though they're paper. Too gross.

There! Not bad for a paper boot, is it? And it totally beats those envelope ones in the important capacity category. You can have a rush of enthusiasm and decorate it if you want - glue some ribbon or rickrack around the top, attach some real or paper buttons or silk flowers or something. Be creative - I bet you can come up with some very ~~good~~ clever ideas using common household items, like flourescent-colored cereals or wheels that have come off little cars.

Just don't forget to put it out for St. Nick on the night of December 5th. Because it really looks best all filled up with chocolate and other lovely goodies.

Happy Hanukkah! With Coloring Tutorial!

2010-12-01T11:43:00.001-05:00

This is a paper doll based on the star of my book Mimi, which I first posted last year in a longer piece about the holiday (complete with book recommendations and latke recipe) here. I've colored the sheet with colored pencils (though unfortunately it hasn't photographed great and scanned even worse...) Anyway, as a gift for the first day of Hanukkah, I'm going to offer some tips on coloring for young artists.

Below is the uncolored page, which you can dowload and print as a pdf here.

By the way, I apologize if you tried to download this or any of my other free printables recently and got asked to pay a monthly subscription fee to Scribd first. Apparently they were trying an "experiment" by asking people to subscribe in order to use "archived" documents (which they defined as anything that had been on there more than a couple months). They didn't notify users, so I didn't realize. But I've now changed my settings and you should once again be able to download all my printables for free. Sorry!

Tip Number One: Use the Best Quality Supplies You Can
One thing many people don't realize is that the kind of colored pencils marketed for kids are, well, lousy. If you are lucky, you'll get even a small set of artist-quality colored pencils, like these ones made by Prismacolor for Hanukkah or Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate.

As you can see, good supplies are much more expensive than the kid-quality ones - the smallest set of 12 pencils is $10 US at 50% off at the above retailer - but they are totally worth it for several reasons. First, they work better which enables kids to produce a better final product which encourages them in turn to work harder and longer at their artwork. Second, kids are more likely to take care of and keep track of something that is special and valuable; this teaches them respect for their tools and good lifelong habits. And finally, giving them "real" art suppplies lets you demonstrate that you take your kids and their interests seriously. Two of the best gifts I ever received in my life were a set of artist quality watercolors that I got when I was nine (and which I still have and use) and a drawing table my folks got me for my birthday when I turned eleven. I still have it too, but my daughter uses it now.

One caveat: artist quality supplies don't have to adhere to the same safety standards as kid materials. Make sure you choose appropriate materials for kids who still mouth things or lack the dexterity to handle tools which are sharp or otherwise dangerous. And remember the real stuff is more likely to stain...

Tip Number Two: Start Light and Work Darker
You can always make things darker, but going light again is less successful. If you start out light, you'll be able to add some darker areas around edges or in folds to give a sense of dimension. In the image below, see how I've colored Mimi lightly all over, then gone back and added darker areas (fading toward light) around the edges of her face and in her ears to give the sense of roundness and/or depth. (I've also used a slightly darker pencil for her nose, mouth and eyebrows, but you can get almost the same effect by using more pressure on the pencil.) Another note: the pink pencil I used wasn't Prismacolor but highish quality kid pencil - and see how much less waxy and smooth the coverage is than with the yellow.

By the way, I'm no master with colored pencils (which is why I work in other media professionally). You may notice I still tend to color outside the lines (and I wasn't great at coloring as a kid either). It's okay here, though, because Mimi will get cut out!

Another tip is to use dull pencils (or crayons) for large uniform areas of color and sharp ones for picking out details. And an advanced technique (which I did not use here) is to go over your colored pencils with a white one - it creates a smoother texture. That's called burnishing.

One other thing: many art educators frown on coloring; they feel it stifles creativity and doesn't teach kids real art skills. While I agree that coloring alone is not art, I disagree about its value. It lets kids (and adults) experiment and practice with basic skills and color use in a very low risk way. Similarly, using tracing paper, stencils and other "cheating" ways of drawing can help kids develop an understanding of how to draw things and muscle memory that lets them work more quickly on similar things in the future.

Tip Number Three: Shade with Other Colors

You'll get even better effects using blues, grays, and browns to add more shadows. To decide where to put shadows, look at things around you. In general, shadows go in areas that are under, behind, etc. depending on the light source. Learning to look carefully is a core skill for artists and worth cultivating daily.

In this close-up, notice how I've used some blue-grey for extra shadows (Payne's Gray is my favorite paint color for adding shadows). I have some around Mimi's nose, the tops of her shoulders, and the edges of her undies (to give a sense of puffiness). There's also some in the folds of her undershirt, but it didn't show up well in this photo.

Tip Number Four: Play with Color - and Leave some Areas White

I made Mimi's new dress a pale blue, in part because blue is a traditional Hanukkah color, but mostly because I like how the blue looks against her pink skin - a nice cool (blue) color contrasting with a warm (pink) one. With her underclothes, I went with yellow as an experiment to see which pairing I prefer (I like both, but prefer the blue a bit.) I used my light-dark technique to make the detailing on her dress look different from the main fabric too. And I chose green and yellow for the dreidel and gelt bag because I like the contrast with her dress. (Plus I made the menorah colorful, because I like the joyfulness the color scheme suggests - colors are strongly linked with emotions.)

You can play around with creating different shades by layering different colors on top of each other. I didn't here, but it is a fun and often overlooked technique.

Another thing I did was leave some areas white - we forget that the absence of color makes a statement too. So the bib of Mimi's dress is white instead of light blue (looks subtle in the picture), and her tights are lightly striped blue and white. I've also use white for modeling/texture. For example, by leaving areas of white on the toes of Mimi's party shoes, they appear both rounded and shiny.

Tip Number Five: Add Details, Make Changes, Make It Your Own!

You don't have to be limited by what is in front of you. I added an "embroidered" snowflake to Mimi's dress and yellow and orange stripes to her undies. I could have done more things - made Mimi a brown pig or even a green one. That's the beauty of coloring and drawing - you can make anything you choose!

I've always loved this description of one of the "Useless Presents" the poet Dylan Thomas recalls in his now classic book, A Child's Christmas in Wales by (I know - wrong holiday):

"...and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any color I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds."

And that's it! If you want more advanced tips on drawing with colored pencils, you can also check out this tutorial.

Here's Mimi assembled but uncolored :(.

By the way, I LOVE paper engineering. It was lots of fun for me to figure out how to make a menorah that "works." By that I don't mean light the candles on fire. You can insert the proper number in for each day. Maybe you could craft another cool thing for Mimi yourself, like a little box of colored pencils where the pencils really go in and out. Or a dreidel that really works. This site is a cool if nearly overwhelming place to get some ideas and references.

Happy Thanksgiving!: Simple Table Decor and a Last Minute Recipe for a Turkey Glaze and Sauce

2010-11-25T17:12:00.002-05:00

We celebrated Thanksgiving a day early this year because my oldest decided at the last minute to spend the actual holiday out of town with his girlfriend and her family. That left Wednesday as the only night we'd be all together. It was so nice having our big meal on Wednesday evening that we're thinking about making it our new holiday tradition; we've spent today relaxing and playing games. It feels to me much more like an extra long weekend, since we don't lose Thursday to all-day food prep, eating too much, and cleaning up. I simplified the menu a bit because Wednesday's busier and I hadn't even baked pies or anything. But I also benefitted from having two of the kids already home from college and work to help out yesterday, so it wasn't too bad getting everything together.

My daughter decorated the table, using Japanese maple leaves she'd pressed and an odd assortment of ornaments and candles from family childhoods, like the Thanksgiving candles my husband has used as long as he can remember and the funny little clay pots all three kids made for their kindergarten Thanksgiving feasts.

We had a turkey breast rather than a whole turkey again this year; I finally realized that since no one in our family especially likes dark meat, it was silly to wrestle with gizzards and trying to get the dark meat cooked adequately without drying out the white meat when we could just buy and cook (much more quickly) the part we all like best. Doh!

For a couple of years, I bought breasts from Costco that came packaged with a really delicious glaze. Costco stopped carrying that brand and I was feeling sad about the glaze again last night when it suddenly occurred to me to just look up a recipe for a similar one. Doh! again. I found a recipe that seemed promising here, but I was missing some of the ingredients. The recipe that follows is my improvised version. I also added extra liquid to the leftovers to make a sauce that could substitute for gravy (I have one kid who eats gluten-free, which makes things like gravy challenging.) Anyway, it was so good, I actually wrote it down at the urging of the whole family so I'll be able to recreate it again.

This picture shows leftovers, because I forgot to take a picture last night. And there's no sauce poured over anything because it was so popular we finished it all last night (and I noticed someone even seemed to have licked the last of it out of the pitcher).

Orange-Chutney Glaze for Roasted Turkey Breast

• 2-3 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon olive oil

• 6 ounces orange juice concentrate (about 3/4 cup – I used about 1/3 cup because that was all I had)

• 2 tablespoons Major Grey Chutney
• 2 tablespoons brown sugar

• 1 tablespoon soy sauce

• 1 teaspoon ground ginger or 2 tablespoons fresh minced ginger

• Pan juices and/or chicken broth and/or sherry or wine

Combine all ingredients except the pan juices/broth in a saucepan. Bring to a boil. Turn down heat and simmer 10-15 minutes until reduced and thickened. Baste turkey with glaze several times over the last 20 minutes of cooking. (I draped foil over it loosely.)

Just before serving, stir in enough defatted pan juices/broth/wine to make a sauce of your preferred thickness to use in place of gravy. (I kept it fairly thick still.)

This would also be tasty on pork I think. I'm going to try it the next time I make a pork roast. For that matter, I think it would be good as a glaze for roasted veggies, like green beans. Hmm - time for some taste-testing experiments.

Oh, one more thing: you can make a really excellent gluten-free pie crust for pumpkin pie by combining 1 cup finely chopped pecans (freeze them first to make it easier to grind them), 2 T of sugar, and 2 T butter. It tends to caramelize faster than regular crust, so bake for the minimum time and keep an eye on the pies.

And last but not least, thanks to all of you who read my blog and make such nice comments. I'm grateful for everyone who has stuck with me through a long blog-hiatus. And I also thank everyone whose blogs I follow; I feel so lucky to be part of a creative, and generous community that stretches around the world.

Happy Feasting!

Sunday Exploring: Chatham Village

2010-11-21T23:48:00.000-05:00

Twenty-one years ago, shortly after moving to Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania (a Pittsburgh suburb), I was wandering around my neighborhood with my one-year-old son in a backpack when I met another mom with her young son in a backpack. We shared a nice long walk that afternoon -- and have been walking together ever since. Mary Lou and I have covered a lot of ground, both literal and figurative, in the intervening years. Monday through Thursday evenings most weeks, we log five brisk miles over hilly terrain, usually close to home. On Saturdays, we frequently hit an estate sale somewhere not too far away and walk the surrounding neighborhood afterward.

But our Sunday morning walks these days are my favorites. A few years ago, we decided to walk every street and alleyway in our town. It took nearly a year of Sundays to finish Mt. Lebanon - and then we branched out into surrounding communities. In the years since, we've covered a good many neighborhoods all around Pittsburgh, and I've learned more about my city from our hikes than I'd learned in the fifteen years plus before that. We especially enjoy cemetaries, the steep hillside neighborhoods where steps often replace sidewalks, and the quirky older communities with interesting architecture and mature landscaping.

Today we visited Chatham Village, a planned community in the Mt. Washington section of Pittsburgh that's on the National Historic Register. It was developed in the 1930s in the model of the "Garden City" movement launched in England. It's as lovely and well-planned today as it was then. You can read more about it here and here.

The community consists mostly of townhouses grouped in clusters around common greens with curving sidewalks, giving it the feeling of a college campus, I think. And each cluster has a lovely "folly" like the one shown above to house communal garden implements.

The homes have lovely details - red brick, slate roofs, copper gutters and downspouts, limestone around the windows, and crests above the entry ways. And each cluster of townhomes is a little bit different.

Around the perimeter is a large park of virgin forest (dating back to colonial times and before) with paths that curve and wind along the hillside. We saw plenty of wildlife today, including a large buck with an impressive rack.

This is the updated playground, seen through the mist that hung over the hills this morning.

And I arrived home to find that a squirrel has made a nest in the planter atop my rain barrel. And all day since I've been hearing him storing his acorns inside the rain barrel (which fortunately has a screen to keep debris out of the water).

I think he and his buddies are using my squirrel bench as a buffet table. But that does seem appropriate. And maybe there's a picture book in here...

Route 19 Writers: A Blog for Writers, Readers and Anyone Who Loves Kidlit

2010-11-19T09:45:00.000-05:00

I know it seems crazy, since I haven't exactly posted regularly (okay, hardly at all) this past year, but I'm also writing now for another blog. The Route 19 Writers are a motley crew of mostly children's book writers who live along Route 19 South in the Pittsburgh, PA area. I've known most of them for years and am in awe of them as both writers and all-around-great people.

We take turns posting (at least three times a week), usually on a different theme each month. For this first month, we chose the theme "Novels" - but we allow lots of leeway in what to write about. You can see my first post on NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and other motivational writing "tools" here.

It even has the super easy directions for making this charming button chair (get it? Butt-in-Chair? That's the main tool you need to get your novel done.)

Of course, there's lots of other great stuff to find there too. A report on the great Katherine Patterson and her recent talk in Pittsburgh, a piece on finding your voice, a fabulous tutorial on twisting folktales to turn them into novels, new picture book stories, or tall tales, and even an interesting and funny discussion on figuring out what teens like to read (complete with very, very tasty recipe for Cornflake Chicken - yum.) I hope you'll check the blog out! Here!

Next month's topic is Giving and Receiving. I'm still noodling what I'll write about when it's my turn - but I'm already promising some kind of a nice giveaway. (Let me know if there's something you'd like me to write about.)

Oh, the new picture of the frog in my header is one I took this summer of one of the residents of my family's newish pond. I'll leave you with some images of flora and fauna around the pond this summer. (Can you tell I'm already feeling nostalgic for warm weather? Even though I really do love fall too.)

This deer visited daily to clean up all the fallen apples from the tree that's the base for my tree house. She was very considerate and didn't eat any of my landscaping plants.

The fish - mostly just the 12-for-a-dollar feeder goldfish - were prolific breeders this summer. It was so exciting! We rescued a few babies (which seemed to be a popular menu item for the adult fish and the frogs) and a number of them grew quite large by the end of the summer.

A view of the whole pond and new deck (before I did a lot of the planting around the pond).

So great to be back blogging! I didn't realize how much I missed it until I started up again. Thanks for your patience with me.

Happy Birthday, Frances!

2010-11-17T20:13:00.001-05:00

Karen MacPherson's syndicated Children's Corner column this week alerted me to an important occasion: the 50th birthday of Frances, star of the classic picture book series by Russell Hoban. (I strongly recommend reading Karen's column - always good and this one is chock full of interesting facts about Frances and how she came to be. Also, if you haven't read the Frances books, it's time to get to the library. Or better yet, go buy them.)

I first met Frances, the strong-willed, persnickety, song-writing, problem-solving badger, when I was a strong-willed, persnickety child myself. Although song-writing and problem-solving weren't my strengths so much, it's still small wonder that I identified with the young badger. The challenges Frances faces are universal ones of early childhood, and she confronts them with a quirky intelligence and creativity that I found both inspiring and reassuring.

To celebrate this important event, I broke out some homemade bread and jam and my copy of Bread and Jam for Frances, my favoritest Frances book of all. Everything was delicious, and the dog enjoyed our read-aloud very much.

Possibly what she liked best was that I shared my bread and jam with her.

Anyway, I noticed something while I was reading the book: one spread seemed kind of familiar to me. And then I realized why.

The lower image is a spread in my Mimi book that I must have unconsciously modeled on the Frances one shown above. How funny!

By the way, notice how my copy of Bread and Jam for Frances is in black and white with blue washes? At the time the book was printed (1964 - this was a book club copy I got through school), color printing was still both expensive and tedious. Illustrators had to meticulously make color separations by hand, with separate transparencies created for each color used. These were done in shades of gray and took real skill. That's why the old books often had only one or two colors. I feel very fortunate to be able to do my illustrations with full color and any media!

Over the years, the Frances books have been re-released with color. The top image shows two different era versions of the cover of A Birthday for Frances. And here's a comparison of an inside spread.

It's probably just nostalgia, but I like the older one better. (I do like the new color one too - just not quite as much.)

Another interesting thing to note is how much more text-heavy the older picture books were than ones published today. A friend who attended a children's writing conference last weekend said the editor who spoke recommended no more than 50 words for a picture book text. I wonder if the push for shorter and shorter texts for pretty much all picture books has contributed to the decline in their sales; as the New York Times noted recently, many parents are pushing their kids to listen to chapter books at earlier and earlier ages. Maybe they would feel less need to do so if they had meaty complex picture books like these old ones available.

Here's a brief excerpt of a scene between Frances and her mother to give you a feeling for the quality of the writing and for Frances' personality. Mother is getting things together for Frances's sister's birthday, and Frances is working through her jealousy by pretending to prepare a party for an imaginary pal:

"Who is Alice?" asked Mother.
     "Alice is somebody that no one can see," said Frances. "And that is why she does not have a birthday. So I am singing Happy Thursday to her."
     "Today is Friday," said Mother.
    "It is Thursday for Alice," said Frances. "Alice will not have h-r-n-d, and she will not have g-k-l-s. But we are singing together."
     "What are h-r-n-d and g-k-l-s?" asked Mother.
     "Cake and candy. I thought you could spell," said Frances.

By the way, in case I've convinced you to rush out and buy copies of all the Frances books (and I hope I have), you need to be aware that in honor of Frances' birthday, HarperCollins has released abridged versions of the Frances books in an "I Can Read" format for beginning readers. I haven't seen them yet, and it's encouraging that Hoban and his daughter worked together on the reformat. But I'm sure I'll never love them the way I love the originals - and I definitely recommend reading them first.

Last but not least: food. You can find my recipe for the homemade bread I nibbled today in an earlier post here. And, in case like Frances, you have learned to like some other more adventurous foods as well, here is a recipe for soup that I think goes especially well with the bread. I got the recipe from a neighbor, who got it from a cookbook - but I don't know which cookbook and the neighbor has long since moved away. I think it was called Chippewa Soup. I also may not have the recipe quite right. Somehow I never actually wrote it down; I just kind of remember it - plus I've undoubtedly changed it over the years because I am as much a revision addict for recipes as I am for the written word.

Tomato Vegetable Soup

aka Chippewa Soup

aka The Best Soup You'll Ever Eat on a Chilly Autumn Night

Ingredients
Olive oil
2-3 yellow onions, finely chopped
3-4 ribs celery, finely chopped
2-3 carrots, shredded
2-3 cloves garlic (Note: if you are lazy or pressed for time, most supermarkets carry all the veggies pre-chopped/shredded and sometimes it is just worth the extra expense)
Curry powder to taste -- I use 1 T mild curry powder when making it for people who don’t like spicy stuff (aka children), 2-3 for the more adventurous eaters (aka certain adults)
1 tsp cumin
Ground black pepper
1 26-oz can Campbell’s tomato soup, plus water to reconstitute it
2 11-oz cans Campbell’s Green Pea soup - but NO water. (Yes, it is really gross looking right out of the can. Try not to think about it.)
1 cup milk or cream (more if you prefer a thinner soup)
1 ham hock (optional)
Chopped ham (optional)
Dollop of low fat sour cream (optional)

Directions
In a large stock pan, heat the olive oil. Add the onions, celery, garlic and carrots and sauté until the onions are translucent and the celery and carrots are softened. Mix in seasonings and cook, stirring, for a minute or two to combine flavors well. Add soups and water (it is really tricky to get the pea soup stirred in well - but worth the trouble because coming across a big lump of the concentrate when you're eating your soup is an unpleasant surprise, in my book). Add ham hock, if using. Try not to examine it too closely as this may also gross you out. Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer on low heat at least one hour (more is better). Stir occasionally to prevent soup from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Shortly before serving, stir in milk or cream (and chopped ham if desired) and heat through.

This is quite good served on a doily with a tiny vase of violets, along with a crisp green salad and Swedish Sour Rye bread. If you are careful, you can take bites of each and make everything come out even.

And if you did not get this literary allusion, I am going to admonish you even more strongly to go check Bread and Jam for Frances out of the library.

Another Radio Day! Parents Rule with Pat

2010-03-18T10:46:00.004-04:00

I'm doing a radio show this afternoon on topics from my latest parenting book, The Preschooler Problem Solver (Peachtree, 2009). I'll post the announcement for the show below, which you can listen to on the radio, the internet or by podcast. Pat Montgomery, the host and a parenting expert herself, and I will cover lots of interesting topics, including how to handle oppositional kids, coping with meltdowns, talking to kids about fun topics like sex or family finances, how to help your child make and keep friends, and of course, that perennial favorite, how to get your kid to quit picking his nose at the supermarket. Should be a good hour - please join us or send Pat your questions!

In case you didn't get an email from me about the show, here's the official announcement from Pat:

It is about time someone wrote a book about preschoolers and the myriad of issues their parents face. My guest this week has done it for us and she is willing to tell all she knows. At least all that will fit into the hour long show!

Carol Baicker-McKee PhD is trained in child and family psychology, as well as being a mom of three. Her book, The Preschooler Problem Solver: Tackling Tough and Tricky Transitions with Your Two to Five Year Old, is terrific. She has so many wonderful ideas and insights from all her experience that she shares in this book. And, it is a fun and interesting read!

We are going to discuss:

The defiant toddler

Nose picking

Planning for the new baby

Toilet training

And much more.

You are not going to want to miss this show!

Blog: http://www.parentsrulewithpat.blogspot.com

Latest blogs: What to Do if You Witness a Theft?

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You are welcome to call in during live shows with questions or comments. 404-943-1620

Be sure to pass this notice on to anyone you know who would be interested in this topic.

Knowledge is power. Be informed.

As always, you can hear the show locally in Sandy Springs on 1620 a.m. or, for most of you, on the internet at www.radiosandysprings.com or www.americaswebradio from 2-3pm EST every Thursday.

Can't listen at that time?

Go to iTunes and sign up for free podcasts!! Browse for Parents Rule. That way you will never miss a show.

Go to http://www.radiosandysprings.com/showpages/parents.php to listen or download at your convenience. Any problems with that, give me a call.

Upcoming shows:

Mar 25 Helping Kids that Others Don’t

Apr 1 replay of Nightmares and Dreams

Apr 8 Dr. Papciak, our favorite pediatrician, is back

Apr 15 TBD

Apr 22 Grandparenting

Apr 29 TBD

Radio Day

2010-02-04T12:34:00.006-05:00

I'm doing two radio shows today for my latest parenting book, The Preschooler Problem Solver (Peachtree, 2009). The first show today is with Grandparenting Today on WMKV-FM in Cincinnati OH. I'll be chatting with host Sue Zimmermann from 1:30 to 2 pm EST about a variety of topics related to young kids and grandparents. The show also streams live here.

Then this evening, I'll be talking about manners for munchkins with Stacey Powells on The Exhausted Parent Network show on KMMT radio in Mammoth, CA shortly after 7 pm PST. You can click on the link to listen to the show live here.

Come join us!

Peace in the New Year

2010-01-01T21:19:00.004-05:00

I'm making a wish for peace in 2010 - for the world, for my family and friends including all of you, and for myself.

The paper crane is a symbol of peace. In 2001, I gave out paper crane ornaments (like the one in my current header) as my holiday cards, and this year I'm planning to make one daily - at the end of the year I'll turn them into something cool and auction the resulting piece for a donation to a peace-related charity (not sure which one yet).

The cranes are easy to make once you get the hang of them. A google search will reveal many, many tutorials for making them, including this animated diagram one here (I think it's pretty easy to follow.) Adding some beads makes the cranes hang a little better and look good as a stand-alone mobile. I use jewelry wire threaded through a long needle (large enough to fit through the body of the crane, from the center to the point on the top). The first bead can be a charm or dangling bead, and you can add others or just pass the wire through the body. You can also put more beads above if you like, or just make a loop in the wire to thread a ribbon through for hanging. For the last few years, I've made these often, and I keep them on a branch in my living room; if I need a quick gift for a visitor or to enclose in a note, I just grab one.

For several years, I've been making the cranes mostly from recycled papers (like the ones in the photos above). Here are a few close-ups of some from last year (though I apologize for all these crappy pix). These ones are from security envelopes:

And these are made from (left to right): a page in a magazine, a map, and a calendar page.

There are several excellent children's books about paper cranes, including this one by Rosemary Wells, one of my favorite author-illustrators. Yoko makes cranes to stay connected to her grandparents who live far away, which is a nice use for your cranes too.

This gorgeous award-winning book by the versatile Molly Bang is one of my all-time favorites with cut-paper illustrations. Her paper sculptures (and the book design) are so clever and detailed and just beautiful - they really make the story come to life. The book was first published in 1985, which means it squeaks by the CPSIA disaster (phew) and is in print still in any event. You can read the Molly Bang's excellent discussion about the Chinese folk tale, her book, and how teachers can use it with their students here.

And finally, the book that is synonymous with paper cranes for generations of students: the true story of Sadako, a 12-year-old girl who contracted leukemia in the wake of the atomic bombing of Japan and tried to fold 1000 paper cranes to make her wish of recovery come true (there are conflicting stories about whether she succeeded in finishing the cranes).

The book is an excellent starting point for many difficult discussions with older kids and young teens. It's a vintage book, first published in 1977, so the older copies do fall under the CPSIA axe; fortunately, it has been reprinted many times and is still readily available. You can read the wikipedia article about Sadako here. Recently, Sadako's brother, who still has some of the original cranes, donated one to the 9/11 memorial. You can read the CNN story about it and see a photo of one of Sadako's cranes here.

I'll close with the words on the base of the Children's Peace Memorial in Japan that was inspired by Sadako's story (and to which you can send your cranes):

"This is our cry.

This is our prayer.

For building peace in this world."

Cut Paper Christmas

2009-12-22T12:39:00.009-05:00

I'm not sure why, but I always have urges to do cut paper crafts at Christmas (which is why the floors are always covered in tiny scraps at the holidays).

The two paper cuts above were leftovers from a flurry I cut one year to decorate packages. They're basically just the snowflake idea. I precut thin paper (these were origami paper) into a circle, folded it in half (right sides together), in half again, and then into thirds and then cut patterns out freehand. There are a few simple tips that may help you make especially intricate ones: first, do the folding carefully and press the creases well (you can even iron them). Second, have a mixture of large cut away areas and others that are narrow and repeating. Be sure to use very sharp scissors; I use embroidery scissors. (Though check out these amazing Polish paper cuts that were traditionally made with sheep shears!) Finally, take care not to tear delicate areas when you unfold them. (Small tears can be repaired by gluing narrow support pieces to the back of the paper cut.) I always iron my finished piece flat.

The paper cut above was done by my oldest son when he was almost 10, and the similar one below was cut when he was not quite 5. You can see he gained a lot of skill in the years between. In both cases, I folded a piece of paper for him (right sides together) and drew one image onto the wrong side, making sure I had an area of join along the fold. By 10 he was able to cut the design out pretty accurately by himself. I showed him how to trim the excess paper close to the drawn lines and then to cut into tight areas, removing sections at a time, rather than trying to cut along the whole perimeter. When he was younger, I held the paper and rotated it for him as he snipped (mouth open - why do kids do that when they cut with scissors?). Even so, he accidentally snipped off the antlers, but they're cute fawns or does anyway.

Other tips to help young cutters: First, work moderately large and minimize the number of curves or delicate stand-alone areas. Also, use a moderately heavy paper, like old paper bags (below) or coated silhouette paper (above). Cardstock is usually too heavy for folded designs - takes a lot of hand strength - and thin papers flop too much, becoming frustrating.
The teddy bear below was by my daughter when she was going on 6. She had better fine motor skills than my son did around that age, and she was able to cut the bear on her own, though I recall cutting out and gluing in place the eyeballs and nose/mouth pieces.
Can't recall which kid did the penguins below, but they were accordian-folded, like the strings of paper dolls.
The tree below was our Christmas card one year. Last year I made up a page of smaller images to use as gift tags, and meant to post them as a printable pdf - but apparently I never did. I'll see if I can hunt it down and put it up tonight. I made the ornaments with handheld punches while the design was still folded in half.

Hm. I just thought of one thing that has probably prompted my Christmas paper cut connection: these Danish paper cuts. I bought these at a little shop at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware many years ago. (Sorry the photo is blurry.)

The top red one I hung the Christmas after I got it. Then I decided I could leave it up until Valentine's Day, because of the heart theme. Then I decided I could leave it up all year because of the kitchen/cooking theme. Then it faded to almost white...

I was about to throw it away when I realized I could just paint it red again, so I did! I think it's even brighter now than when it was new.

If all those paper cuts sound too complicated for you or your kid, you could make something like these trees instead, which are crafted entirely from recycled materials (from left: newspaper, greenish magazine and catalog pages, and someone's old physic's homework. The stars are from a Triscuits box and the papers are just taped to cones I made by twisting - and sometimes stacking - and taping together subscription cards from magazines. I stuffed extra recycled paper inside the cones to weight them and make them stand better).

To make these, cut long strips of paper, fold them in half, right sides together. Mark a line to cut to, and use your scissors to cut fringye-y "bites" up to the line. For younger kids, cut the strips over-wide, so there's less chance they'll cut all the way through, and stretch the paper taut by taping it between two chairs; you can trim the paper near the fringe afterward. Start attaching the strips of fringe near the bottom of your cone in a spiral, anchoring it frequently with small pieces of masking tape. You can make a little extra piece taped into a cone for a nice pointy top, and tape a star on to hide any lopsided parts.

I used these for a centerpiece at a party last year, and several people asked me where I bought them - they really come out looking nice.

After you finish your craft, relax with Jan Pienkowski's gorgeous silhouette illustrations in his telling of The First Christmas. This book was first published in 1984, making it toxic waste under CPSIA; fortunately there are later printings available.

Or enjoy this incredible silhouette version of The Night Before Christmas by Thai artist Niroot Puttapipat. Absolutely breathtaking - and with an amazing pop-up on the last spread. (It's a recent book - 2007 -- so no CPSIA worries.) Although the cover says it's a papercut edition, I think Puttapipat actually made his silhouettes with pen and ink (as did Pienkowski I believe). [You have to scroll down to see the photo of the spread - I think I needed to crop the photo.]

Christmas All Dolled Up I

2009-12-21T12:08:00.002-05:00

Dolls and Christmas have been entwined in my heart since I found Tiny Tears, above, under the tree the year I was three (I think). She had some great features - she drank from a bottle with real water in it, cried and wet, and her eyes only closed if you lay her down and rocked her. She also came with pleasing accessories - clothes, a doll bottle, diapers, and in my vivid memory, a pacifier that was the only way to make her tears stop. I clearly recall losing the pacifier on Christmas night when we ventured out to my cousins' house for dinner and weeping along with her as she cried out her lifetime supply of tears. But I recently learned from Kaylee's Corner that I have a faulty memory: Tiny Tears didn't come with a pacifier, much less need one to stop crying. It must have been her bubble pipe that I lost as I have no recollection of it in ensuing years.

As you can see, Tiny was subject to some vigorous playing (and grooming) over my childhood. I practiced my mothering skills on her, cuddled her for comfort (hard body and all), pretended like mad with her, and even used her as an accepting, nonjudgmental confidante. Though I had many much loved dolls over the years, Tiny was and is my favorite of all and still sits by my work area to inspire me.

Did you have a favorite doll?

If you'll be giving someone a doll for Christmas this year, and I hope you will be, you might want to consider a last minute dash to the bookstore (or click on an online seller) for a doll-themed book to go with it. Here are few of my vintage recommendations, one holiday-related, some not (and more to come in a later post I hope):

The Best Loved Doll by Rebecca Caudill with illustrations by Elliot Gilbert

This old-fashioned, sweet story is back in print - hooray! - but the vintage copies are more appealing to me. It tells the story of a little girl invited to a party where prizes will be given for dolls in various categories. The girl owns dolls that would likely win prizes, but there's no prize that would be right for Jennifer, the doll she loves best. Which doll will she choose?
The small rag doll above, perched on a page from the book, was also well-loved (though Tiny still claims my heart). My mother made her for me when I was in third grade and having a rough time with a teacher who was a poor fit for me. The doll wore a dress that matched one my mom made for me - and she fit right in the pocket of my dress, so I could carry her along for comfort without anyone being particularly aware. Her dress (and mine) have gone astray in the years since, but I did sew her a new outfit this year. I'm grateful to her and my mother for making that tough year a little easier.

A Gift from the Lonely Doll by Dare Wright
This holiday book was part of a series of books about a Lenci doll named Edith and her adoptive family that included Mr. Bear and Little Bear. As a child, I loved these books because the characters seemed so utterly real (apparently to their creator as well, whom you can learn more about at her official website here.)

In this book, Edith and the Bears are off to visit relatives for the holidays, while Edith, determined to make something special for Mr. Bear, suffers some handmade gift misfortunes (with which I can readily identify). One thing I always loved about these books was the way the dolls inhabited basically a people-sized world - it underscored my fantasy that dolls were living, sentient beings.

William's Doll by Charlotte Zolotow

If you have boys on your gift list, please consider a doll for them too! The dolls (and softie) below are ones that belonged to the males in my household. From left: Ted-Ted, a new baby gift to my middle son, he traveled far and wide with his owner having adventures like falling in the toilet in a Toronto hotel; Scotty, who was a Christmas gift to my oldest the year he got a new brother (I'm going to monitor that child's parenting skills closely when the time comes - he spent a lot of time poking Scotty's eyes, dragging him around by the hair caveman-style, and submerging him for long periods of time while bathing him, also, Scotty was always naked); and last but not least, Pearl, who was beloved by my husband when he was small and later by all of my kids, but especially by the oldest.

William's Doll was revolutionary when it was released. You can read about it on the author's website here. William is a little boy who likes lots of playthings, but wants a doll - which his father refuses to buy for him. Fortunately, a wise grandma intervenes, explaining that William needs a doll

"so that

when he's a father
like you,
he'll know how to
take care of his baby
and feed him
and love him
and bring him
the things he wants,
like a doll
so that he can
practice being
a father. "

Lest you think this book is outdated and no longer needed, pay a visit to the doll section in any big box or toy store - everything is still pink and girly. And I still know plenty of dads who'd prefer their sons not have baby dolls. Sigh.

An CPSIA Update

As we near the end of the year, vintage children's books remain banned for sale or lending to children under CPSIA (though most libraries are leaving them on the shelves until ordered not to). There have been some recent developments that give me hope that change may be coming. See this recent article in Publisher's Weekly about how the law currently affects the children's book market, including vintage books. I was only able to find this cryptic dispatch about ALA executive director Emily Sheketoff's meeting with the head of the CPSC. Keep pressuring Congress if you care about these old books.

Happy Hanukkah!

2009-12-16T15:37:00.008-05:00

Happy Hanukkah! Nearly belatedly! In honor of the Jewish Festival of Lights, I have another Mimi paper doll available to print and color; you can get it here. There's a brief story-ette about Mimi going to a Hanukkah feast, and it includes a menorah that can stand up when assembled, as shown above. The top part of the menorah is a "pocket" in which you can insert the correct number of candles for the current night of Hanukkah (today is the 6th day of Hanukkah for 2009, so you'd insert six candles, plus the center one or shammes candle, which is used to light the others). I was too lazy/rushed to color Mimi and her menorah, but she looks great "colorized" with colored pencils or crayons.
Not sure why this image came out vertically; thought I'd saved it rotated...

Quick question: I've been posting various paper dolls as sort of doodly coloring pages - just pencil sketches, and no color. What do you think - should I keep doing them that way, or would you greatly prefer something more final-artish that you'd have to print in color? (Keep in mind that would likely mean I'd make even fewer of them...)

One of my favorite things about December is the variety of special days (Christmas, Hanukkah, St. Lucia Day, St. Nicholas Day, the winter solstice, etc.), and the opportunities they provide to learn about different cultures (or even just people who have different traditions). My husband and I both grew up celebrating Christmas, so that's the December holiday we celebrate with our kids, but our extended families include people from diverse backgrounds, including the Jewish faith. We live some distance from them, so our kids have only occasionally celebrated Hanukkah with those relatives. Fortunately, though, we long had a tradition of sharing holidays with neighbors and good friends who are Jewish. Their kids came over each year to help decorate our Christmas tree, sing a few Christmas songs, and have a holiday dinner, and our kids went to their house each year for a Hanukkah feast, complete with dreidel games and songs and decorations. (They always sent extra latkes home for me, the latke-fiend. Yum!)

Here's my favorite low-fat latke recipe. I don't have a photo to show you because I haven't managed to make them yet this year, but I'll try to add a picture later. These are quite tasty, though perhaps not as scrumptious as the crispy fried ones. I cut the recipe out of some newspaper many years ago; more than that I can't tell you about its origin. Sorry.

Low Fat Potato Latkes

3 lbs. potatoes (I've used both Idaho and Yukon gold)

1 onion

1/3 cup matzo meal or flour

1/2 tsp baking powder

3 T chopped parsley

2 eggs plus 4 additional whites

salt and freshly ground pepper, to taste

2-3 T canola oil (I've used olive oil on occasion and that was good too)

Low fat sour cream and/or applesauce for garnish

Preheat oven to 450 F, with a nonstick baking sheet inside. Peel potatoes (if desired) and grate them and the onion coarsely. Squeeze handfuls to remove as much liquid as possible. Transfer potatoes and onion to a bowl, and stir in meal/flour, baking powder, parsley, eggs and salt and pepper. Pour the oil onto the hot baking sheet and spread it around with the back of a wooden spoon. Spoon 2 1/2 inch mounds onto the sheet, leaving at least 1 inch between. Bake until golden, 6-8 minutes (or a little more), turning at the half way point. While they're baking, sing "The Dreidel Song" ("Oh, dreidel, dreidel, dreidel,/ I made it out of clay./ And when it's dry and ready,/ Oh dreidel I will play!") and challenge the kiddies to a game for gelt (the chocolate coins wrapped in gold foil that you may have given out on St. Nicholas Day). You are not allowed to cheat, although you may save a little "grown-ups only" chocolate aside for later. Serve latkes promptly with sour cream and applesauce.

Two excellent vintage Hanukkah-related books to enjoy (both fortunately are still available new and both squeak past the CPSIA axe):

The Trees of the Dancing Goats written and illustrated by Patricia Polacco tells the true story of an incident from her childhood when her Christian neighbors came down with scarlet fever right at Christmas. Her family used their Hanukkah feast and decorations to assemble holiday food and lovely trees to rescue Christmas for the sick families. The illustrations are fabulous and the story could not be any more heartwarming or more beautifully told. We read this book every year. Here's a link to her website, with assorted printable and freebies related to this book (and others too)

Next: Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel and illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman.

I love this book. It's perfect for kids who like a bit of a scare (though I remember one of my kids made me read the goblins' dialogue in my "regular voice" because my goblin one made the experience a bit too terrifying). It's a longer picture book, which is another reason to save it for slightly older kids. But what a great tale, of the triumph of good over evil, and cleverness over brute strength. Lots of fun. And as for the illustrations, well, sadly the world will never again see the likes of Trina Schart Hyman. She was really something.

Happy Hanukkah! Or however you choose to spell it!

My Creative Space - The Holidays Are Coming!

2009-12-10T22:47:00.003-05:00

Not too surprisingly, I continue to fall farther behind with my attempts at daily blogging this month, even though the weather has been keeping me home and mostly inside - though also computer and sewing machine-free, as I seem to be taking my electrical interference tendencies to the wider community and causing neighborhood electrical outages. (Really we got some of that huge storm that hit much of the U.S. through here - really wild winds and plummeting temps for the last couple days. Brrr.)

On my drawing table this week are the little angels above. I made the prototypes last year (based on the characters in my Merry Christmas, Cheeps and Mimi books) intending them to be gift tags that could be made into ornaments, but never finished them. The dog found the paper prototypes the other day and got completely freaked out by them (they move when she breathes heavily on them), which inspired me to finish them, if for no other reason than the opportunity to freak the dog out in living color.

On my sewing table were also this old doll, in bad need of a new dress...

...and this new one in need of, well, everything.

Lots of sewing and ironing!

Head on over to kootoyoo's to see the rest of the creative spaces bursting with projects. And take your time checking them out, because Kirsty's taking a well-earned break until after the holidays. (Phew - gives me more time to make some progress on my studio. And maybe finish up some of these projects.) While you're there, be sure to check out the pix of Kirsty's own beautiful creative space. I'm so jealous!

Hot+Not: Computers and Piggies and Lanterns, Oh My!

2009-12-08T23:28:00.006-05:00

Hot. Not. Loobylu. Need I say more?

This week, I'm starting with the NOTS.

Not. Any Computer in Our House. Or, for that matter, any electrical appliance, like say my car. My refrigerator. Half the lightbulbs.

Lordy, it's been a week of technology-related woes, and I still feel a bit shaky. I know I was complaining about this last week, but things just kept getting worse every time I turned around, and of course my husband was out of town for much of the week, leaving me, the person who still struggles even just to turn on the TV (which is really not my fault, since we seem to have like a thousand remotes and way too many buttons and I never have the right ones), to be the family Geek Squad. Mostly that means we were computer-light (hence the week of no posts - but I have lots of stuff half written I'll try to post in catch-up fashion). And the car wouldn't go, so I was stuck at home. And the refrigerator was WAY too cold, freezing all the veggies and making the butter extra-rock hard. Maybe even diamond-hard. And I don't know what the heck was going on with the light bulbs, but they were burning out left and right and I still haven't caught up replacing them.

Making Little Dresses for Little Piggies.

This little dress was way too small. This little dress was way too big. And this little dress was really too big too, but I fudged and made it kind of fit because I couldn't bear to try again.

Not getting the recipe for this St. Nicholas Day treat up until today. Two days after St. Nicholas Day.

These are actually buckeyes, which aren't officially a St. Nick treat, but they are very similar to a traditional St. Nick candy I found online. More importantly, they are super easy, no cook, use only ingredients I already have in the house, and contain chocolate.

Here's what you do: Combine 3/4 cup of peanut butter, 2 T honey, 1/4 cup crushed graham crackers OR crushed breakfast cereal, and a handful of mini chocolate chips in a bowl. Stir and mush around with your hands, adding a little more of this or a little more of that until the texture seems right - sticks together adequately to shape into small super ball-sized balls and doesn't "melt" into a blob if you walk away for five minutes. You can roll the balls in grated chocolate or dip them in melted chocolate for fanciness, but the plain ones taste perfectly wonderful.

I used natural peanut butter because I think it tastes better, but it does have the disadvantage of having the oil leach out if you don't eat them all in the first hour. Fortunately that is not a big problem.

That's it! Now the HOT.

Little Piggies

Specifically the hot babes above. I finally finished making prototypes and working up tutorials and patterns for making two different styles of Mimi dolls to go with my book of the same title. It was hard for me because I have not really sewn much with an actual pattern since high school. And I've definitely never made up my own pattern first (as opposed to just winging it as I go). I'm hoping to have the patterns and tuts finished and posted here in the next day or two.

Mimi 1 is posable and intended for kids past the age of putting things in their mouths because she does have small parts (like her eyes, nose, and buttons - oh, and her belly button. And her bunny slippers). (Secretly she's my favorite. Also secretly, I'm giving her to my daughter for Christmas because Sara's kind of gaga for her, even though I messed up Mimi's ear, her legs, and half her other body parts.) I'm working on some other outfits too, like her tutu, jammies, tiara, and cape. And of course Bunny and Frank-the-Roly-Poly-Bug.

Mimi 2, below, is a softie appropriate for babies and toddlers. Her features are embroidered or sewn (her nose and belly button), and she's a little larger and softer and easier for a little one to grasp and tote to bed. She's very sweet and cute, especially for my first effort with this sort of thing, but she doesn't seem quite as...spirited, I guess, as posable Mimi.

SNOW!

Technically cold, but light and magical like this, and in the run-up to Christmas, just right hot for me. Of course, we're getting freezing rain at the moment, but I did enjoy the white stuff while it lasted.

And Ice!

As in ice lanterns. I blogged about making these last year here. Jennifer Hedberg, the ice lantern lady I interviewed for the Nick Jr. article that featured them, has added a nice blog to her website here with lots of cool (get it?) new tips, supplies you can order, and pretty pictures.

My daughter made several of these over the weekend, and fortunately we lit them yesterday (before the temps warmed up and the rain came), even though that was one day early for celebrating La Fete des Lumieres (which is December 8th) in honor of Mary. I'd never heard of the holiday until last week - but as it turns out to be celebrated only in Lyons, France, I think I can be forgiven. Still I'd love to go check it out some day. Here are some links where you can read about it and look at pretty pictures.

Hot+Not: Hearts and Chili and More

2009-12-02T17:23:00.006-05:00

I'm joining in again with what's hot and what ain't at Loobylu (and you should definitely head over there to wish her a happy 10th blogging birthday at a minimum), but I'm starting to squeak in just under the deadline every week - but it's one of the "nots" fault. At least it's not yet midnight on Wednesday (here in Pittsburgh anyway), so here's my list:

HOT

A Template for the Scandinavian Heart Tutorial Which I posted, um, last December here. Well, now that I've remembered again how to turn jpegs into pdf files and post them so you can actually get them (I think Blogger still doesn't allow them - somebody please correct me if I'm wrong), I decided to make a new printable (can't find the old one anymore) and quick get it up. You can get it here. It's not exactly pro-quality or anything, but it does get the job done - as shown in the examples above.

This (above, not the chili below) is what the finished templates should look like when you make them out of your cereal box.

Turkey Chili - and Using Up the Last of the Thanksgiving Turkey

This is such an easy meal and satisfying on a cold night (and again for lunch the next day) and it makes a nice change from yet another turkey sandwich. I make my chili dinners a little differently each time (my usual cooking approach), but here's more or less the way I did it this time - and it was very good.

Turkey Chili

Olive oil for sauteing (1-2 T)

2-3 ribs celery, chopped

1 large onion, chopped

2-3 cloves garlic, minced

Other veggies (optional) like shredded carrots, peppers, or finely chopped broccoli, or whatever you have about to go bad

All the leftover turkey, cut into cubes - or 1 lb ground

2 cans chili beans, 1 mild, 1 medium (you can substitute whatever canned beans you like - I often use one can of black beans - but you may need to increase the other seasonings if they're plain)

2 small cans diced tomatoes (these had more onions and garlic and peppers in with them)

1 medium can tomato sauce

2 T, more or less to taste, chili powder (although I think that was a tad too much here)

1-2 tsp cumin

Dollop of sour cream and/or shredded cheddar cheese and/or rice or something like that (all optional)

Saute the chopped veggies in the olive oil until soft and add the cubed or ground meat. Add the beans, canned tomatoes and sauce and bring to a gentle boil. Add the seasonings gradually, tasting frequently (it's easy to go overboard). Stir in well, reduce heat and allow to simmer until heated through or the kitchen smells incredible. Serve as is or over rice (or noodles, or potatoes, or even toast). Garnish with sour cream and/or cheese, especially if you've accidentally made it too spicy. Great served with cold beer, hot corn muffins and a tossed salad.

Now I'm hungry again.

This Book It's called The Worst Kids in the World in Australia. Here's a link to the author's website.

This year I've decided to review mostly vintage holiday books (see my nots for why), which is easy for me to do since there are so many I love. This chapter book has been a favorite of my family's for many years. I'm reading it aloud to my daughter yet again (I absolutely cannot shake the daily holiday book readings no matter how old my kids get - I'm worried that next December I'll have to read them to the dog after Sara's off at college too). Anyhow, how can you resist a holiday book that opens, "The Herdmans were absolutely the worst kids in the history of the world. They lied and stole and smoked cigars (even the girls) and talked dirty and hit little kids and cussed and took the name of the Lord in vain and set fire to Fred Shoemaker's old broken-down toolhouse." Fortunately, the book is still in print and easy to find (plus there's a movie version and a play script, though I've not seen either).

Having My Mini Pie Tutorial Mentioned on joepastry Great website for foodies. You can find it here and read his short post about my little apple pies here. I'm drooling with pleasure. Thanks to Lisa Holewa, author of the fabulous parenting book What Kindergarten Teachers Know for mentioning the post to Joe.

College Applications. Getting Done! 4 down and bunch still to go but we are all less grouchy already. And as a bonus the girl already got an acceptance letter (probably the only one she'll get until April, but it sure does take the pressure off). I would be completely content not to ever edit/proofread another application essay as long as I live.

NOT

Bad Electrical Karma I seem to be breaking (or at least causing to work badly) every electrical item I get near. First one computer, then my email stopped working on the other (and I've lost apparently forever, all my old saved ones in my folders), my car's been acting up, and now my beloved Mac is being as....slow...as...a...turtle...eating....molasses. I've restarted everything and nothing is better. It is driving me insane.

The *&#%# CPSIA Law Which is not going away, not getting tweaked to resolve its flaws, and is scheduled to move forward with testing requirements come February. Vintage books, despite being so low a risk that NO ONE has ever gotten lead poisoning from one, remain on the chopping block, and I worry what will happen come February. I can still find old kids' books for sale online, but almost none at my local used bookstores or the library bookshop. I worry they're being pulped. I know, your eyes are glazing over. Everyone who knows me is tired of hearing about this - BUT IT IS STILL A REAL PROBLEM! And it's going to get worse. Call your congress people again and give them a good ranting for the holiday. I know I'm going to. Again.

There, not too bad. Other little grumblies, but mostly life is good. Though my house isn't decorated, I haven't bought gifts much less wrapped them, and the only lights up are the ones I had up in the backyard over the summer (but they still look festive out there, so I think that can count). But I feel merry anyway.

Get Ready for St. Nicholas Day - by Making Paper Shoes with My Handy-Dandy Tutorial!

2009-12-01T20:55:00.013-05:00

How goofy are paper shoes? But when I checked the stat thing for my blog the other day, I noticed that lots of people have been coming here looking for directions and a template for making them for St. Nicholas Day, which is coming up fast on December 6th. I felt kind of bad because I don't have anything like that on here. And then, probably because I've been busy making little bunny slippers for my Mimi doll, I realized I could figure out how to make some, so I did. These ones are just the right size to hold the bag of chocolate coins St. Nick is likely bringing my kids in a few days. (You can buy the same ones at Aldi's. Yum.) These paper shoes turn out to be very easy to make, and practically free (except for a small quantity of glue) because I used all materials from the recycling bin.

My husband says blogging is making me completely lose my marbles. He may be right. Only now am I wondering why people would want to make paper shoes for St. Nick Day - for party favors? For a class project? Because they're not sufficiently addicted to chocolate to overlook the fact that their bag of chocolate coins smells a bit like old sneaker if they put out their regular shoes to receive treats, like we do?

Whyever. Here's the tutorial:

STEP ONE: Gather your materials You'll need:

a printed copy of the template, which is available as a pdf here,
some lightweight cardboard (I used some from an empty cereal box),
some scrap paper (I used the insides of security envelopes, which I am absolutely addicted to these days - I have fits if anyone rips the envelopes when opening bills),
some kind of a quick grabbing glue, like Alene's Fast Grab Tacky Glue, pictured above (and no, Aleene's does not give me any kind of a kickback for how frequently I mention their glues, but I wouldn't say no if they offered one...),
a pair of scissors, and
a pencil for tracing the patterns

STEP TWO: Transfer your patterns and cut out all the pieces I just cut out the templates and traced around them on the back side of my paper, but there are many other ways to transfer patterns, and I will guess you are smarter about the whole thing than I am. Remember that the heel upper piece needs to be cut along a fold.

I did cut 2 of the sole templates, so I could give the slippers a nice, finished looking bottom. I cut them with the cardboard right sides together (whatever that is for you) because I wanted the plain brown to show both inside the shoe and on the bottom of the sole. This is because I am insane.

STEP THREE: Fold the tabs on the uppers toward the wrong side of the paper For you origami people, if you're looking at the right side of the paper, it should be a mountain fold.

STEP FOUR: Ignore the picture above and glue the heel/upper piece on first Or carefully peel the rear part of the toe piece off so you can get the other piece glued in place...

Start by spreading a thin line of the tacky glue along the outer edge of the bottom of sole A (the top of this piece will be what shows inside the shoe). Glue the upper to the sole starting by attaching the tab along the fold to the middle of the heel. Work toward the front, bending the upper so that the fold along each tab is snug against the sole - should be pretty easy.

Then attach the toe upper the same way, starting with the middle tab. This is a bit trickier to glue because you have to allow the top of the upper to bow up over the sole, but it's still not terribly difficult once you get the hang of it. Position the tabs at whatever angle gives you a snug fit to the sole.

STEP FIVE: Ta-Da! You can be done right now, or be perfectionistic and glue Sole B over Sole A to hide those unsightly tabs on the bottom of the shoe.Now you really are done.

After I finished this tutorial, I had the bright idea to do a google search of my own for paper shoes. Naturally there are a number of others out there. I like the shoes here (meant as a shower favor thing, but that hardly matters) - they're so cute and the template looks so professional - but I do think they're probably a lot more trouble than mine. They're from Lovebug Scrapbook who says they're adapted from a tutorial in an old issue of Somerset magazine.

Now for my suggested twists on a new tradition for celebrating St. Nicholas Day. Take your kid shopping for some new shoes -- for someone needy. "Encourage" him chip in some of his own money if he has any (and if he's 3 and up, he ought to have small amounts to spend, save, and give). Then help him write a note to St. Nick saying he'd like St. Nick to take the shoes instead of leaving him presents in them, and give the new shoes to a child who really needs some. St. Nick will likely leave behind some of these paper ones with some treats anyhow, and a nice note about how he appreciates your child's kindness so much that Black Peter definitely won't be leaving him any coal this year!

You can help St. Nick donate the shoes to a local homeless shelter, women's shelter, or other organization that collects shoes for needy kids. Or you can make a donation to Soles 4 Souls here, which does a lot of good things.

While you're awaiting St. Nicholas's visit, you might want to read about him. If you'd enjoy a book that focuses on the religious aspects of the man and his holiday rather than the folktale and celebration angle, I highly recommend my friend Julie Stiegemeyer's book, pictured above. Julie has such a clear, warm writing style that I can't help feeling a bit teary every time I read her books. This one is clearly a standout among St. Nick books too - it continues to be a mega-seller year after year. I have amazon ranking envy... Here's a link to read more about it on Julie's blog, and also one for buying the book on amazon, thereby making me feel even more jealous (in a nice way).

Still hungry for more about St. Nicholas and the celebration on December 6th? Check out my last year's post here or check out this amazing website completely devoted to the holiday. It has stories, recipes, crafts (including yet another paper shoe one, sigh), songs, e-cards and more.

Update Note I've added a tutorial and template for expanding the paper shoe into this paper boot. You can find the tutorial and a link to the printable template here.

Advent Traditions: Encouraging Affection, Kindness, and Gratitude with Tiny Food and Little Notes

2009-11-30T09:20:00.004-05:00

Happy Advent, which I guess technically started yesterday, but in my household it begins officially on December 1st (making me early! At least in the U.S.!) Last year, I wrote about my family's advent traditions which are focused around a little Elf dropping by to leave the kids little gifts and chocolates in a pocket calendar to minimize the "I can't wait for Christmas" whining. I also linked to a zillion ways to make your own creative calendar. (You can see my 2008 post here - I checked and all the links still work. Amazing.)

Anyhow, over the last year while working on my Preschooler Problem Solver book, I talked to a lot of parents about their families' holiday traditions and ended up feeling regretful that I'd failed to take our calendar tradition to the next level and use it to help instill some better character traits in my kids. Some families, for example, instead of doling out more goodies every day to their already privileged kiddos, set up a little empty creche with a container of straw next to it. The idea is that the kids (and I guess the adults too) add a straw to the creche each time they do a good deed. The family tries to amass enough kind works to create a nice cozy soft bed for the baby Jesus by December 24th. They didn't mention anything about having to remove straws for evil deeds done to your little brother, but that corollary might be useful in certain unnamed households.

Other families have traditions like decorating a tree via good deeds (you add an ornament each time you do something kind), having secret Santas within the family, secretly delivering goodies or thank you notes to deserving people around the community, or putting notes with compliments or promises of a family activity in their calendars instead of sugary things or cute erasers shaped like animals.

The closest my family came to some advent altruism was leaving an occasional little something for the advent elf and writing him teeny thank you notes at the end of the advent season. I'm reasonably proud I did that (not every night or anything! I was way too tired, plus struggling to remember to, um, remind the elf to visit in a timely fashion). You can read about sending elf thank yous in a post from last year here and find my pdf template for making a cute cardstock elf mailbox and mini card and envelope here. Anyhow, today's craft is making elf-sized food and arranging a welcoming rest stop for the present-deliverer who visits your house. This stuff is actually edible, as both I and the dog can attest.

Naked Mimi, above (I will finish her dress one of these days, very soon), is standing, or more precisely, sitting in for our elf, who just happens to be 9 inches tall like her, in front of a tempting wee feast, featuring a properly crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cut on the diagonal as it should be, potato chips, apple slices, and bits of a blackberry artfully arranged to look like grapes (until they shriveled up while they sat on the counter for a couple hours waiting for me to get around to taking a picture of them).
We have prepared almost this same menu with great success for our ant picnics/science experiments on many occasions, and I can testify that the recipes are easy enough for a four year old to manage most of the steps, (leaving only a little peanut butter globbed on the underside of the kitchen table to be discovered at a later date by an unwary visitor's knees).

Take a slice of bread (white is best, given the suggested use for the leftovers for "cinnamon rolls" - but you can use whole grain white if your elf is into healthy eating). Cut off the crusts and hand your kid a rolling pin. A full-size one works fine, but it's much, much more satisfying to use one of those little ones that comes with play kitchen sets. (If the bread is too wide for the little roller, you can cut it in half.) Roll the bread out as thin as possible (which is amazingly thin). Cut two small squares to the scale of your choice, and then thinly spread jelly on one side and pb (or vegemite or whatever it's called in Australia) on the other. (Fingers or a table knife work fine for spreading, but again, a toy knife will seem just right.) Pre-slice an apple into smallish bits and give your child a plastic or toy knife to make them smaller yet. One potato chip broken into tiny bits will yield enough elf chips to last him several days. The blackberry thing is probably best reserved for someone with a delicate touch, like not your average 4-year-old boy.
Then it's onto dessert! The cookie plate above features a pseudo cinnamon roll made by spreading a wide strip of the remaining smushed bread with a smear of Nutella (possibly the most heavenly substance known to man), which is then rolled up jelly-roll style and carefully sliced into spirals. If you were being very fancy, you could squeeze a little white frosting on it. I am too lazy. The cookies are made from a small ball of toll house cookie dough snagged from the batch of cookies I was making for the college student about to head back to school after break. For the chocolate chip cookie on the right, I just mixed in a few mini-morsels and shaped the whole thing into a ball slightly larger than a petite pea. The pseudo peanut butter kiss on the left was made from a ball of plain dough, baked along side the chocolate chip cookie (and lots of their little companions) at 375 F for 3 minutes (cooking times may vary by oven - start checking at the 2 minute mark). A mini morsel was pressed into the center of the cookie while it was still hot.
If it were the elf's birthday or he'd been especially thoughtful and generous lately, you could bake him a cake like the one above. It was made by baking two slightly larger balls of plain cookie dough (about the size of a smallish grape I'd say) for 3 and 1/2 minutes. After cooling, the top of one cookie was spread with Nutella and the other cookie carefully stacked on top of it. The whole thing was then covered with more Nutella, which proved to be a fairly messy venture. I think you could use melted chocolate chips for the frosting, which might work better as the chocolate would firm up while it cooled (the Nutella stayed deliciously and messily moist, even until the next day). The top was decorated with little holiday cake decoration thingies made of some kind of hard inedible sugar stuff and sold in a little jar at the supermarket. Tiny sprinkles would look nice too and be equally inedible.

We arranged a couple birthday candles in button candle holders on the table we set up for the elf, just to make the whole thing look appropriately festive, but I definitely don't recommend lighting these before bed in anticipation of the elf's visit. I believe he carries his own matches and will light them himself when he comes.

It would be awfully sweet for your child to make a miniature thank you drawing for the elf and dictate a note for him to read while he eats his snack. A really nice elf might write a note back from time to time, thereby reinforcing good manners and encouraging literacy skills.

Next up: preparations for St. Nicholas Day (December 6th).

My Creative Space - Week 3

2009-11-27T21:06:00.004-05:00

Well, I'm a day late with this post this week - Thanksgiving and guests got me a bit behind - and, I'm ashamed to admit, I've made no significant progress with organizing my studio this week. Sorry Crzylady - next week will be better, I promise.

On the other hand, I did make progress on several projects this week, including this prototype for a Mimi softie. She's from my book of the same name (see sidebar for more info about it). Since the book was published last year, I've received numerous questions about when there will be a Mimi doll available to buy, and sadly, the answer likely is never. It's actually rare for a picture book to get merchandise (it pretty much has to be a best seller). Mimi has had okay sales, but not even strong enough for a go-ahead on the sequel I was hoping to do, much less a softie or something fun like that. But because I continue to get requests, I decided to develop a pattern and tutorial for interested people to make their own. The pattern-making process has proven a bit tricky, though - I'm really not much of a seamstress (I'm a big fan of glue), and I've made only a handful of stuffed animals in my life.

My prototype thus has lots of flaws, but I think she also has some lopsided charm. With luck I'll have figured out the worst of the difficulties in the next couple of days, so I can get the tutorial and pattern up in time for people to make this for a holiday gift. I'll have patterns for clothes (you can see the first bunny slipper in the photo above!) and for Mimi's friends, her stuffed Bunny and her roly-poly Frank. I'm also hoping to offer some help making other accessories, like Mimi's cape, tiara, and sunglasses, Frank's special yogurt cup home, some library books, and maybe Mimi's missing underpants too...
Speaking of which, here's Mimi's bare backside - which has already gotten me in trouble with a few folks who objected to the view of her little piggy tail in the book. Oops.
Here's the start of her dress.

This Mimi is poseable, with a pipe cleaner skeleton inside. She's intended for kids past the age of putting everything in their mouths. I'm also working on a simpler softie-version with all embroidered/sewn features intended for the toddlers and babies. I'll write more later about the value of dolls and book-doll combos for helping little guys develop their imaginations.

Oh, I added a photo of the chocolate cheesecake to Wednesday's post, if anyone's curious to see it.

What's Hot + What's Not: Happy Chaxgven

2009-11-25T22:35:00.010-05:00

I love Wednesdays. Time to play along again with all the hotter-notters at Loobylu's. Head over there to check out the cute artwork Claire's featuring this week and to see what's hot and not around the globe!

HOT

Chaxgven Also known as Thanksgiving. We renamed the holiday after receiving this charming invitation a few years ago from my nephew who was then in kindergarten. (In case you don't read invented spelling, it says, "Dear Baicker-McKees Could you come over for Thanksgiving."

Naturally, we couldn't refuse.) Hope you have lots to gve chax for this year; I know we do. And it's not just the food.

The Kitchen That's because of the food. Specifically at the moment because of the Chocolate Amaretto Cheesecake that's about to come out of the oven. (I'll have to add a picture shortly.) Not traditional - but good on any occasion. We're having pumpkin pie too, and lots of other typical Thanksgiving dishes, but I'm planning to give special chax for this dessert. Here's the recipe, which came to me by way of a work colleague of my husband's. Here's the amazing part: it's low fat, but you'd never guess that from the taste. It is, quite frankly, incredible.

Chocolate Amaretto Cheesecake

2 small tubs soft light cream cheese (I've tried fat free, but the texture was weird.)

1 cup sugar

1 cup 1% fat small curd cottage cheese

1/4 cup flour

1/4 cup + 2 Tbsp unsweetened cocoa

1/4 cup amaretto (you can sub almost any liqueur, like creme de menthe, Kahlua, Cointreau)

1 tsp. vanilla extract

1/4 tsp salt

1 egg

4 Tbsp mini chocolate chips

8-9 crushed chocolate wafers OR 2-3 crushed graham crackers OR a 1/3 cup graham cracker crumbs

Extra chocolate bar for making decorative curls (and tiding you over until it's time for the feast)

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees. Prepare a 7 or 8 inch spring-form pan by spraying it lightly with Pam. Then put the cookies in heavy duty zipper bags, squeeze out the air and seal. Recruit your little people to crush them. (Consider double-bagging them if your kids are "enthusiastic" workers - less chance of dog hair mixing in with the crumbs that way.) They can use the traditional rolling pin or canned peas to crush them - or for extra fun, they can run their trucks back and forth over them or stomp them to smithereens with a large toy dinosaur. Sprinkle the crumbs over the bottom of the pan, adding some extra if the bottom isn't covered. Set aside.

Put the first 8 ingredients (cream cheese through salt) in the food processor with the sharp spinning blade thing. Process the heck out of these, pausing several times to scrape down the sides. The mixture should look very smooth and creamy, with only faint traces of tiny white lumps/dots. Add the egg and process just until mixed in. Remove the blade, taking care not to cut yourself or drip chocolate on the dog or kids whining at your feet. Fold in the chocolate chips, then pour the mixture carefully over the crumbs.

Pop in the oven and bake, 45-50 minutes for an 8-inch pan or 65-70 minutes for a 7-inch one. In my oven I nearly always need an additional 5 minutes. The direction says it's done when a knife comes out clean, but I don't think that EVER happens. I look to make sure it seems set (not too wobbly in the middle) and that it's starting to pull away from the sides a tad.

Refrigerate for at least 8 hours before serving. It may crack as it cools, but no worries. Just use your veggie peeler to make lovely chocolate curls (or the grater for grated stuff) for a dense garnish that hides all the flaws. Then eat the rest of the chocolate to keep your strength up.

Coming up with an idea for Once Daily

That's Claire's ning-thing where you post one photo a day, usually around a theme. Read more about it here. I'm going to take photos of my new backyard pond. (Just wishing I'd started back when the pond first did. Here some more in-progress pictures. (It's not done yet - but done enough to enjoy.)

Last but not least, gearing up for my second annual Advent blog

Starting Sunday! Over the month (probably not daily, but I'll try) I'll have a little something holiday related. Like the tutorial for these little mushroom houses that I meant to post last year...and lots of other craft ideas too (most kid-friendly). And some recipes, book recommendations, fun if somewhat quirky traditions, and some gift ideas for kids and parents too. I'm working on a few printables and a give-away as well. Any requests or suggestions for other ideas?

NOT

Skipping the nots in honor of the holiday. Must. Bite. Tongue.

Miniature Apple Pie Tutorial

2009-11-23T15:58:00.010-05:00

Well, I still haven't managed to resurrect my old hard drive. But I've decide to celebrate having a new computer up and running by recreating the mini apple pie tutorial I mentioned in an earlier post here. This tutorial is more or less the process I used to make the apple pies in my newest picture book An Apple Pie for Dinner (by Susan VanHecke, Marshall Cavendish, 2009). I learned the basic strategy for making the pies, the apples, and many of the other clay miniatures for the book from Sue Heaser's outstanding book Making Doll's House Miniatures with Polymer Clay.

You can read about Sue at her website here and also find ordering information for the book - which I really cannot recommend highly enough if you're into making polymer clay tiny things.

Anyway, here's the tut (I'll do the apples, and maybe some pumpkins or something too, tomorrow. I hope.):

STEP 1: Gather your materials (most of which are shown above)

Clay I used Fimo "sandstone" for the crust and a mix of yellow and white for the apples (but you could certainly cheat on them since they barely show). Any brand of polymer clay will work. If you're making this with a very young child, you might want to consider using a more kid-friendly modeling material like Crayola's Model Magic, plasticine, or even play dough. For that matter, you could use snippets of real dough and apple bits (though I'd recommend either not eating the finished product or removing the plastic liner from the bottle cap first).
Bottle Cap This will be the pie pan. You can buy unused ones at craft stores or some kitchen/beer-making supply places and they're really ideal since they flare out a little more. But I just used one from a bottle of root beer, and it was fine. If you're making this with a young child, consider using some larger "pan" like a bigger metal lid or dessert patty pan - this scale is challenging for little fingers.
Soft Pastels OR Ground Cinnamon You'll use these to "brown" your pie to a lovely golden color. You also need a tool to scrape some of the pastel dust off and a paint brush to spread the coloring, whichever you use. I used real cinnamon, which works just as well and has the added advantage of smelling lovely.
A Cutting Tool I love the super thin slicing tool pictured above, but an x-acto blade or old paring knife (NOT one you'll want to use again for food) or other sharp blade will do. Obviously an adult should use the sharp tool!
Waxed Paper Or something similar to protect your work surface. Do not use polymer clay directly on wood or on any surface used for food preparation or consumption.
A Baking Container Many polymer clay artists prefer glass pans, but I find cookie sheets, metal or ceramic baking dishes or cheap aluminum bakeware works fine. You can even just bake the little pies inside a cupcake liner place carefully on the rack. Just don't use a container you'll want to bake food in again.
A Small Wad of Fiberfill (optional) For filler in the bottom of your pie and a few strands for "steam."
Miscellaneous A soft brush (even a soft OLD toothbrush will do), a pointy thing like a bamboo skewer or knitting needle if you want to make a traditional top crust (I'm going to show a lattice-top crust). If you want to add steam, you'll also need a couple drops of a glue that adheres to clay. And if you want a sliced pie, some gloss medium or varnish will give it a more realistic look.

STEP 2 Prepare the crust

Cover your work surface with waxed paper. Then condition the clay you're using for the crust by kneading it with your fingers or running it through a craft pasta machine. You'll need two balls about the size shown (I stuck the penny and bottle cap in to help you judge the amount.)

STEP 3: Roll out the dough into circles

I didn't actually roll these out - just flattened them with my fingers. With a pasta machine, use the #4 setting. The kids I've done this project with really liked using miniature rolling pins, but then we had to go back and fine tune with fingers. Ideally, the crusts should be very thin (especially the one for the top crust).

STEP 4: Put the crust in the pan

I used the rounded end of my old toothbrush to help work the crust tightly against the sides of the "pan." Any rounded object will work.

STEP 5: Trim the excess dough

Not really a precision maneuver at this point. It does help to leave a little dough overlapping the top crust, especially if you're going to make a full top crust. This is easier with the flared unused bottle caps, but you can fudge with either.

STEP 6: Prepare the filling

I like to put a small wad of fiber fill in the bottom of my pie as filler - but you could also make a zillion more mini apples or use little lumps of clay. If you want to make the finished pie look like it has a slice taken out of it, make sure you cut away a slice of bottom crust and leave just a couple crumbs and a couple apple bits in the bottom. Save the cut out bottom crust to make a slice that will stand on its own.

(By the way, I had too much fiberfill in the picture above and took some out before filling it with my apples.)

Prepare the clay for the apples by conditioning a small ball of white and a pinch of yellow and kneading them together until they're a pale yellow. You can add a smidge of green too, especially if they're supposed to be Granny Smith apples.

Form this clay into small apple crescents. They won't really show much if your pie is completely covered, but they look good peeking through and give the top crust a natural lumpy look.

STEP 7: Dump the filling in the pan

Really, carefully arrange your mini apples over the fiberfill or clay lumps. Remember the nearly "empty" area if the pie will be missing a slice, and put some apples in the cut out slice you set aside.

At this point, you can sprinkle/brush a little cinnamon or cinnamon-colored pastel over the prepared apples - more important for a sliced pie than a covered one. (Don't forget to add some to your separate slice too.)

STEP 8 Prepare the top crust (Sorry for the lousy photo here.)

Retrieve the other crust circle. If you'll be making a lattice top like I am, cut it into narrow slices. I wanted at least 10 strips, so I could have 5 in each direction.

If you'll be making a full top crust, use your skewer or knitting needle to poke some holes in the top (where the steam would escape). You can also use clay scraps to make little leaves or a tiny apple for a decoration for the top. Finally, if you want a sliced pie, cut out a wedge shape out of the top crust now - it's trickier to slice it once it's in place.

Step 9: Put the top crust in place

For a full crust, lay it in position (carefully if you're going for the sliced look) and push it down around the edges of the bottom crust, remove the excess, and use your skewer or knitting needle to "crimp" the edge, just like you would use a fork to crimp a real pie crust.

If you're doing a lattice top like I am, follow these directions:

a) Lay five parallel strips, leaving the same width between strips, across the top as shown. Place the longest strip down the middle, the next 2 on either side of it, and the 2 shortest toward the edges. (I'm going to refer to the strips by number, with "1" at the top.)

b) Gently fold strips 1, 3, and 5 back on themselves, leaving 2 and 4 in place.

c) Lay a new strip (the other longest one) down the center of the pie over strips 2 and 4. Then fold numbers 1, 3, and 5 back down. You've finished the first weaving!

d) Now fold #2 and 4 back on themselves, leaving 1, 3, and 5 in place.

e) Lay the next longest strip parallel to the one you just place and fold strips 2 and 4 back in place. I have no idea why this is underlining.

f) Go the other side of the center strip and again fold 2 and 4 back on themselves, but in the opposite direction. Lay another strip down and fold 2 and 4 back. It should like the picture above.

Repeat with the last 2 small strips, but folding 1, 3, and 5 back in opposite directions and replacing them (should look like the photo below).

STEP 10: Trim the excess

Just make sure the top crust is adhering well to the bottom one and/or the pan.

If you're making the other style top, also remove the excess, and then use your skewer or knitting needle to "crimp" the edge, just like you would use a fork to crimp a real pie crust

STEP 11: Brown the crust

Gather some pastel dust or, as in this case, real cinnamon on your soft brush and lightly dust the top of your crust, thinking about how a real pie crust browns (usually more near the edges and a bit in the center). You can use your fingers to smooth out the dusting if you want. (I wish I'd gone a little heavier with the browning on this pie in hindsight.)

STEP 12: Bake and enjoy!

Follow the clay manufacturer's instructions regarding temperature. Because of the small size and thinness of the clay, these will bake quickly - I give them 15 minutes. Allow to cool before using. And be sure to use the oven fan - probably not great to breathe polymer clay fumes on a regular basis.

Optional Extra Steps

You can dot a clay-strength glue on the top of the pie and attach a few strands of fiberfill as steam. (Use a toothpick to press them in place if you don't like glue-y fingers.)

If you've made a sliced pie, paint gloss medium or varnish over the apples at all the cut edges (don't forget the separate slice too). This will give it a realistic cooked appearance.

Bon Appetit! (Not really!)

My Creative Space - Week 2

2009-11-19T22:33:00.003-05:00

BEFORE...

AND AFTER! WELL, DURING!

Crzylady at Home Grown Insanity who is apparently both organized and an organizer has given me lots of food for thought and inspiration for reorganizing my creative space. She has this great checklist, perfect for creative spaces, and a wonderfully gentle manner. I'm planning to post my progress weekly, along with a project or two that I can actually work on as I gain space and order - and a feeling of peace.

As you can see, I have a long way to go - but I'm taking the first "baby steps" as Flylady decrees. (Flylady, in case you aren't already familiar with her, has a free online organize-your-whole-life-even-your-body website that has been very helpful to me in general, though not one bit with this space...). I'm throwing stuff out as well as shifting some things to other places, and creating some better homes (and labels) for the stuff I keep.

I took Crzylady's advice to start by clearing one big space, both to give me working room and a sense of encouragement - and it has helped. I got my drawing table cleared off of most of the unnecessary junk, re-established my stations and cleared the floor enough around them that I can fit easily in and out of my chairs. Phew! And then I even started clearing out the shelves on the wall behind. Look! There's some empty space! (Probably won't stay that way for long - but I'll settle for order.)

Anyway, I got things tidy enough to get working on my Christmas card (that's what the little Christmas tree in the foreground goes to), to make good progress on the sketches of two picture books, and to nearly finish this gift I started making a while ago. SPOILER ALERT, MARY LOU - don't peek.

It's a drawstring knapsack for my walking buddy. On Saturday mornings we visit estate sales and then take our walk in the neighborhood around it. I'm making her a bag to tote her loot, and I've used all thrifted materials I've acquired at the sales. The main fabric is blue and white ticking from a vintage pillow cover, the calico lining (shows at the casing) was a vintage fabric I bought from a crafter's huge stash (it was really something - and it takes a lot to impress a hoarder like me), and the pocket on the front is from an embroidered hand towel. The bag also has a couple interior pockets. I used the excellent tutorial for a lined pack with interior pockets on Break It Down Design here - and, get this: I followed practically all the instructions. Maybe that's why it came out so well.... (Changes: I folded the lining to the front to make the casing for prettiness' sake, added an exterior pocket too of my own "design," and used grommets instead of button holes - partly because I can't remember where my button hole attachment is, partly because the fabric was too heavy for my little machine and would never have been able to manage them.) The tutorials are free, but she accepts donations, and I'll make one when I finish - the tutorial was really a big help.
Here's a close up of the tea towel pocket. I probably should have lined it.
I'm filling the bag with some other thrifted treasures - a small measuring tape, a notebook and pen for keeping wish lists and jotting measurements, etc., and an old tin I lined with felt and filled with some quarters and a few dollars (we're very cheap - but it's nice to have a little mad money for those things you absolutely don't need but really want). Any other suggestions of vintage-y things that would be useful?

Sorry my photos are crap today. Waited until it was dark to take them and the lighting is less than optimal at night.

Head on over to Kootoyoo to see all the other wonderful creative spaces, including hers. Thanks Kootoyoo!

What's Hot? What's Not? It's that Time Again!

2009-11-18T16:23:00.007-05:00

I'm joining in again with the hot+not meme over at loobylu. Thanks, Claire!

HOT THIS WEEK

The Kindness of Strangers I swear the blogging community includes the nicest people. Special thanks to crzylady, a budding pro organizer at Home Grown Insanity who has given me some excellent, excellent guidance on whipping my creative space into shape (witness the first step of the transformation tomorrow through kootoyoo's My Creative Space meme)! I'm very excited to say the least. Thanks too to Chele at Happy Dacks who kindly taught me the correct pronunciation of whinging. What a fantastic word. To Gale at scribble prints, who gave me some much needed reassurance about my messy space. And to all the other bloggers participating in this meme - such great inspiration, laughs, and interesting thoughts to look forward to each week.

My New Old Apron

Picked up this lovely vintage apron at an estate sale on Saturday for two bucks. It was very stained, but thanks to the miracles of Oxi-Clean, it now looks pretty much good as new. Check out the sweet hand embroidery. I am swooning.

Apple Pie for Dinner

That apron reminded me of the zillions of little aprons I'd embroidered for Granny Smith in my latest book which in turn reminded me that I'd stumbled upon a new review of it this week. Saralynne said some very nice things about my artwork, so nice that she put me in the mood to make apple pie and actually serve it for dinner. The book includes a very tasty recipe, but I think I'm going to make my usual sour cream apple pie this time. I'll include the recipe I use at the end of the post. (I have to wait and make the pie on Friday - my hubby is out of town on business and gets back late that evening. I think hot pie and ice cream will make a nice welcome home, don't you? Maybe I'll wear my hot new apron too.)

Reading that good review also put me in the mood to go check my amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com rankings. (I have been relieved to come out of the closet on this and learn I'm not the only author/illustrator who does this obsessively.) They were still disappointing. Rats. SoI consoled myself by reading all the other good reviews the book has gotten (which the Barnes and Noble site has in their entirety here, or which you can read at the website the author created for the book here).

Oh, I also found a really interesting interview with the author, Susan VanHecke, here. What a fascinating life (and family) she's had.

Fooling Around with the Camera on my Phone

I took a bunch of pix of weird reflections this week. They have a creepy surreal feeling I think. The one above is of my husband and various plants reflected in our new backyard pond.

This one is of my hand and some furniture in my husband's office, as reflected in his window with a view of the construction of the new subway tunnel that will go under the Allegheny River. (I was waiting almost patiently while Steve finished up some work.)

This one's my favorite. It's of the stained glass inside a mausoleum, with reflections of the grounds (and the top of my head) at Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh. My friend and I walked there on Sunday - so beautiful and interesting, but of course I forgot my real camera. I love how the reflections pick up the colors of the stained glass and I like the ghostly feel.

NOT HOT

Going to my first Steelers game ever and having them lose

To the Bengals, no less, who are usually lousy, but are now in first place over my beloved team. Plus now everyone I know says I am never, ever allowed to go to another game since I am obviously bad luck.

Really, that's mostly okay. It was fun (and very loud) - but I think there's a lot to be said for watching sports from the comfort of my family room. Including a bathroom nearby and commentary for those of us who need a little explanation some times.

Steelers Nation, baby!

The Lost Tutorial

See those cute little pies in their bottle cap pie pans? And the teeny-tiny apples? I had a nice tutorial almost finished on how to make them. Guess where it is? On my computer that died. And guess if I just remembered that when I went to finish it up and post it? Poop.

Whinging about Whinging Or more specifically about my use of the term, which has been perhaps a tad liberal since I learned how to pronounce it. But you don't see ME whinging about that, just my daughter. WHO STILL HASN'T FINISHED HER COLLEGE APPLICATIONS. Not that I'm feeling hysterical about it.

Recipe for Sour Cream Apple Pie

Which is Hot, Not Not

(But It's Good Served Cold Too - Just Better Hot)

This is basically the recipe from my well-worn copy of The Silver Palate Cookbook (by Julee Rosso and Sheila Lukins, Workman, 1979). Because I am NEVER able to follow directions precisely, I have made a few small changes, and I also just use the Pillsbury prepared pie crusts because I am much too lazy to make one from scratch.

This pie has been a group project at my house for years and years. Every summer, one of my Ohio nephews would come stay for a week and he, my kids, and my Pittsburgh niece would make it using a zillion of the tiny, very tart apples from the tree in our backyard (or if it was a no apple year, with Granny Smiths). This summer, that nephew's little brother came instead - here he is making it with my daughter.

Anyway, when I got the manuscript for Apple Pie I laughed and thought, "How perfect!" This reaction blinded me to the fact that there were a million characters (well, 13 humans and a bunch of animals), people (which I'd never done for a book), and very detailed backgrounds (which take me forever). Fortunately I did not go utterly insane, just nearly so.

But I still love apple pie.

Invite a few young friends to bake with you. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F and line a 9 inch pie pan with a crust. Set another pie crust aside for the top. (I wait to preheat until after the apples are peeled and sliced, because that can take a long time with young helpers.)

For the Filling

6 Granny Smith apples OR one zillion little ones from the tree in the backyard, preferably ones with relatively few worm holes

2/3 cup sour cream (I use lite sour cream and it works perfectly)

1/3 cup granulated sugar

1 egg, lightly beaten

1/2 tsp salt

1 generous tsp vanilla (the generous part is because the kids have always managed to spill it all over and now I'm just used to it on the vanilla-y side)

3 T flour

Peel, core and slice all the apples. Feed the peel to the dog and hope it doesn't give her diarrhea. Take a short break to plant some of the apple seeds (optional). Whisk the remaining ingredients together in a small bowl, giving everyone a chance with the whisk, and pour the mixture over the apples (which should be in a bigger bowl - important to specify this to young cooks). Toss well until all the apples are coated and the dog has had a chance to eat the ones that have sloshed out of the bowl and landed on the floor. Dump everything in the prepared pie pan.

For the Filling

3 T brown sugar

3 T granulated sugar

1 T flour (not in the original recipe - I added it because our pie is invariably over-filled and the extra flour seems to keep the topping from bubbling over onto the bottom of the oven and setting off the smoke detector. But you can leave it out if you prefer.)

1 tsp cinnamon

1 cup walnuts, finely chopped or ground

Combine all these ingredients and sprinkle the topping over the apple mixture.

Make a lattice top crust, if you already know how or can follow my confusing directions. First cut the remaining pie crust into long thin strips. Lay half the strips across the top of the pie in parallel strips, leaving an equal distance between strips (put the longest strip in the middle and the work outward). Fold half the strips back in a line along the middle and lay one of the remaining strips across the middle of the pie. Then put those strips back flat and fold the others back, laying another strip across. Continue until the whole thing is covered in a pretty woven pattern. Crimp the edges lightly. Pop the pie in the oven and take the dog out potty.

Bake for 55-65 minutes, until the pie is bubbly, the apples tender, and the kitchen smells like cinnamon.

Serve generous slices with vanilla ice cream. Eat every last crumb.

Turkey Meatloaf Recipe: Looks Like Dog Barf, but Tastes Great

2009-11-15T21:47:00.004-05:00

Sunday evening suppers tend toward comfort food at my house - a little something to soothe the disappointment that the lovely weekend is drawing to a close and to provide a boost as everyone heads off to cram in the last of homework and work prep for the week ahead.

This week's menu was turkey meatloaf, baked sweet potatoes and tossed salad with blackberries and cashews -- and a bowl of canned soup for my teenaged daughter who declared herself unwilling to choke down even a bite of what looks to her like dog barf. She has held this opinion for many years now -- but this Sunday marked an important transition for her. She was persuaded to have a nibble, decided my meatloaf was perhaps better than dog barf or even canned soup, ate a whole slice and then had seconds. And has since been caught picking at the leftovers straight from the fridge.

So, while it's undeniable that this dish does resemble dog barf (which for the record, my dog would happily eat), I think we can all agree it must in fact taste much, much better. Which it does.

This is another one of those recipes that I make slightly differently, depending on the availability of ingredients and/or my mood. It's equally delicious served hot on a cold winter evening or cold in a sandwich on a hot summer afternoon. It's even good for breakfast, and apparently also tasty straight out of the Tupperware in the fridge for a bedtime snack. It's adapted from the turkey loaf recipe my wonderful former neighbor Eileen Edson used to make and from the classic meatloaf recipe in my ancient copy of the Better Homes and Garden cookbook.

The measurements below are the American-style ones, but I just found this great website that tells you how to convert the measurements, depending on where you live. If I have time tomorrow I'll have a go at a metric/celsius version.

Turkey Meatloaf

For the loaf:

1 or 2 eggs, lightly beaten (depends on how gooey you like it)

1/2 cup milk

1/2 cup old-fashioned rolled oats OR bread crumbs OR cooked rice OR other filler kind of stuff

2-3 tsp Worcestershire sauce

1/4 cup catsup (can vary to taste)

1 onion, grated

2-3 ribs celery, finely chopped

2-3 carrots, shredded

Or whatever combo of veggies you have in your fridge and like

1/2 tsp Italian seasoning or some sage or whatever seasonings you prefer

1 pound ground turkey (I normally use the extra lean ground turkey breast, but you can really use any ground meat, including combos of different ones)

For the topping:

1/4 cup catsup

2 T brown sugar

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Combine all the ingredients for the loaf EXCEPT the ground turkey in a large bowl. Lightly mix in the turkey (if you over-stir it, it gets tough). Spray a loaf pan with Pam, then dump the dog barf, I mean meat mixture, into the pan and pat it smooth.

Mix the extra catsup and sugar in an old coffee mug and smooth it over the top.

Pop the pan in the oven uncovered and bake for 1 hour and fifteen minutes (at 350 degrees F).

It is tricky to get slices out of the pan in one piece. On occasions when I have guests who don't mind an entree that looks like dog barf cut in slices, I'll line the pan with baking parchment before I put the mixture in. Then I'll let the loaf sit for 15 minutes after cooking and lift it out using the parchment paper. It will then slice rather neatly. (But this is too much bother for ordinary family meals, especially given the usual rejection of it, however it looks.)

The only problem with my daughter learning to like this is that there will now be much less left over for my lunches. And that's bad, because this is insanely good in a sandwich on homemade Swedish sour rye bread - which you can find my favorite recipe for here.

I'm drooling already and will have to go hide the last couple meatloaf slices and get up early tomorrow to bake bread.

My Creative Space - HELP!

2009-11-12T16:15:00.000-05:00

I'm joining in for the first time with the meme "My Creative Space" over at Kootoyoo's fun blog - you can check out all the other cool spaces and projects for this week here. Pictured above is one of my projects for this week, a button necklace that's a belated birthday gift for a good friend. (My first attempt was a disaster. This one is not going much better. Just a few tips - if you're going to make someone a crocheted button necklace, it is probably good to know how to crochet already. And to follow the directions. And to have the right size crochet hook.) This project is on my kitchen table because, as anyone who read yesterday's post will know, my studio is a disorganized disaster.

So I'm pleading for some ideas. I got these great books out of the library - and they do have sound strategies and photos of some truly gorgeous work spaces - but I am sufficiently organizationally impaired, and my space is small and odd enough, and my stuff varied and uh, numerous enough, that their ideas don't really work for me. I'm open to any suggestions, except to throw everything out and start over. (But pare down...that I'll probably have to live with.)

Here's a tour of my studio, which is in a big landing area at the top of the steps to our second floor. It has some charming features, like knee walls and a little alcove-y thing, but it's pretty small, has low ceilings, the original dark wallpaper, tiny windows and generally poor lighting, and it's rather "public" since anyone going to one of the bedrooms or upstairs bathrooms has to pass through it. Which means, my husband thinks, that it would be better if it didn't always look like the aftermath of a major earthquake or Category 5 hurricane. He may have a point.

This is my drawing table, which is pretty large. I never use the tilt function, so I probably don't really need something this nice, but it is in good shape and I already own it. I usually have it set up with "stations." The near edge is for cutting (mat, blades, etc.). The edge along the right has, sometimes, space for working with polymer clay (including my oft-used pasta machine). (The stairs are just out of the photo on the right, and it does make me a bit nervous to sit along that side, with my back to the steep staircase.) The far edge is my sewing area, with my trusty vintage Singer Featherweight (hand-me-down from my mom). The sitting space is a bit tight, but it does more or less work. And the side on the left is for drawing, gluing and whatever else needs to be done. There is not supposed to be so much stuff piled all over the desk, but there always is.

Behind the drawing table along the far wall, there is lots of storage-y stuff - some narrow shelves, a 2-drawer file cabinet, a small chest of drawers, an old glass-fronted kitchen cabinet with tool drawer things on it, and thread racks. Across from that, forming a hallway to the bedrooms is a large flat file. It has a great melamine top that my husband made for it and could be a good extra workspace, if I ever managed to keep it clear. I store large pieces of foamcore and some finished stuff vertically between it and the stair railing.

This is the view in the opposite direction. I have bookshelves and an old card catalog with tons of little items in it to the left (which is a narrow space leading to the door to my daughter's bedroom. I would feel sorry for her having to navigate through all my crap except: a) she has just as much crap in her room, b) she uses my studio herself all the time, and c) she's often responsible for lots of the mess in my studio too.)

I love the little alcove/dormer area, but feel like I'm not making good use of it. There's a cabinet where I store things like stuffing and batting and various odds and ends. On top I have a light table thing, which I rarely use anymore and could probably get rid of or at least store out of the way. I'd love ideas for how to make this area either more attractive or useful. Or, and this would be really cool, both.

On the right is an old IKEA piece of "little drawers." They are mostly filled with crap and badly need to be purged and reorganized. On top are my homemade trays for when I'm working on a book - there are 34 of them, one for each page in the book plus the covers. They were an ingenious (I think) solution for my weird needs - they keep all the little odds and ends for each page corralled and unsquished until I glue them in place and even give me a space to lay out each page on top of a photocopy of the sketch so I can make sure things are going along well. I'd like to have smaller stacks of them - it's tricky grabbing a tray from the bottom of one when I'm working - but on the whole it's one of the better organizational strategies I've used.

Finally, a view of the third wall. I have a large old IKEA unit that used to be in our family room for the TV and whatnot. It is in desperate need of sorting and organizing. It holds various reference books for drawing and techniques that I use often, as well as the "Bible" notebook I create for each book I'm currently working on, fabric, paper, old "stuff" I quickly hide during pre-houseguest clean-up frenzies, and most of my polymer clay stash.

Not shown is where I have all the artwork from the books I've done. I've given away a lot of it, but I still have enough that it's quite frankly overwhelming. It's all stacked in the bedroom of one of my kids who's off at college. I'm praying he doesn't want to move back home for a while after he graduates; there's not really much space left for him. (Legally, I can't really sell or give away my work anymore, thanks to the stupid CPSIA law - it almost certainly wouldn't pass the tests for lead and phthalates, plus the testing would destroy it. I think it's okay to sell or give it to adult-only households or art/kids' books collections, since it could then be classified as a collectible, but I'm not exactly famous enough to attract much interest from those markets yet.)

This is my mish-mosh inspiration bulletin board. I haven't updated it in many, many years. Bad me. But check out this unbelievably cool (and unused feature). You lift off the bulletin board and...

Ta-da! There's a hidey-hole, complete with a safe from the days when this was my middle son's "bedroom" (he got a real bedroom when he reached adolescence, but it's still kind of embarrassing that we made him sleep on the landing for years). I do not know the combo for the safe, but I bet I could jimmie it open. Wonder what's inside?

I have various little cool storage thingies that I don't make good use of. The little drawers above are from my 70s teen years and now contain 1 needle threaded with white thread, 2 gold paper leaves, and a handful of picture hangers. The shopping cart usually holds spare postcards, business cards, flyers, etc. that I take with me to book events.
The little drawers have stuff like buttons, but mostly my buttons are in jars. The locker used to hold my spare x-acto blades and a tin of used ones, but now it's pretty much empty. It looks like a real locker inside with a high shelf, a low shelf and a biggish middle area with hooks on the sides. Any ideas for making better use of these?

After you guys help me with this, I'll get your assistance with my desk area downstairs. (See it below.) Yikes.

What's Hot + What's Not

2009-11-11T11:12:00.010-05:00

Dangy blangy. I meant to start back posting at least several times a week, and here it's been a whole week again.

I'm joining in again with Loobylu's hot+not meme because it is easy and fun. I urge you to go to her site and check out the blogs of all the participants - there are some very inspiring (and funny) postings out there - and to join in yourself. I've also discovered lots of new blogs to follow, which is a good thing given the not-hot thing that happened to my computer last week.

HOT

Leaf Art I decided to make a new banner for my blog that's appropriately seasonal for the northern hemisphere -- for another week or two anyway... Someday I'm going to do that stuff in a timely fashion, right?

The papercut leaves in my banner are incredibly easy to make, though a bit time consuming if you're foolish enough to choose leaves like these Japanese maple ones that have little toothy edges. Don't even try that super lacy one I show in the photocopy unless you're a glutton for punishment. Anyway, here's how:

Collect leaves with interesting shapes and press them (to make instant pressed leaves, iron them on low heat between a couple layers of paper towels).
Photocopy your favorites.
Cut loosely around the shapes (see above).
Use a repositionable glue stick to attach the cut-out shape to the wrong side of a piece of paper. I used some of the beautiful rice papers from my stash (the ones I tend to save in perpetuity because they're too beautiful to use).
You can use an embossing tool to go over the veins (these should be reasonably clear on your photocopy). The resulting texture is subtle on these soft rice papers, but I can see it, if the light's right.
Cut around the photocopied image. I used an x-acto knife, taking care to go through both layers of paper, but embroidery or decoupage scissors would work too.
Peel off the backing. Only don't wait weeks to do so like I did because then the repositionable glue stops wanting to be repositioned/removed. Though that seems to be okay too.

These make nice greeting cards and they look great framed as seasonal art - a good hostess gift.

Or, you can do something even easier that looks really elegant (my photos don't do these justice). I just painted these pressed gingko leaves with gold leaf paint. Thicker, sturdier leaves work best. The gilded leaves look dramatic glued to black paper or fabric and displayed in a vintage gold metal frame. (I find the frames, with little embossed designs, all the time at estate sales for almost nothing.) Or scatter a few on a dark tablecloth around an autumn centerpiece.

Creative Inspiration

Thanks to the SCBWI conference I attended last weekend here in Pittsburgh, PA. Not only did we get some good swag (the nice tote bag shown above, with an image by local illustrator Leda Miller), but Bruce Coville was everything I hoped for and then some - go check out his website which is funny and interesting. His keynote address was encouraging, uplifting, motivating - and hysterically funny. The main points I took away are:

Hard work and persistence are the main keys to success. Plenty of talented people never succeed because they never put in the time and/or effort to learn the craft of writing or illustrating, or because they give up too soon when they meet initial rejection. I've certainly found this to be true - it took me five years to get my first manuscript accepted and more than 10 to get offered a book to illustrate - and meanwhile, plenty of aspiring writers and illustrators with more natural ability than I have have fallen away.
The 7 Deadly Sins for Writers are: Dullness, Repetition, Cliche, Sloth, Inattention, Perfectionism, and Clumsiness.
The 7 Virtues for Writers are: Passion, Sensuousness, Wisdom, Guile, Humor, Courage, and Joy. Of these great virtues, the greatest three are humor, courage and joy, the last of which is the birthright of all children.

It's impossible not to feel inspired to sit down at my keyboard and drawing table (aka the kitchen table) after that - and to top it off, all the other speakers were interesting and informative. Probably best of all was reuniting with some of the most talented, creative, hardworking and kind people I know. I feel all "popcorn brainy" now, as my friend Kitty Griffin puts it.

Chalkboard Paint and Chalkboard Markers

I can see where it might be possible to go a little overboard with these. A lot of the woodwork in my house has secretly become writing surfaces in the last week.

The colors and variety of line you get with these chalkboard markers make them way cooler than ordinary chalk, not that I don't like it too. (They can be a little stubborn about coming off, despite the manufacturer's promise that they are easily erased with warm water - but they do come off with a little elbow grease and/or Clorox Clean Up.)

Claire's Nice Comments

Incredibly kind of Loobylu to visit everyone's blogs and comment. I'm going to try to be equally thoughtful this week. (Okay, and I was blown away when she called my art hot, since I think hers is flaming.)

NOT

My Creative Space

Which is disorganized. Cluttered. Messy. And impossible to work in, which is especially frustrating now that I'm brimming with creative urges. Thank goodness we had a houseguest all last week, so I kept my fall-back workspace (the kitchen table) pretty much cleared off.

You know the saddest thing? The photo above is the after picture - I actually purged and tidied it before the company came, and that's all the better it ended up. And now all my closets are overflowing with junk I swear I'm going to sort through, but probably won't until I'm desperately searching for something I need to finish a project.

The Kitchen Computer

I'm actually very lucky - our household has gobs of computers I can use, so even though the kitchen one is dead, as in it won't even think about turning on, I can still get my work done. But the kitchen computer is where I kept my calendar, so I now feel adrift and anxious. (I've tried to back it up in the past, but I can never get the backups to open so I finally gave up. I know; I need a new system.) And it's where all my bookmarked blogs are (I know, I should just subscribe to my favorites, but I haven't.)

And it's where I had the last couple chapters of my novel, which I (I know, stupid-head, stupid-head) hadn't backed up. My husband thinks the problem is a dead motherboard and that we'll be able to rescue the hard drive and get all my data back - and I'm praying he's right. If not, well, what's a little more hard work, right?

A Nameless Teenager Who Must Be Nagged Endlessly to Finish Her College Applictions

Fortunately I have these good chalkboard markers and door panels coated with chalkboard paint to help out in the nagging department.

I do love that Douglas Adams quote (he's the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and many other excellent books).

Leaves

There is no pleasing me. This week I'm whinging about the ones that are smothering my yard or still clinging to the oak trees so that raking will never end.

And I'm moping about all the beautiful ones that are GONE or nearly so. (I'm trying hard to heed Claire's advice to just concentrate on enjoying the colors. She's right, of course - the colors were downright spectacular this year.)

By the way, about that word "whinge"? It's a new one for me that I keep seeing on Australian and English blogs and I would like to start using it. Specifically I would like to tell my teenager, "Quit whinging about your applications and just finish them!" But I don't know how to pronounce it - is it WIN-jing or WHINE-jing? Or something else?

Have a great week, everyone. (Though I am planning/hoping to post more often than weekly.)

What's Hot + What's Not

2009-11-04T09:22:00.007-05:00

I love playing along with this theme with loobylu. Be sure to visit her site and see all the other bloggers participating - lots of inspiring and pleasing things to check out.

Hot

Squash and Squash Players

My husband is in charge of a squash (the sport, not the vegetable - though that could be interesting too) tournament in Pittsburgh this week, so it is all squash all the time for our family this week. And of course my husband is hot. And we're also hosting a very nice young player from France - a bonus for those of us who enjoy a cute French accent and a chance to try to remember our high school French. It's also making me want to plan a trip to France again soon.

Leaves

The reds are looking a bit faded after a couple of freezes, but the yellows and golds are still breathtaking. I've been pressing leaves like mad this year, and even doing the iron them between sheets of waxed paper and hang them in the window thing. I've decided I'm just going to go back to doing all my little kid crafts that I love right now and not wait for grandkids to give me an excuse to indulge in them again, because that will likely be a long wait still (well, I hope so on the whole at least).

The Western Pennsylvania Society for Children's Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) Fall Conference

It's coming up this weekend, and I'm looking forward to seeing some old friends like Marc Harshman, who's working on a book project with me (and my daughter Sara) involving this bear, who is still in the development phase, and possibly a chipmunk too.

The keynote speaker this year is Bruce Coville, and I can't wait to hear him in person. I've heard and read interviews where he consistently comes across as funny, smart, talented, inspirational - and best of all, just plain nice. I have high expectations.

If you are interested in writing or illustrating for kids and don't already know about SCBWI, you should definitely check out their website and consider joining. They have lots of useful info, especially for newcomers, and they're beginning to offer more and more for experienced people in the field too. It's a great way to meet people too - and like gardeners, kids' book people are nearly uniformly generous, interesting folks.

Unfortunately some good friends won't make the conference this year, having had the gall to move away and have busy lives (just kidding - but I do miss all of them.) This includes my dear friend Julie Stiegemeyer, with whom I have TWO new projects in the works with these characters: The Little Red Monster and Benny.

NOT

Leaves

I do not understand how my yard and pond can be completely covered already again right after I raked a zillion leaves two days ago. Nor do I understand how there can still be so many left on my oaks, most of which don't even appear to have changed.

The weather. The dark.

Geez, it's cold! 28 F (like -2 C) this morning. And SNOW in the forecast for tomorrow. It is much too soon for winter. And daylight savings time ended last weekend so now it is dark, dark, dark when I go on my walks with my friend Mary Lou in the evening, and there are still only the first glimmers of light when I have to get up in the morning - not enough help as far as I'm concerned to be worth the end of day light.

How many plants I have yet to get in the ground

We have been too insanely busy this fall on the weekends, what with traveling and frantically trying to clean my house for visitors, so planting has not been happening. But lots of plant buying did, so this Sunday, snow or no snow, visitors or no visitors, I MUST plant.

NaNoWriMo

Swore I was going to do it this year. Have. Not. Written. One. New. Word. on my novel. Poop.

Halloween Redux Part 1: Costume and Pumpkin Resolutions

2009-11-02T08:31:00.012-05:00

Happy post-Halloween!

I hope everyone out there had a good one, with more giggles than tears. My kids are old enough that the holiday has lost some of the magic it once had, but also most of the headaches. This enables me to be Wise and Knowing about the holiday and to offer you a list of the resolutions I've made over the years regarding costumes and pumpkins. You can make the same ones for next year if things haven't gone smoothly at your house this year. (In the spirit of full disclosure I will note that I rarely managed to keep my resolutions the next year, but still...)

Alternatively, you can just indulge a few moments of feeling like a Halloween pro compared to me.

Resolution Number 1 I will be accepting of my child's costume choices.

...even if that means that Child A in the photo above chooses at the last minute to wear her big brother's tattered bat costume from the year before after I've spent weeks crafting a lovely, feminine Butterfly Fairy costume from yards of tulle and sequins and glitter. Even though I have been dying for a dose of girly after two boys, and even though all her friends are outfitted in tutus and tiaras, and even though she will then insist on wearing the bat costume daily right through the Christmas holidays when every other little girl we know is wearing velveteen and tights and sparkly hair bows.

...even if that means that Child B wants to be a praying mantis, a costume you cannot possibly buy ready-made and that is also insanely tricky to make and that absolutely no one can tell what it is. I will recognize that being unidentifiable is part of the appeal for some children and I will graciously make him a "black hole" costume the following year even though it is even more unidentifiable.

...even if Child C takes one look in the mirror, scares himself, and insists I wash off all his ghost make-up after I've spent nearly an hour carefully applying it to his directions and we are already running late for the school Halloween parade.

Resolution Number 2 I will remember that sweatshirts are the basis of the best costumes.

They're great for a number of reasons: 1) they're versatile enough to be modified with moderate sewing/gluing skills to be a bat, a praying mantis, or, in the case above, a roly-poly bug costume; 2) they're warm, plus roomy enough to put extra warm layers underneath (this advantage might not apply if you're lucky enough to live some place where it isn't routinely freezing cold, raining and/or snowing on Halloween); and 3) they're reusable after the holiday, simply by removing the various accessories you've hot-glued or tacked on. Or not, if your child continues to demand to wear her costume for months.

Resolution Number 3 I will remember that indulging kids' costume preferences can lead to all kinds of good things.

Like imagination and creativity and a strong sense of self. Like cementing a passion for science and natural history that will last well into the teen years and even become the foundation for career choices.

Like giving me an idea for a character to put in a picture book. That's Mimi in the picture above with her pet roly-poly bug Frank.

My daughter's costume was inspired by a science unit her class did on roly-poly bugs, and becoming a roly-poly bug herself for Halloween really seemed to take her interest to the next level. After Halloween that year, we gathered up the roly-poly stragglers we found under the flower pots I hadn't yet gotten around to dumping, named them all Frank for easy identification, and moved them into a warm habitat in a special old diaper wipe box. Which we then kept as a centerpiece on the kitchen table, so we could observe their behavior carefully over the winter months. (As a bonus, the centerpiece also curbed my appetite, a good thing after all the leftover Halloween candy I "took care of.") Sara has since remained fascinated since by all creatures great and small. (This was actually the second time we'd housed roly-poly refugees over the winter, but Sara had been too young to really take notice the first time around.)

Resolution Number 4 I will remember to rush out and buy lots of costume stuff on November 1st because there is really no better birthday gift for a preschooler than a dress-up box - and no better time to find good stuff on mega-sale.

Resolution Number 5 I will not put the jack-o-lantern out for the trash thereby causing my toddler to wail, "The garby-men took my PUMPKIN!" every time we see a garbage truck for the next 12 months.

Instead I will plant pumpkin seeds so that my child can observe the full life cycle of his beloved pumpkin. This will cause an enormously long and prickly vine to take over my entire garden and kill half my treasured perennials in the process. And then I will put the used jack-o-lantern back in the garden so we can check every day to see how moldy, slimy, blobby it gets as it decays back into soil. And then we will plant the seeds again in the spring so we can start the process all over again, wiping out the last remaining perennials in the process.

I will also remember that a good alternative to carving a pumpkin - a too-difficult task for a preschooler - is to let him hammer large nails all over the pumpkin, pull them out, and then enjoy the lovely polka dot effect when a candle is placed inside. I will also remember that it is much better to cut off the bottom (easier to light the candle) and scoop everything out BEFORE all that hammering.

Thanks everyone for the comments welcoming me back to blogging! It's great to be back.

Next up: handling the horrors of all that Halloween candy.

What's Hot + What's Not

2009-10-28T18:10:00.011-04:00

I'm taking up Loobylu's challenge to post a list on Wednesdays of what's hot and what's not. So here goes:

HOT

Me, blogging again Wow, that was a long unintended break, but I'm glad to be back at my keyboard. The one good thing about such a long hiatus is that I have TONS of material saved up.
New books! I haveTWO of them out this fall! I illustrated the picture book An Apple Pie for Dinner by Susan VanHecke (Marshall Cavendish) and wrote another book for parents of young children, The Preschooler Problem Solver (Peachtree). I'll write more about both these books in coming days, but in the meantime, you can check out the beautiful website the author created for the apple pie book here.
Fall color in my garden
It's spectacular this year. Hard for me to stay in the house when I know my trees look like that.
Autumn-themed miniature gardens

What's Not

CPSIA The Consumer Product Safety law has not gone away nor been amended in any significant way. Vintage books have been confirmed by the Consumer Product Safety Commission as forbidden to children 12 and under despite any evidence that they pose even a small threat to kids' health and abundant evidence of their value for them. Grr.
Radio interviews I'm lucky to have gotten a bunch lined up to promote The Preschooler Problem Solver, but even though I've done tons of media interviews over the years, they still make me feel a tongue-tied mess.
Amtrak I'm normally a huge fan of train travel, though I've long lamented the sorry state of it in the U.S. - but Saturday was a particularly deep low in my regard for it. My son's five-hour train trip from NJ to Boston arrived nearly five hours late, putting his arrival close to 2 am instead of anywhere near the scheduled 9 pm. Which meant he missed the last connecting commuter train to his destination in Worcester MA where he attends college, as well as all the bus options. And no taxi would take him that far nor to his friend's place at a Boston area college. And the train station was completely deserted and no one at the Amtrak "customer service" number would offer any assistance in finding alternative travel or lodging because he wasn't continuing on an Amtrak train. And that stinks.

Okay, as usual I have NO control of the numbering function on blogger. Pretend the numbers aren't there. And the random text color stuff also defeats me. Sigh.

Happy Easter! With Just a Little about CPSIA and Vintage Books

2009-04-12T21:28:00.003-04:00

This Easter, as I have for every Easter I can remember, I read The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes by Du Bose Heyward, with illustrations by Margery Flack (the author-illustrator of the Angus books I've written about before), and as always, the book warmed my heart and gave me a burst of energy and determination to be kind to children in need.

The main character of this 1939 classic is well-ahead of her time. She's dark-furred, raised in an impoverished environment, left a single parent of 21 children - yet she manages to succeed in a privileged, white-furred all-male world as one of the five designated Easter Bunnies. She triumphs because not only is she wise, kind, and swift, as all Easter Bunnies must be, she is unusually sensitive to the needs and abilities of children and possessed of courage and determination (okay, and she's the timely recipient of a pair of magic gold shoes, but a stroke of good fortune has cemented many a success story).

The copy of this book from my childhood technically belonged to my older sister, and when she left home to raise her own family, she took it with her. (The country bunny was a role model for all the females in my family, so I couldn't really blame her.) I immediately acquired the used paperback (below, in pink) because it wouldn't be Easter without the country bunny! And I was delighted when I found the used hardcover a few years later. My own kids have grown up loving the book - and peeky eggs, which are a prominent object in the story.

Both of these books predate the 1985 "safety date" under CPSIA (and the paperback is actually older) but both are in good shape, and I'm planning to pass them along to my future grandkids. In fact, I'm probably going to order a few more hardcovers this week while they're still easy to find, because these old ones are so much nicer than the new ones. You can get a new hardcover from amazon for about $12, but there are vintage ones beginning at $4, and even a 1939 edition for a mere $10.
The old ones are bound in a lovely yellow bookcloth. The above is a close up of the bunny image from the cover. I do not have the dust jacket for my book, but it looked a lot like the paperback cover I believe.
Margery Flack's illustrations have the same beautiful graphic quality that they do in the Angus books, and I'm so impressed with how much she manages to do with the color in spite of the limitations of hand-done color separations. Flack's work is always notable for the way she integrates the text and illustrations and the expressive postures of her animal characters, and this book is no exception. I particularly loved the detail in these books - each of the 21 offspring of the country bunny is a distinct individual. In the vintage copies, the paper is heavy and the colors rich.

I was so enamored of the peeky egg in this book that I eventually learned how to make them with my kids. In fact, one of my first ever blog entries was about making them - you can read it here. (By the way, I no longer worry about getting salmonella from eggs, since I learned about how remote the chances are - see this post from Deputy Headmistress.)

The peeky egg on the shelf above was made by Jacob, the son of my kids' book collaborator Julie Stiegemeyer (see her blog here). He did a great job, and I bring it out every year to enjoy again. The eggs will last ages as long as you keep sugar fiends like my dog (and me) out of licking range.
Children's books are always a key feature of my holiday decorating. This year I also decorated my shelves in different colors - but I didn't have a good Easter book for the blue shelf above - any suggestions?
The nice thing about having a late Easter was that we had so many things in bloom to brighten the table.

I realized this year as I finished my reading of The Country Bunny that she not only influenced my career choices and the attitudes I've tried to cultivate in my own kids, but apparently my choice of house - I noticed that her little cottage with its arched door and leaded windows looks an awful lot like my own home. Even her kitchen hutch is mighty familiar.

Those old kids' books really pack a wallop. (Be sure to check out the reader reviews on amazon - I'm not the only one with strong feelings about this book!)

CPSIA and Vintage Books: The Rally Update and More

2009-04-05T22:03:00.002-04:00

Souvenirs from the April 1, 2009 Amend the CPSIA rally

The cherry blossoms fluttered and the gray skies threatened rain while hundreds of folks gathered to speak with reason, common sense, and determination against the well-intentioned but gone-all-wrong CPSIA in Washington on April 1st, and thousands more watched by webcast. My daughter and I felt lucky to be at the rally (especially after our GPS quit working, we missed our freeway exit, and then got lost again looking for the entrance to the parking garage at Union Station).

I hope I managed to do right by children and their books.

As will surprise no one who has known me since my grade school days, I talked too long. (When Rick Woldenberg stood up and started inching toward me I knew I'd better wrap up quickly - sorry Rick!) But I had to speak for so many - for used booksellers, for libraries, for schools and homeschoolers, for childcare centers, for literacy groups, for historians and social scientists, for art and knowledge, and of course for children - that it was pretty much impossible to cram everyone's messages into a mere four minutes. Heck, just listing all those interested parties takes almost four minutes. But I do apologize if I trod on anyone else's time, because all our messages are important.

Overall, the rally left me very encouraged. I lent my copy of the speaker schedule to a congressional staffer and realized too late that I'd never gotten it back, but there were speakers from many of the businesses, large and (mostly) small, hurt by the over-reaching provisions of this law, experts in risk management and material science, homeschoolers with their kids, an eloquent six-year-old promising not to eat his dirt bike, and a host of senators and representatives (all Republican, which annoyed me as a Democrat). Speaker after speaker was calm and reasonable, well-spoken, and utterly compelling. I was disappointed and confused that no one from ALA or the American Association of Publishers showed up, and I'm still wondering why not. We do all have to pull together for one another and not just fight this law piece by piece because one way or another we all pay for it - and if we're going to be putting out that much money in the mission of protecting kids from lead, I can think of much, much better ways to spend it.

Over and over, the congressmen acknowledged the unintended consequences of the bill they voted for, told us they heard us and understood, spoke of common sense and making things right. I had to leave before things wrapped up to make my scheduled appointment with Senator Arlen Specter's legislative staffer, but I felt optimistic, and even a teeny bit like my march on Washington had probably been unnecessary, that everything would be fixed before long.

That feeling lasted long enough for me to find my way from HVC201 to a small conference room in Specter's office, where my daughter and I had a long discussion with a well-informed staffer who listened carefully to our concerns - but then told us frankly that the law was unlikely to be changed. Any law is hard to reverse once it's been implemented, she said, and their office was hearing from folks on both sides.

"Really?" I said. "Who on the other side are you hearing from? Because I've gone door-to-door in a middle-class neighborhood full of NPR-listening moms with advanced degrees, I've waylaid dozens of "safety moms" at a nearby upscale mall, and I've chatted up teachers, librarians, children's nonprofit staffers, doctors and nurses, and other mental health professionals (in other words, the people most likely to know about and/or care about CPSIA) - and not one of them had even heard of this law. And after I explained to them what the law covers and how it affects things like consignment and thrift stores, garage sales, charitable donations, children's books at the library, bicycles, and the availability and price of their favorite consumer goods for their kids, their reactions ran the gamut from 'That's insane!' to 'They'll never enforce it.' Not one thought the law was a good idea. So I'm very curious about who these folks are on the other side."

She hemmed and hawed and finally half-admitted it was the consumer groups. But Senator Specter does not represent the consumer groups. He represents me and the ordinary people like me who care about our kids but who have to live in the real world. And there's not much about this law that works in the real world.

I was very, very pleased to see that Specter voted for the DeMint amendment when it came up for a vote the next day, and also pleased that his staffer sent me an email about his vote (I'd already called his office to thank him and her). I doubt that my arguments alone were responsible for that vote, but I think I may have at least nudged him in that direction.

Senator Casey's staffer had accidentally double-booked my time slot, so I presented my case as we scurried from one office to another. She too listened well, though seemed less well-informed (trotting out my least favorite reassurance - "I don't think they'll enforce the law against books"). She was also skeptical that the law would be changed, and more or less said that businesses that make kids' products will just have to adapt to the realities of the law as they get sorted out in the next year or so.

Casey voted against the DeMint amendment the next day. I called to express my disappointment.

While I'm on my soapbox again (it takes so little to get me going), I'm going to remind Congress and the CPSC that selective enforcement is a very, very bad idea. To paraphrase Dr. Seuss's Horton the Elephant, you have to "Say what you mean and mean what you say." Every effective parent quickly figures out that empty threats get you in deep doo-doo faster than you can say PB&J. If the CPSC enforces the CPSIA only when they feel like it, no one will have respect for the rule of law - any law - and no one will feel safer as a result of the CPSIA because the promises behind it are hollow or unpredictable.

My representative in the House, Tim Murphy, was unavailable to meet with me, but I have spoken with his legislative aide on the phone. Murphy, himself a clinical psychologist and author of parenting books, supported the CPSIA wholeheartedly (even wanted to extend the provisions to pet products). I'll keep working on him.

Later I joined the two Oregon delegates (a whole group of crafters and small businesses pooled resources to send two spokeswomen) and the compliance director for Alex Toys (which I remember as excellent products from my own kids' younger days) in meeting with a representative from Oregon, Kurt Schrader, who generously let all of us present our cases and asked good questions. He seemed receptive and open to at least voting for one of the amendment bills.

The final NJ congressman we tried to visit was unavailable, but we all left materials for him.

I've put the slightly revised 2-page handout that I left for my congressmen on scribd.com, a file-sharing site. Anyone who cares to can print it out or email attached copies of my file to their congressmen or the media freely. You can access the document here. If you like it, please mark it as a favorite; I think that helps it get a higher ranking so that it has a better chance of being a featured document and getting a wider audience.

Soon I hope to post a longer version of the handout with the citations for my facts that you can use to back up your points if asked, as well as a shorter one page summary.

Since I got home, I've been asking myself, "What next?" I don't really know the answer. Plugging away with the same approaches may ultimately get results, but so much is teetering on the edge now that I'm not sure we can afford just to be patient and doggedly persistent. The rally was amazing and seemed so successful to me, but the press coverage has hardly been overwhelming. The public remains largely ignorant or misinformed. I'd like to believe that non-enforcement, the "solution" that both the CPSC and Congress keep pushing for small businesses, libraries, and all those hit by "unintended consequences" will work, but I just can't.

Any great ideas out there? Or half baked ones? Or silly Seussian ones?

Courage is not my middle name, and Politics is not my last. I have never before gone to Washington to fight for anything I believed in, but I'm so glad I did this time. I'd like to thank Rick Woldenberg and all the folks who put together this rally and the amendthecpsia website. I'd also like to thank Walter Olson of overlawyered.com who has tracked this law and its impact so thoroughly. (It was very exciting to meet all these people; bright, organized, hardworking, and passionate all of them.) And I'm deeply appreciative of all those who made the effort to come (I met another book-loving family - homeschoolers from California who gave up a day of their vacation to attend) and all those who couldn't make the trek but watched from home or followed online accounts. Thank you for your good wishes and nice comments; they mean a great deal to me.

I'll close with this quote from the anthropologist Margaret Mead:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

CPSIA and Vintage Books: My Comment to Consumer's Union

2009-04-03T15:16:00.007-04:00

Drawing by Jessie Willcox Smith from The Little Mother Goose, with thanks to Project Gutenberg

Consumer's Union blog has a very inaccurate account of the rally (really quite bizarre at times - don't know what rally they attended, but it wasn't the same one I did). You can read it here.

There are lots of great comments from people who were really there, but I had to add my two cents too (especially since so far they haven't seen fit to post my comments, though in fairness they've posted plenty of others that are critical):

Um, you forgot to mention speakers like me. I do not represent any organization or industry, I paid my own way to the rally and gave up a day of work to attend and speak at it, and what's more, I was even arguing contrary to my self-interest. I write and illustrate new children's books, the ordinary kind currently enjoying a stay of enforcement - it would be to my advantage to have libraries and schools throw out their old books and have to buy new ones like mine to replace them. I was there to argue for what I believe is best for children, particularly for the most disadvantaged in our society who suffer disproportionately from lead poisoning. This law gets it wrong on so many fronts.

I have my doctorate in clinical child psychology from the University of Virginia and graduated magna cum laude from Yale with distinction in psychology. I am not an idiot and I am well aware of the potential hazards of lead poisoning for children, especially for the youngest ones. I also know that the research on lead is more complex than is commonly acknowledged by consumer organizations like yours. The truth is that lower SES kids are at greater risk of lead poisoning, and this discrepancy has persisted even as efforts by the CDC and other agencies to reduce sources of environmental lead (in lower income areas as well as others) have been enormously successful. Part of the reason that lower SES kids are at greater risk is because they still live disproportionately in older homes with lead-containing dilapidated paint and to play in areas with lead in the soil (the CPSIA does nothing to help with those on-going issues). But there are many other variables that also put low SES kids at greater risk -- and I can assure you that higher rates of exposure to books, high quality handmade toys, bicycles and ATVs, ballpoint pens, organic clothing, and one of kind artwork are NOT among them - and yet these blameless items are disproportionately being affected by CPSIA, which also means they won't be around in 5 years to be passed along through thrift stores and give-away programs to kids who could really use them. Instead the law does NOTHING to address the very real measures we could take to reduce the absorption of and harm by lead in the young children from lower SES populations, including improving their nutrition (low calcium and iron levels lead to higher absorption rates), providing support to improve parenting practices (neglected and abused kids suffer higher rates of lead poisoning even when controlling for SES; and kids whose parents have poor housekeeping practices have higher rates, again controlling for SES), and improving the mentally stimulating quality of the child's environment through providing high quality child care, book distribution programs coupled with instruction on sharing books with children, and programs to distribute toys that promote physical exercise (like bicycles) and encourage brain development (a mentally stimulating environment both prevents and treats the harmful effects of lead at low to moderate blood lead levels). The CPSIA not only doesn't help with these proven effective measures, it actually hinders them, putting an end to bike distribution programs, closing down the children's sections in affordable thrift stores, and raising the prices of all consumer goods for children, so that low income parents have less money to spend on high quality food, toys and books. By banning the sale of inexpensive older used books, removing them from libraries, schools and daycares, and raising the costs of the new ones purchased by literacy programs, the CPSIA snatches books and the chances for better school achievement from the hands of low income kids as surely as the Grinch plucked the books and toys from the Whos down in Whoville.

Way to go, Grinch.

P.S. You are correct that the law only addresses children's products. But if this law were in fact necessary, then you'd have to ban lead in adults' products as well. Children are actually at the greatest risk of lead poisoning prenatally, when it's Mom's exposure that matters, and they further come into contact with items intended for adults or the whole family every day. When you decide that minimal lead exposure is important enough to take away American's automobiles (aka lead machines - with lead in everything from the batteries to the steel to the brakes to the weights used to balance the wheels) then I'll start to think you at least believe in what you are saying.

I'd also like to see you recommend that all American families discard all their current children's products and household goods unless they get them tested - obviously necessary if you believe that retroactive application of the law is so essential that even during a severe recession thrift stores can't sell a pair of jeans to a 10 year old.

CPSIA Rally Update Coming - I'm Whupped

2009-04-02T22:17:00.003-04:00

I'd like to thank everyone who left words of encouragement for me over the last couple of days; your good wishes are much appreciated, and I hope I did well by all of you. My plan had been to get everyone updated this evening, but I'm going to have to ask for your patience until tomorrow.

Yesterday was a LONG day for me and my daughter. We got up at 3:30 a.m. to drive to DC and didn't get home until 10:30 last night - and then because I was speaking at a literacy organization midday today, I had to get up early and spend the morning preparing for that and the afternoon catching up a bit on various things. I'm so tired now I'm heading to bed with a good book.

Publishers' Weekly interviewed me last night about the rally as I was getting ready to head home, and though I'm sorry they couldn't use most of what I told them, the article is excellent coverage - and more than a little worrisome for new books too. You can read the article here.

I was/am a bit disheartened about what my senators' staffers told me about the likelihood of the CPSIA being amended - but it does sound like other rally people felt more hopeful after meeting with their congressmen, so overall that's encouraging. And the staffers I spoke with were not only polite and listened, I think they are genuinely willing to learn more. Please everyone, don't let up now - keep working to get this law changed, sooner rather than later.

Okay, more tomorrow.