Foggy fun

If you're new to our blog, you might not know about our colouring pages, which you can download, print and colour at home. We have one for Foggy that you can find here.

Warai

Joseph Wu makes fantastic origami. You can find many origami diagrams to make at home at his web site, including original Joseph Wu designs or look for anything you can think of at the origami database.


The images here are from a collection called Warai, which means laughter in Japanese.

Paper bag space helmet

Here is an activity inspired by the moon in our last post. This idea comes from the NASA web site (you can see the original instructions here).

Materials

Paper bag (big enough to fit over your head)
tape
scissors
transparent plastic (office supplies or cellophane), preferably red
decorating supplies (any kind you like)


1. Try on your bag and estimate where you should cut the hole for your eyes. Cut a rectangular hole in your bag, roughly 3 and 1/2 by 4 and 1/2 inches. (Cut the bottom off your bag if it's too long for your shoulders).


2. Cut a square of transparent plastic about 4 x 5 inches.


3. Tape the plastic over the hole. (If, like us, you attach it from the inside of the bag, you will have trouble folding the bag flat to draw on it, so gluing on decorations in the next step will work best).


4. Decorate. You can experiment with different types of helmets. We tried one with an antennae and one with a microphone. Have fun on the moon.

How to make a mini kite

This post has moved.

How to make a kite

It's time to think about an activity for the weekend...how can we not have done kites yet! We have a link to Windy's original instructions for making a real kite below. If you are the type who prefers to play indoors (or it's rainy where you are), we'll add a little set of directions for making a little paper kite for your favourite toy, or for your own diorama, on Sunday morning.

Let's start with a proper kite (PDF). There are 2 pages to this PDF.

The original directions for making a kite are on the dust jacket of our first book, Windy.

Colouring page for Foggy

Here is a colouring page for Foggy, for you to print out and colour at home. Have fun!

Sunday honey

After the Easter eggs have all been dyed and hunted, you might be looking for something to do? If you have any food colouring left, you might make "Colored Honey" from the Pooh Cook Book, a very old, loved and used (as you can see) book from our shelf.

Ingredients: honey and vegetable food colouring.

Only use a tiny bit, especially if you are using red dye, which can add a little bit of flavour if you add too much.You might use a dipped toothpick to transfer the colouring to the honey.

This would be nice on leftover hot cross buns tomorrow morning, don't you think?

Hello Baby

this post has moved here.

cococakes + children's books

We mentioned earlier that cococake in Vancouver made some fantastic mini cupcakes for our Foggy launch. Before ordering, we were looking at cococake's web site, which got us onto her (that is, Lyndsay Sung's) blog with its addictive gallery of cute cakes. We chose some simple mini cupcakes with flags and sprinkles. But! As we were looking we saw these children's book themed cakes for Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.

One of us (*ahem* Robin) has been having trouble sleeping, thinking of the cupcake possibilities for a big birthday coming up this summer.

Colouring page for Sunny

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

Foggy fun

We had so much fun at the Foggy launch. We'd like to thank everyone who came out and celebrated with us. Thank-you to fabulous Erin of Collage Collage and Simply Read Book for hosting the launch. And thanks to Lyndsay of cococakes for her great cupcakes. Special thanks to all the great boat-makers, artists and binocularists who manned (boyed and girled?) the craft tables.

Whether you were able to attend or not, we hope you will play along with our Foggy guessing game and let us know: what is Foggy's favourite thing to eat for breakfast?

Juice box boats and toilet roll binoculars

A party for Foggy wouldn't be complete without arts + crafts. We found a great project from Parents magazine via inchmark (which has a great tutorial showing you how to make your own juice box boat).

We also made toilet roll binoculars, which are quite useful if you get lost at sea.

Launched

Launch today!

Our launch is today. Hooray!

Making a lovely day

On this grey morning, maybe it's a good time to bring out this happy idea from our friend Sharilyn Wright's blog lovelydesign.