5-minute pinwheel

I found this very easy pinwheel photo-tutorial from Petit Poulou which we pinned to our Windy board on pinterest. To make on, you will need: square paper, hole punch, brass paper fastener, bbq skewer or chopstick and scissors. It took me 5 minutes to make and when I photographed it outside it spun like...a pinwheel ^_^

The only paper fasteners I had were fancy fabric covered ones for some reason, so it looks like I've added a button or something, but it's just a paper fastener. For square paper, I used origami paper — mine is white on one side, so I glue-sticked two pieces together. It looked like they paper was buckling when I did it, but it looked smooth when folded. I used a chopstick instead of a skewer. 

This is the pinwheel blowing like mad.

This shows the fastener wrapped around the chopstick at the back.

This is Windy's pinwheel from Sunny.

Happy New Year

It's lunar New Year, would you like to make some noise to celebrate?

To make a very basic shaker, here is our set of instructions from Sunny below. If you are stuck inside, rice makes a softer sound :) A cup from a coffee shop with a lid is the easiest. You can tape or staple two paper cups or paper bowls together.

If you'd like to do a fancier noisemaker, you could make this lovely hand drum from pichouline via bloesem kids.

Windy & Sunny posters

The fantastics over at buy olympia have made two of our favourite prints available online as posters. The prints are on 6 x 6 inches on gloss paper and are suitable for framing.

We have Windy and the chickens from Windy

and this photo from Sunny available — they're quite cheap & cheerful, too. They have loads of other pretty children's books and all types of printed matter at buy olympia, too, so you may want to visit their shop. All images © Judith & me.

Gift box ukelele

Here's a version of the shoebox guitar activity (instructions at link) from Sunny. We used a sturdy little giftbox and some paper straws. Auggie had some trouble with the elastic bands so I did that for him, and I cut out the hole with an exacto knife. I think within a year he could tackle this project on his own with safety scissors, but not today. He really loves colouring on black paper so lucky for us we had a black gift box in the closet.

December giveaway: cards

We are having our December giveaway early, because the prize will be more useful before the winter holidays (although these are useful all year round): a set of our greeting cards. We've just gotten caught up and restocked our cards at buyolympia.

To win a set of our cards, please leave a comment below this post. Please be sure to leave an address so that we can contact you. Let us know in the commments below. Contest ends midnight December 9. This is open to anyone worldwide and there is no fee to enter.

Our cards are 4.75 inches x 4.75 inches and are blank inside. They are offset printed on glossy cardstock and come packaged with a white square envelope. There are 4 cards in our set, Windy, Sunny with his guitar, Snowy and Chinook jumping on the bed and Chinook with a snowball. Each one has a little drawing on the back. (Thank-you to buyolympia for the product photographs.)

Puzzles

We've made some simple block puzzles for you to print and make, one from each book (high quality PDF link).

Simply print these out and cut along the dotted line with scissors. You can also glue your printout to a piece of card or cardboard and cut them out with a craft knife if you would like the puzzles to be a bit more durable.

Congratulations to our giveaway winners!

We're pleased to announce the winners for our Foggy t-shirt June giveaway. Congratulations, gardenofmoi and AmandaSue.

Thanks to everyone who entered. We will be holding more giveaways, so there is more fun to come.

Image from Sunny.

Hootenanny

At this time of year it's hard to plan activities. One day it is a perfect beach day, the next it's rainy and you need to put on a sweater and jacket. A hootenanny is a good activity for inside and outside.

If you need some instruments, you can make a shoebox guitar and cup-shaker (PDF link) from Sunny.

Saturday!

An outtake from Sunny with Lolly and Mild.

It's Saturday. We only have two days left before we give away copies of Foggy. All you have to do is tell us what you think Foggy likes to eat for breakfast.

Sunny and Windy in the woods

In 2000, before we had a publisher, we put out a set of postcards with pictures from Windy and we sold them at Eugene Choo and Dream in Vancouver. We included in the set two snapshots of Windy and Sunny posed sitting on logs (well, sticks really). We called the two pictures "Windy in the countryside" and "Sunny in the countryside". But it's funny, when we came across the old digital files, they were called "sensitive_windy.jpg" and "sensitive_sunny.jpg". We named them that because we thought they looked like "sensitive" folky musicians, especially with the lens flare. This was a joke we had forgotten until the files showed up.

(In the spirit of the olden days, our link to Windy today is from our first review by Shift in Japan. Ah, back in the days when Judith had just opened her studio, Steedman Design, and Robin was still studying design at Emily Carr.)

Edited to add: We still sell the books at Eugene Choo and Dream!

Colouring page for Sunny

Here is a colouring page from our second book, Sunny.

Sunny afternoon at Dandelion

Judith just sent me this old picture of us at a reading for Sunny at Dandelion in Vancouver. At first I was wondering, "who is that next to Judith?" And then I realized it is me with short hair. Now I have long hair, but a short memory it seems. Hopefully we can do some readings soon.

Hi!

We will be posting updates about the progress of the "Windy" series here, including the upcoming release of "Foggy".