Snufkin hats

Snufkin, the vagabond and philosopher, arrives each spring to Moominvalley to set up camp, fish, and comfort the small creatures of Moominvalley. He is always wearing a green hat, sometimes decorated with flowers and sometimes with feathers.

If you would like to make your own Snufkin hat, you can use this Pilgrim's hat template, using green paper instead of black. Then decorate. Instead of gluing the headband, we cut notches like this.

Make your hat soon. At the first sign of autumn, Snufkin slips away from the valley and doesn't return until spring comes again.

Pom Poms on the Street

Thanks to everyone who came out to make crafts with us at Word on the Street this Sunday. We made pom pom characters. Here is a gallery of some of the great pom pom characters from the workshop. We'll be putting up directions on how to make your own pom pom character next weekend as our rainy day project, so check back soon.

Thanks to Chirp magazine for hosting us. We're putting together a story for Chirp's spring issue right now and we'll be sure to post more details about that soon, too.

Brown Owls

We've been taking a bit of a break due to summer colds, but we'll be back soon with a book review and some snow globes.

In the meantime, here are some owls we've come across recently in our travels:

Owls and nests by the K 1/2 class at Charles Dicken Elementary and a brown owl cardigan adapted from the Owlet pattern by Kate Davies.

Edited to add one more owl, this time one for Auggie, with button eyes:

The Teachers' Holidays

The Teachers' Holidays(PDF link) was written and photo-illustrated by the children in Division 1 and 2 at Charles Dickens Elementary after reading Foggy.

It begins: One June morning, all the kids in Karen, Jen, and Wendy's classes were looking forward to summer. The kids began to imagine what the teachers might do on their holidays....

Buffalo collage collages

Erin from collage collage sent us these lovely portraits of Tulip the Buffalo receiving his birthday present from Snowy & Chinook. These are from a crafting session she held earlier this year. We love the bright red and green tissue against the kraft background. Also googly eyes are always great. We'll be posting more about making paper and tissue collages soon.

windmill trees

When we were working on the set for the Windy animation tests, one of the challenges was creating much wider sets and so we set about making new kinds of flowers and trees. Chlose (a friend of Judith's daughter, Stella) made this amazing windmill tree (below) so we tried to fashion some new trees based on hers (above). Chlose's is much better, and ours remains on the cutting room floor.

Rainy by Euan

When we did our book tour for Sunny, we found that one of the exciting things about the books is that they inspire children to make their own illustrated books or animations. This is partly because they are photographic, so they are perhaps less daunting than drawing or painting at a professional level. Also, our dioramas often incorporate everyday objects (such as pencils for telephone poles) and this sparks all kinds of ideas....

One of the things we'd like to do with this blog is showcase some of the amazing and cool responses that we come across from young readers.

Here is the director's cut of the short film Rainy, inspired by the test photos for Foggy, by Euan.

Windy School Project - Thank you teachers

At the end of the school year last June, the Kindergarten, grade 1 and 2 class at Charles Dickens Elementary wrote and illustrated this great story book, inspired by the Windy books. The portrait above is of Ray and Cookie, the stars of the story. The kids made all the characters (dolls of kids in the class and the teachers) and made all the presents (from found objects) to give to the teachers at the end of the year.