The Angel's Name--Alternate Illustrations

I've had a set of alternate illustrations for The Angel's Name sitting on my computer's hard drive since 2014, and I finally decided to make the book available with those illustrations also. It's kind of a long story, but back in 2014 I was taking Swahili lessons and thought it would be fun to have the book translated to Swahili. Life got in the way, and then eventually CreateSpace, which did support books in Swahili, merged with Kindle Direct Publishing, which does not. The only part that ever actually got translated was the title, anyway, but the illustrations were almost complete. A couple of people asked why the angel came in two colors on the bookmarks I posted recently, and that started me wondering what happened to those illustrations. There was surprisingly little work left to do on them, so now the book is available with a choice of illustrations. The only difference is that the characters have darker skin tones in the "new" alternate illustrations edition--otherwise the book is exactly the same. The new version can be found here. 

Baby Ballads: A Family Treasury--Bookmarks

Since I was making bookmarks already, I thought it would be nice to do some for Baby Ballads: A Family Treasury as well as the ones for The Angel's Name that can be found in the previous post. These were fun to design--this set is sort of like a collage or scrapbook, with so many illustrations shrunk down and pasted together. I also put in one song that had lines short enough to fit. 

 

The Angel's Name--Bookmarks

 

It's December now, so I thought I'd make a set of Christmas bookmarks based on the illustrations from The Angel's Name. Just print them, cut them out, and glue them on a backing of construction paper or thin cardboard. These are a bit more straightforward to put together than the paper dolls, which can be found here, and the Nativity stable, which can be found here, but if you enjoy these you might want to check out those, too. Personally I tend to use the paper dolls as bookmarks anyway, which is what gave me the idea to make some more traditional bookmarks also. 

Baby Ballads: A Family Treasury

Baby Ballads: A Family Treasury is now available on Amazon! The link is here.

This was quite an interesting project, since so many people were involved. It took a bit of extra effort to make sure everyone liked the pictures I put next to their songs in the book, but I think it was worth it. A book for babies must have interesting pictures! I found a lot of great public domain images from old Mother Goose books and greeting cards and advertisements and such, but of course most of them needed some work to make them fit our songs and look pretty on the pages together (and to remove irrelevant text advertising handkerchief soap or stating a copyright date of 1890). I spent a lot of time working on the pictures. I wasn't able to include musical scores, which is why I have listed the book as poetry, but I did put in a note about it if I know a song fits the tune of "Clementine" or "London Bridge" or another familiar song.

Essentially Baby Ballads: A Family Treasury is a collection of as many songs and games for babies made up by my family as we can remember. In the end we came up with 40 items, including lullabies, silly songs, and educational songs and games. Lots of them are mine, but a fair number were submitted by other relatives. I also added 10 blank pages at the end to write in songs that don't exist yet or that we use a lot but didn't make up (or for others to add their own family's songs). It's a small book, but it's very personal. The oldest song in the collection was made up for me by my grandma who died when I was little; I don't believe she ever wrote it down, but she sang it often enough that my mom and I both remembered it. Putting it into the book means that my children will also remember. 

Realistic Heart Valentine

I've removed the original picture from the center of this old-timey valentine and replaced it with an anatomical heart, just because I thought it was funny. Here's a sheet with nine copies of it, in case anybody else wants to print out a few. Happy Valentine's Day!