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Illustration For Kids just put out a group postcard promotional--With a Valentine's Day theme, of course! Below is the postcard with our joint venture to offer our fun & whimsical illustrations to the world.

Thanks for stopping by!

Just like Claire (below) and the others, I created an image to represent my work for our latest postcard promotional. We chose a Valentine's Day theme so you will see lots of love and hearts and pinks and reds in our images.

Please take a look at our bio's here and visit our personal sites to see more about us! Thanks for visiting!

Here is my valentine piece for our mailer.


Happy Valentine's Day!

In honor of Valentine’s Day coming up next week, I’d like to feature a poem from Naomi Shihab Nye’s amazing new collection, Honeybee (Greenwillow, 2008). Her new anthology includes 82 poems, including many prose poems, on school, war, families, landscapes and bees… the connecting thread that buzzes through the poems with nectar and implication. There are many selections about words and books and libraries (one of my favorite poem topic that I have featured previously). She takes us along with her in her travels through Texas (her home state and mine) and Egypt and childhood and airports and beehives. It’s a striking variety of vignettes and anecdotes and observations all threaded through her unique poetic voice. Honeybee is political, personal, and powerful. I marked at least eight poems that I just had to keep in my “favorite poems” notebook. Here’s one small sampling about love and marriage from the point of view of a two year old!

Accuracy

Lydia Rose walked through our front door and said.
“Where is the sock monkey? I need him.” This surprised
me. She had never shown any interest in the sock mon-
key before.

We began digging in the tall basked where the stuffed animals
live.

Lydia Rose said, “I am two and a half now, did you know
that? Where is he?”

We threw out the snake, the yellow bunnies, battered
bears, a strange small eagle wearing a blue T-shirt, a soft
camel, and the bird that makes a chickadee sound if you
press its belly.

Sock Monkey was buried at the bottom.

Lydia Rose clutched him to her chest. “My husband!” she
said, closing her eyes dreamily.

I was astonished. “Your husband? When did this happen?”

She spoke clearly and definitely. “I thought of him and
I married him in my mind.”

She ran around the dining room clutching her husband
tightly, singing the song of a chickadee trapped in a
human body.

“How great! I am happy for you both! I said,
following her.

She did not answer, lost in a newlywed’s swoon.

I said, “It is so nice that you love him now!”

And she stopped dancing, staring at me
disapprovingly.

“I didn’t say I love him! I said, he is my husband!” *

p. 79-80

Poignant, funny, unsentimental, crystal clear and child-sincere. What a gem!

And don’t forget to join the Poetry Friday Round Up at AmoXcalli.
Picture credit: amazon.com

This is my new logo, created for the web page for the The Valentine's Trunk Show in February. This is such a nice idea for a fair, all the vendors are displaying their handmade things in a suitcase each and then we can mingle and have snacks. I love it. Obviously I will have to find and buy a charming vintage suitcase. I was thinking this could become the perfect place to store my shop between shows.

As you know I also love the Workroom so I think it's the perfect venue. If you haven't been yet, you have to come just to gaze adoringly at Karyn's covet-worthy shelves of fabric.

As we set aside this day to remember those who have served our country in military endeavors,wars, and combat from our country's founding, and given the ultimate sacrifice of their lives, words can't express the gratitude and respect for these men and women, and their families. We owe our freedom and the ability to celebrate and worship, work and live in comfort and ease, move around and prosper and believe what we want freely, communicate, travel, study, learn, read and protest, vote and live in a free land....so much that we can't imagine living without, and the price has been dear.
Here is a link at Lines and Colors showing some artwork created by Combat artists of WWII.