Jo was in a super silly mood yesterday when she helped me photograph these Huggable Blockheads. I got silly pictures, pretend-sleeping pictures, lots (and lots) of pictures with her tongue sticking out, and a bunch of blurry shots because she was moving around so much. It took about ten times as long as it should have - and I loved every minute of it.

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Jo saw me working on some little stitched girls for this Friday's pattern over on my Shiny Happy World. She decided that this girl was her favorite so I surprised her by stitching it up as a little felt pin. Easy peasy - and it's so much fun to embroider on felt. I need to do it more often.

Happy day!

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It was with great sadness that I read the news today that Brian Jacques has passed away from a heart attack at the age of 71. Jacques is the author of twenty-one novels set in the world of Redwall, a fantasy world where woodland animals live and fight like they're in The Adventures of Robin Hood. The books are unpretentious yet poetic, and highly literary yet action-packed.

I was thrilled and honored to have Mr. Jacques be the first person to agree to let me use his characters and his world in Fantasy Baseball, the book I've got coming out in March that has characters from classic children's books all living in the same fantasy world. He didn't ask for a dime; his only request was that I send him a signed copy when the book came out. I'll still send the book along to his family, of course, but it breaks my heart that I wasn't able to send it to him personally with my thanks before he was gone.

Watching him from afar, Brian Jacques seemed to have a real passion for life. Deaths like his are the hardest to take, I think, because he seemed to be someone who was really living, someone for whom life was a gift, both to be enjoyed and to be "regifted."

Farewell, Brian Jacques. I raise a strawberry cordial in your memory!

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News flash! Just a couple of quick round-up alerts to share:

Edi at Crazy Quilts includes Samurai Shortstop on her list of Essential Asian American books...

Miss Attitude at Reading in Color read Samurai Shortstop as one of her 2010 Historical Challenge books, and posted a really in-depth and thoughtful review of it on her blog...

And Samurai Shortstop gets a namecheck in a great Mother Jones article about a high school teacher who really knows how to reach even the most difficult kids.

Thanks, everybody!

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Tis the season for me to start biting my fingernails: the first reviews for Fantasy Baseball are appearing!

First, Dave at the Just One More Page blog (and bookseller at The Blue Marble Bookstore in Ft. Thomas, Kentucky) reviewed an advance reader copy, and says Fantasy Baseball is "one not to miss."

Then I found out that Publishers Weekly reviewed Fantasy Baseball! Here's their review:

Continuing to use baseball as backdrop, Gratz (The Brooklyn Nine) moves from historical fiction to fantasy with a story that playfully mixes storybook characters with stadium action. When Alex finds himself in Ever After he's sure he's dreaming--case in point, he's recruited to play in a high-stakes tournament for a team captained by Dorothy Gale, she of the ruby red cleats. Dorothy's teammates include lesser-known Oz characters like Tik-Tok, Scraps, and Button Bright, who's in danger of fading away because nobody reads the sequel he appears in. They insist Alex is a "Lark," somebody's daydream, and not a book character at all, but they keep him because the kid can flat-out play. Eventually, Alex figures out whose daydream he is in a thread that adds poignancy and tension to a slightly unwieldy narrative, as the Oz team encounters Mother Goose, the critters from Redwall, L'Engle's Charles Wallace and Mrs. Which and Whatsit, among numerous literary cameos. The predictable ending is the only one possible, but Gratz frames it with an interesting question about what effect dreams can hope to have on the dreamer. Ages 8–12. (Mar.)

Thanks Dave, and thanks PW!

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My friend Clay Carmichael reports that The Brooklyn Nine is featured in a Good Sports Books guide supplement in the January issue of Horn Book. Thanks, Clay, and thanks Horn Book!

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Here's my map! The book is called "The League of Seven," and it takes place (pretty obviously, I guess) in an alternate American history...

Click on the image to see it larger.

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Today I am making a map of the world from my new alternate reality fantasy novel. All good fantasy novels need maps in the front, don't they? I'll post it when it's finished.

Above: a map of The Land of Oz

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We knew there was a foundry on Long Island called Gratz Industries, but we didn't know they were famous for making Pilates equipment* until our friend Sarah Mlynowski snapped this pic with her camera phone. Awesome! We applaud industrious Gratzes of all ilks.

*And is it me, or do Pilates machines look like torture devices!?

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Wendi and I watched Easy A last night, which was fun, and has lots of great 80s teen movie references, including quite a few Ferris Bueller refs. That prompted us to pull out Ferris Bueller's Day Off and watch it as a sort of teen-movie, multi-generational double-feature, and we had fun all over again. ("Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to play a little tune for you. I dedicate it to a man who doesn't think he's seen anything good today. Cameron Frye, this one's for you...")

The odd thing about rewatching Ferris Bueller for perhaps the thousandth time (a conservative estimate) is that this time, I saw it as Cameron's story, not Ferris'. Ferris is the fun one. He's the one for whom everything always works out. But most of us aren't Ferris Bueller, no matter how much we want to be. We're more like Cameron Frye. We're nervous, we're scared, we're tentative about life. And it's Cameron who changes by the end of the movie, not Ferris. Cameron's the character who grows and changes. We love Ferris for not growing and changing, much as we love Peter Pan for the same reasons, but none of can ever really be Peter Pan, either.

In fact, as I watched the film, I couldn't help comparing Ferris to another character who shows up in some nervous and tentative characters' lives and mixes things up for one crazy day:
The Cat in the Hat, who promised two children they would have some "fun that is funny." I can't think of a better way to describe Ferris and his day off. Of course, when the Cat in the Hat leaves, everything is put back exactly the way it was when he arrived, and in Ferris Bueller's Day Off...well, if you've seen it, you know what isn't exactly the same as it was in the beginning of the movie. (I can't believe I'm even being careful about spoilers here. Seriously, if you haven't seen this movie, go out and rent it RIGHT NOW.)

So, is Ferris Bueller the Cat in the Hat? Discuss amongst yourselves...

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Just a quick sneak peek at something I've been working on for release next week at my Shiny Happy World. Have you signed up for my mailing list yet? You don't want to miss the pirates and ninjas - do you?

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I got great news right before the holidays (and all the snow!) hit: The Brooklyn Nine has been nominated for the 2011-2012 Indiana Young Hoosier Book Award! The Brooklyn Nine is one of twenty books nominated in the Middle Grade category.

Thanks, Indiana Library Federation--and happy reading, Young Hoosiers!

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This past summer I took a two-week letterpress class at Penland School of Crafts, and what did I create and print? Fantasy Baseball posters, of course! A set of four, in fact, and I'll be giving copies of each away in the months leading up to Fantasy Baseball's release in March 2011.

*And seriously, why aren't you signed up for my newsletter already? The sign up is just an easy scroll to the bottom of the page...

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Alan lost a bunch of weight this year - which means I got a huge stack of too-big clothes to play with. Jo's response when she saw the pile? "Will you make me some clothes from those? I love it when you make things for me out of Daddy's old clothes!" I love it that that's still her attitude - I know at some point she probably won't want to wear things made from her dad's cast-offs. But for now? She got this skirt made from one of his T-shirts. She really does love these super-comfy skirts - though she likes them to be jazzed up a bit. For this one I stitched a rainbow of backstitches around the hem.
For the bottom two rows I stitched right in the stitch lines for the existing T-shirt hem. That dictated the spacing for the rest of the rows - which I eyeballed.

At some point I'll write up a tutorial for this kind of skirt. For you adventurous types who want to try it right away - cut the T-shirt straight across at the armpits. Turn the cut edge down to form a casing for elastic and stitch it in place. Thread some elastic in, close the casing and you're ready to fancy it up. Easy peasy.

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There's an awful lot of buzz out there right now about the new Tron: Legacy movie, a long-awaited follow-up to the cult classic from 1982. But good luck finding the original Tron on DVD to watch ahead of the new holiday blockbuster. The DVD is out of print, and the only remaining copies available on Amazon are going for around $120. Same thing on eBay. According to the L.A. Times:

Why, you might ask, wouldn't Disney capitalize on all the hype for the new movie to sell copies of the old one? It seems like an incredibly stupid move not to have at least the old version--let alone the planned newly remastered version available for sale and rental in the weeks leading up to the premiere of the new movie.

The L.A. Times speculates that Disney doesn't want the now antiquated special effects of the original to turn off modern audiences:

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5 cups old-fashioned oats

1 cup coconut. You can leave this out if you don't like coconut - I love the toasty flavor it gets. Maybe try some wheat germ instead?

1 cup chopped nuts. Any kind except sunflower seeds. They taste good, but they always float to the top of the milk and make the final bowl look less pretty.

2 teaspoons cinnamon

1/2 cup sweetener. I like to mix two kinds - I think that gives it a deeper flavor. Try a scant 1/2 cup of brown sugar with a few tablespoons of honey or maple syrup.

1/2 cup oil.

Mix it all together. Spread on an oiled baking sheet and bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. Stir once halfway through cooking.

Eat one bowl hot out of the oven, topped with some dried fruit and cold milk or warm apple cider. Let the rest cool completely and store in a sealed container. Serve with milk, cider, or yogurt.

I love mixing and matching different nut/fruit/sweetener combinations to get different flavors. Some of my favorites are dried apricots with almonds and honey (mmmm. . .) and dried cherries with cashews and maple syrup (fancy!). My everyday basic is raisins with almonds and honey. So good. And I just happen to have a pan in the oven right now.

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I'm getting ready to shoot a video on pressing vs. ironing (I know! So exciting!) and I decided I just couldn't do it on my old, water-stained ironing board cover. I have a magnificent Michael Graves extra-wide ironing board that I bought several years ago. When I bought it I had the foresight to buy an extra Michael Graves cover - knowing that by the time I needed a new cover the extra-wide version would be long gone. I've moved it to four homes and I finally took it out of the package today - only to find that it was a standard-sized cover. Aaargh!

I was. . . angry. I briefly considered putting the icky old cover back on the ironing board - but it was really pretty gross. And then I realized it was just a flat piece of fabric - no shaping - nothing fancy. Even the drawstring was just slipped through the serged edge.

I realized I could use the old, stained cover as a pattern for a new cover - and one that would be way cuter than the boring Michael Graves design I had been schlepping around for years.
How about this cute Peter Pan fabric I bought in Japan? I just laid the old cover on the new fabric and cut around the edge. (New pattern weights are on my list of Things to Make Soon.)
I even made improvements! Instead of a flimsy serged edge I used some old (really old - look at that price!) seam binding tape someone gave to me. Bonus points for it being orange and looking so cute with the fabric.
I stitched the binding around the edge. I pulled the drawstring out of the old cover and reused it on the new one - I just threaded it through the binding tape using a big, blunt needle.
The original cover was tightened on the board and just knotted in place. I used this fancy sliding springy thing instead of a knot.

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74. Happy Thanksgiving!

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By: Alan Gratz, on 11/25/2010
Blog: Gratz Industries (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Happy Thanksgiving! We don't do a traditional dinner - instead we do a few favorites for everyone in the house - and who cares if together they make up a balanced meal. On the menu this year (in case you can't read our fancy-schmancy chalkboard or want links to recipes). . .
Peach Crisp
Chocolate Chip Cookies
Ice Cream Cones
Curried Butternut Squash Soup
Cheese Pizza
Ritz crackers with Boursin cheese and gruyere
Homemade Bread
Cornbread Dressing with Chestnuts and Sausage

I'll leave you to guess who requested what. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

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75. Meet the Anywhere Bear

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By: Alan Gratz, on 11/24/2010
Blog: Gratz Industries (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags:  Wendi, crafting, holidays, Add a tag

Isn't he a cutie? The Anywhere Bear is a very versatile little pattern. I designed him to fit on my free Swell Stocking pattern - and that's what you see here.

But as I was working on the pattern I realized he could be used on lots of other things. Once you get the basic applique steps down you could add him to a pair of jeans, a handbag, a tote bag, a pillow - anywhere really. And he's not just limited to fabric uses either. I have a HUGE stack of paste paper that I've made at my job at Penland School of Crafts. And look what I did with some of it.

Instead of fabric I used my paste paper. Instead of embroidering the face I used a Sharpie. Instead of sewing him in place I glued him to the front of a card. Easy peasy and so much fun!

The pattern includes full-sized templates for the bear - sized to fit just right on the Swell Stocking or a regular-sized greeting card. There are also complete step by step instructions (with photos, natch) on how to applique the bear to fabric. There are even some notes and suggestions to help kids with the project.

Download the free Swell Stocking pattern here.
And the free Neato Ornaments pattern here.
And purchase the Anywhere Bear pattern ($5) here.

In 2011 I'll be offering weekly video tutorials on all kinds of sewing techniques for kids and other beginning sewists. I'll also be designing special patterns and projects that use these beginning techniques to help build your skills. If you want to be kept in the loop on all the news and updates, please sign up for my newsletter. And if you know someone who wants to make "Learn to sew" one of their New Year's resolutions - please forward them the link. Thanks! And happy sewing!

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