sailboat cake

Our sweet friend Lyndsay of cococake did a great and very simple tutorial for a sailboat cake & garland, perfect for Foggy's birthday (which is coming up soon on June 1st).

Lyndsay made this tutorial for you are my fave — you can see more about it on her cococake blog as well. (Lyndsay made cupcakes for our Foggy book launch a couple of years ago, too).

Top image is © cocake, used with permission.

coffee filter sky

Update: we worked on this more this morning to make all different planets! This technique makes great suns, too.

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This is an idea that came from DLTK crafts for kids — they made a coffee filter planet earth.

We visited the planetarium this weekend and this was a fantastic after-activity. It's a great idea, thanks to DTLK Kids for the idea, which you can see here.

If you draw with felt pens on coffee filter paper and then spray or sprinkle water on your drawing, it gets nice and fuzzy. Perfect for making weather paintings, satellite images or even a collage. This would also be a good way to make a Foggy diorama.

The shape of the filters we have make a natural rainbow shape — cut off the sealed side and bottom and unfold. Cut circles for suns & planets (or just flatten them, if that's the kind of filter you have).

Marine alphabet (& a free printable poster)

Today Foggy & Cloud teach you the International Marine Alphabet (also known as flag semaphore). You can learn more about semaphore from Arthur Ransome's Winter Holiday or read this excellent student project by Susan Laflin.

You may download and print this mini-poster to help you with your messages. This is taken from the inside dust-jacket of Foggy.

(I made an extra colourway for fun, so you can download the blue one here and the yellow poster here). As usual, all rights from the Windy series reserved © Judith and Robin. Happy signaling.

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.

Windy's Boat

A paper boat for Windy (PDF), from the book Foggy.

Update: you can see photos of the paper boat here.

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.

Foggy baby t-shirt giveaway (Updated)

Update: Thanks to everyone who entered our giveaway. We will be holding more giveaways, so there will be many more chances to win something fun. We chose our winners by lottery. Congratulations to our white shirt winner, gardenofmoi, and our yellow shirt winner, AmandaSue!




A few months ago we did a silkscreen workshop at Blim and made some Foggy t-shirts for for fun, and you could win one (contest closed).

Pom Pom Dolls

We're making pom pom dolls of Foggy and Old Al from the Windy books today at Word on the Street at the Raise-a-Reader pavilion, 530 West Georgia Street in Vancouver this afternoon at 12:45. This is a workshop for children 4–8.

We'll be putting up pictures and instructions on Monday. In the meantime, here's our first Foggy and Al.

NB: We were going to do a workshop on vehicles originally. If you'd like to make some vehicles out of household objects, please see our earlier post for inspiration.

Cloud on TV

Finally the long-awaited interview with Cloud (the co-star of our new book "Foggy") is on TV! You can watch it between kids programming on Knowledge Network, or find it at http://knowledge.ca/program/cartographies-shorts. The interview is one of a number of shorts from cArtographies: a documentary directed by Brian Johnson, produced by Leah Mallen (Twofold Films), and commissioned by Knowledge Network.

Reed Boat

After working on Foggy, we've collected many different schemes to make a boat. Over the summer we'll be posting a few more.

Here is a very cool boat made out of a reed leaf. Would you like to make one? Take a look over here...

We'll be posting more again next week.

(Image from Lap(fen)lander's Natural Lore blog).

Launch at Kidsbooks

A few weeks ago we launched Foggy at Collage Collage. Now we are preparing for a second launch at Kidsbooks, as part of Simply Read Books' spring book launch. We will be there to present our book, along with some other new books, including Owls See Clearly at Night.

The launch will be from 7–9pm on Wednesday May 5th. You can find more details at Simply Read's blog. We hope to see you there!

Colouring page for Foggy

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

Foggy's Figgy Muesli

Now that we've revealed the answer to "what is Foggy's favourite thing to eat for breakfast?", we thought we would share his breakfast recipe with you. Cloud also contributed his recipe for Cloudy Muesli.

The recipe is uploaded as a PDF. Please let us know if you have any trouble downloading it.

Thanks again to Chef Heidi for her help in editing Cloud and Foggy's recipes.

Our giveaway winners

What is Foggy's favourite breakfast? Muesli! Foggy likes his muesli to be nice and crunchy, with cornflakes, dried fruit, nuts and lemon or vanilla yoghurt and a sardine or two on top. We'll put up the recipe in a moment (don't worry, the sardines are optional).

Thanks to everyone who entered our contest. Here are our winners:

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!

Foggy music

This is quite exciting to announce...

As with Sunny and Snowy & Chinook, we have music to accompany the book Foggy.

The music is by Cowbell with guest vocals (and fantastic lyrics) by our talented and generous friends Chris Harris and Larissa Loyva.

You can listen to two of the tracks now at Simply Read's blog.

Foggy giveaway

To celebrate the launch of Foggy at Collage Collage this Saturday, we are giving away signed copies to three people. We will be announcing the winners on March 29th.

To win a copy, please tell us: What do you think Foggy's favourite thing to eat for breakfast? Email your answers to windyandfriends@gmail.com.

Special note: For those of you who haven't read the book yet, Foggy is the dog and the red- headed boy is Cloud.

Extra special note: The answer is not marshmallows, although he does love to eat marshmallows for dinner!