Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

 

I'm a bit late this year, but I still wanted to wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy New Year! And I'm posting my apparently now-traditional group photo of Christmas tree angels, because I think that's fun (here's a link to last year's). I spent Christmas with my sister, and between us we found four matching tree angels this year (or mostly matching, since one of my sister's is blue). The one in the back middle is my grandmother's original angel--the one I thought ought to have a name when I was a kid, which eventually inspired my first picture book, The Angel's Name. I actually misplaced one of my angels and didn't find her in time to pack her for the trip, but my sister recently bought a new one, so the choir is growing anyway.

I had a particularly wonderful Christmas this year, as we were able to spend it with my parents and sister and also my husband's parents. Also, I unexpectedly got a new job right after Christmas and New Year's, so I've been preparing for and starting that instead of blogging. I'll have less time for writing for a few months, but I'm close enough to the end of a couple of projects that I'll be posting about them soon enough anyway. I'm looking forward to an exciting 2025!

The Angel's Name--Spanish Translation Proof Copy

 

Today I got my proof copy of the upcoming Spanish translation of The Angel's Name, El nombre de la angelita. I've had the recolored illustrations ready for years, but it's only just been translated. My friend Amy Hernandez did a great job--it was a new type of project for both of us, but I'm pleased with the results so far. It still needs to be proofread again for typos and accent marks, but it's very close to finished. I'm excited! The Spanish I learned in high school and college is quite rusty by now, but a picture book like this is about at my reading level. I'm having fun with it already and can't wait to be able to share it!

Light of Hope Holiday Craft Market 2024

 

Last weekend I was in Claremore again for another craft fair. This time I shared a table with Kristi Woods, who had bookmarks and handmade cards as well as books. Kristi really knows how to set a table up nicely! The Light of Hope Holiday Craft Market was smaller than the last craft fair I went to, but I had fun and I did sell a few books. Our table was in the front, a little apart, and we had some great conversations with people who stopped by. Kristi's new book 101 Prayers for Military Wives has an interesting QR code bumper sticker that she's trying to get on cars in all fifty states, and I know it's now being sent to two states that weren't already on her list.

We had a third person helping out at our booth the whole time, which was extra fun! My son was an enthusiastic salesman and said he really enjoyed being there. Here's a selfie of the three of us getting ready for business. I was happy to have my "apprentice" along for the ride. A couple of other friends also came to see us, but I didn't get any more pictures after the beginning of the event. 

Westmore Craft Bazaar 2024

 

This Saturday I had a great time at the Westside Craft Bazaar in Claremore! My friend Renee' La Viness and I shared a table and each sold several books, even though we ended up placed in sort of a back corner. There were booths throughout the whole elementary school building, and I'm not sure everyone knew they needed to wander around to see everything. Eventually word spread, though, and since it rained quite a bit we were much better off in a back hallway than we would have been outdoors. I think it went pretty well, overall, and also that my children's books and Renee's holiday coloring book made us ideal table mates. Some of the other booths were also really fun to look at--I think my favorite was the one with a laser engraver to customize wooden objects on the spot, but there were also fancy soaps and birdhouses and coin banks and Christmas ornaments and recycled book art and tons of adorable crocheted animals. One booth near us was all gourd art, which was pretty cool and not something you see every day. And now that I know how much I like them, maybe I'll go to more craft fairs in the future! 

Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper

 

Here's another old Temple of Fancy paper doll. Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper was published in 1814. You can read this version of Cinderella's story on the Internet Archive here, assuming the Internet Archive isn't down again due to hackers. It's a familiar story to most of us. For some reason this is the only one of these dolls whose story is based on a classic fairy tale. This doll was also shared online by the Bryn Mawr College, but I have added a few things. 

Cinderella wouldn't be Cinderella without her magic coach, would she? This is a large piece that originally folded in half to fit into the envelope with everything else. I had to fold my copy in half, too, or it would not fit in the pencil case I wanted to store it in. But the fold also makes it stand up on its own, so that's cool.

The Bryn Mawr College copy of the doll had two outfits without hats. I found a black and white picture of one of them elsewhere with a flat hat that did seem to fit the casual look of Cinderella running away from the ball, so I copied its shape and used colors and textures from her dress to make it match. So the hat on the right in the photo above is supposed to belong to her but could be missing details or have the wrong colors. The hat on the left was spotted with a copy of the Ellen doll, but it is not one of Ellen's hats. It fits Cinderella and goes with her last hatless outfit, so I think it's quite likely to be hers. It's styled like some Mother Goose bonnets, which I think fits with the idea that Cinderella would be working for her stepsisters--you can see them in the background--while wearing unfashionable old clothes. It's kind of pixilated, but I've tried to smooth it out a little. If you want to be completely sure you only use correct pieces, you can discard those two hats, but they are a much safer bet than Frederick's replacement hats.

Now, here's where I've gotten, ahem, creative with this set. Cinderella's final outfit is a wedding dress, and it comes complete with both the prince and the priest standing next to her. But I thought that was shockingly unfair, that the other characters were only part of her clothing! So I extracted them and tried to make them into proper dolls of their own. The prince's other outfits are recolors of his original one, so his pose unfortunately doesn't change. I did make him a bit bigger, just because his head was originally so small, so as a side effect he's taller than Cinderella now. Two of his feathery hats were blown up larger from the backgrounds of Cinderella's other outfits, and a third is a recolor of one of those. The crown was borrowed from a doll called Frank Feignwell and recolored, as I thought the prince really ought to have a crown. His page also includes Cinderella's wedding dress separated from the other characters.

The priest doesn't have any hats, but I recolored his robes in a few basic liturgical colors. I'm not an expert on those, but I figured green, red, and purple would offer reasonable choices for anyone who might want him for a paper doll church service. Anyway, since I was making the prince into a proper doll I decided that I might as well do it for the priest, too. If you want only the original pieces for Cinderella, print pages 1 and 2 and ignore pages 3 and 4. 

If you do use my extra dolls, the prince can interact with Cinderella while she is wearing her other outfits. It's fun to have options.

Here's my current collection of these paper dolls, all dressed up for Cinderella's wedding. Find my previous posts about Little Fanny and Little Henry here, Ellen here, and Frederick here.

Download the Cinderella paper doll in PDF format here (page 1) and here (page 2), and get the prince here (page 3) and the priest here (page 4).

Mayetta Pioneer Days 2024

 

I had a rather eventful trip to Kansas last weekend, for the Oct. 5th Mayetta Pioneer Days celebration. My family was supposed to meet up and share a booth space, but my parents didn't make it there due to surprise health issues (all appears to be well now, but not in time to make it to the party). The rest of us managed to have fun anyway. Here's a picture of me that morning at my newly-set-up book table, wearing my sunbonnet because it was Pioneer Days. The sun came out later on, but so did the wind. I tried taping my book stands in place, but in the end I had to take about half of them down and just lay the books flat so they wouldn't keep blowing over. I did sell several books, so that was nice, and I gave away a lot of advertising bookmarks.

Here's a picture of my kids watching the rope spinning demonstration. None of my still shots from that turned out--maybe because I didn't realize my flash was on, which slowed down the shutter speed--so I took a screenshot from the video I recorded. The rope spinning demonstration is always my favorite activity at Pioneer Days.

The battery for my phone didn't last through the day very well, so I couldn't use it to take photos of the parade at the end. My aunt let me borrow her phone to get a few shots, though, and I like this one of my kid waving at a float. It was a busy day that didn't exactly go as planned, but I was definitely glad I went. 

Temple of Fancy Paper Dolls--Frederick, or The Effects of Disobedience

 

Here's another one of those early 1800s paper dolls from S & J Fuller at the Temple of Fancy. Frederick, or The Effects of Disobedience was published in 1816. In this story, Frederick is a fourteen-year-old boy who runs away from home because he is too lazy to study Greek and Latin. Of course the first thing he does is dress as a sailor and get on a ship, which doesn't work out nearly as well as he expects it to. You can read Frederick's story on the Internet Archive here. He manages to get captured by pirates not once, but twice (well, once by "a Barbary corsair" and once by "an American privateer," but... those are both pirates) and have a few other awkward adventures. Some of these involve dressing in women's clothing as a disguise, so the two incongruous-seeming outfits with dresses really do belong to this set. Eventually Frederick meets up with some English soldiers, fights in one battle, and is sent home heroically wounded to apologize to his parents--and to his Greek and Latin teacher. You know, good 1800s morality tale drama.

The Bryn Mawr College was kind enough to share a printable version of Frederick online, but their copy is missing his head and all his hats. Their solution to that problem was to throw Little Henry's head on the scanner with Frederick's clothes, which technically would make it possible to play with the set. I had already constructed a Little Henry set, though, and I didn't want a Frederick with the wrong head. So I set out on a quest to find out what he was actually meant to look like. Eventually I found scans of an old book from 1899 called Pages and Pictures from Forgotten Children's Books, and on page 255 was a black and white picture of Frederick's head! If poor Frederick was "forgotten" by 1899, no wonder I had trouble finding him in 2024. By this time I was resigned to having to colorize the black and white image, but a while later I found pictures of a different doll in the series with an incorrect head--and since I had seen the picture of Frederick in black and white, I knew who he actually was when I saw him in color. So I am quite sure that my version of Frederick now has the correct head. The hats I decided to give him, however, are wild guesses. 

Frederick and Little Henry have matching sailor outfits, though in completely different poses. The hat I've put on Frederick was supposedly Little Henry's, though it can't actually be Henry's because all Henry's hats are otherwise accounted for. That doesn't mean it was originally Frederick's, of course--the copy of Little Henry that it was seen with appeared to have swapped heads with a doll named Hubert, so I suppose the hat could also have belonged to him. It does look similar to the hats on the background characters behind Henry's sailor suit, though I'm not completely sold on the feather. 

Frederick's "peasant" clothing isn't really a beggar outfit, but the stick and bundle makes him fit in pretty well with Fanny, Henry, and Ellen in their beggar clothes. He could have had a hat to go with it, but I have not managed to find one that I think fits. Maybe he could wear the possible sailor's hat with it.

The turban and also the dashing plumed hat in the first picture above were spotted with a different doll from this series called Young Albert. Young Albert's head is facing the opposite direction from Frederick's, and while it's hard to tell the front of a turban from the back, the plumed hat absolutely cannot have originally been Albert's. Once again, that doesn't mean it was Frederick's, but it fits his pose and looks pretty good with one of his outfits, so he might as well wear it. And of course he can't reasonably pass for a French girl without something to cover his hair, so I made him a lace bonnet by combining the basic shape of an unknown hat in a blurry picture of the Ellen paper doll (wrong pose for Ellen, and anyhow all her hats are otherwise accounted for) with the texture of a lace bonnet in an old painting. So that explains the hats I've given him; if you want your own printed Frederick to have only verifiably correct pieces, just discard those, but if you want fun hats to dress him with, I've done my best. 

Here's a school scene I set up with my modern copies of the Temple of Fancy paper dolls, just for fun. Little Fanny is reading aloud as Ellen and Frederick sit at their desks and listen. Since Little Henry is the only one who doesn't have either a book or a desk, I made him borrow Ellen's dunce cap so he would fit into the scene somehow. 

Download PDF files of the Frederick paper doll (two pages) here and here. The previous post about the Ellen doll is here, and the one about Little Fanny and Little Henry is here. Cinderella will be coming soon.