Mr. Brushshoe & Miss Broach

Mr. Brushshoe, designed by Mats Theselius for Die Imaginäre Manufaktur in 1999. It's been sitting in our post queue for a bit, waiting for the right time to pop out.

Then this morning this beautiful felt broach from catrabbit popped up on our blog feed (via bkkids) and through it we found a sweet little blog called eatdrinkchic.

These both feel like early spring and they just make you happy to see them.

Shoe Cake

The summer is slipping by and we have some new posts to come.

In the meantime, look at this amazing shoe cake that our friend Lyndsay made. We mentioned her amazing cakes a few months ago.

This one was for Robin's son Henry. His favourite thing is a good shoe, especially with laces or buckles. This was inspired by Judith and Robin favourite Richard Scarry's shoemobile.

Odeeoh is featuring some of Lyndsay's children's book themed cakes today, too.

Mothers' Day

(Image from Idea Archive 01 Saul Bass & Associates)

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.

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.

Fablernas värld

Ah, Owls. How we love owls.

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.

Cheburashka Чебурашка​

A few years ago, I saw a cute little character in a magazine (maybe petit glam, which was being featured in Inside Magazines...I'm not sure) with massive furry ears. As the text around him was only Japanese and Russian, it was difficult to tell what his name was and find out more. The Russian Olympic team (which was recently in Vancouver, sporting his image) has solved the mystery. He is a Cheburashka, and will be the official mascot of the Sochi 2014 games.Cheburashka originally appeared in a 1966 children's book by Edouard Uspensky. In 1969, a stop-motion animated series based on the book came out. We love Eastern European stop-motion animation, some of which has been a source of inspiration for our dioramas and hopefully for some stop-motion animation of our own.