Further to Katie’s post on the Moomin fabric which is divine, I have to share my favorite fabric which I bought off ebay when Ned was born. It is Little Prince fabric but the Japanese Little Prince not the French one! I didn’t even know there was a Japanese version until I saw this fabric and fell in love with it. I have stretched it over an artist’s canvas and it hangs over Ned’s cot.

I have searched for more but never found it. Maybe someone out there knows where to get more?

And here is a shot of Ned, the little bookworm, in his room perusing his bookshelf while his dad took photos of the fabric for the blog.

Amherst, Massachusetts that is. ‘Cos this Saturday 26 July there’s the chance to meet Eric Carle…

If anyone reading this goes to the event, please let us experience it vicariously and tell us about it??!

Further to my previous post on The Very Hungry Caterpillar fabric, I have just found out about this Moomin fabric (via the groovy and talented Loobylu):

Not sure where you can source it, unless you happen to live near London (or Finland) but it is very lovely.

HandmadebyMia on Etsy has some gorgeous totes made from re-used and recycled Moomin fabric.

Meanwhile, I need to get around to making something with my Hungry Caterpillar fabric…

Adapting a children’s picture book for the stage must be a daunting task. How do you capture the creativity allowed by the illustrated page? A typical picture book is 32 pages – how do you make a production last a full hour? The age range of your audience may be broad – how do you create something to entertain them all? How do you let the original picture book stand on its own and yet put your own creative stamp on the adaptation?

This task is something that the Patch Theatre Company have made their specialty. They have adapted four of Stephen Michael King’s picture books in a production called Emily Loves to Bounce, which we saw on stage at the Darebin Arts Centre earlier this month. Previously, Patch Theatre has also done two productions of Pamela Allen’s picture books. Most of their productions are geared to children aged four to eight years.

Emily Loves to Bounce uses four of King’s picture books – The Man Who Loved Boxes, Patricia, Emily Loves to Bounce, and Henry and Amy – as inspiration for ideas. It doesn’t retell the narrative from these stories, but instead uses the ideas and messages and creatively adapts them. For example, in the story Emily Loves to Bounce, a little girl called Emily bounces through the book. In the stage production, there is an enormous purple ball, named Emily, who is bounced between the performers.

The production incorporates many different media. Live music and song are important elements, and a violinist and piano accordion player are on-stage and part of the action. There is a sequence of shadow puppetry, which forms an ideal introduction to this medium for young kids. Props are integral, and a magical array of boxes of different sizes, many lit from within, make a visually stunning setting for the opening scene.

Emily Loves to Bounce is currently on an Australian national tour, culminating in November 2008. ACT, NSW, Tassie, Victorian regional and Qld readers might have a chance to catch them. More details available here.

Photo credit: Sarah Long c/o Patch Theatre Company. Pictured are Briohny Campbell, Sarah Brokensha and Nathan O’Keefe.

We’re all for celebrating the big and small things in life at WeHeartBooks, and so we’re marking the milestone of 100 posts for this blog with a giveaway!

The prize is a gorgeous Little Packrats backpack, similar to the one I bought for Rowan in May and posted about
here. I tried to get Rowan to model his for this post. Like a typical 23-month old, he wouldn’t cooperate, but I did manage to get a shot when he was mid-swing…

Rowan takes his backpack to childcare, where we get lots of comments from other mums and carers. It’s the perfect size for him to carry on his own, and ideal for a day’s worth of nappies and a change of clothes, or on other days for couple of board books and some trains.

To enter, hop over to our Win! page between now and Wednesday 23 July.

Thanks to Nicole from Brite Babes for providing this prize.

Rebound Books are not only practical and environmentally sound but also very beautiful, especially to book lovers like myself.

A Melbourne business, Rebound Books make note books and journals out of vintage book covers that are then filled with 100% denim paper, made from denim fabric offcuts. They are completely hand made and absolutely gorgeous.

Recently written up in the Sunday Age M magazine, they are also stocked at one of my favorite shops Five Boroughs in East Brunswick, who have posted on their blog about them this week.

The children’s book covers they use are fabulously retro, some I’ve seen have been the original Ladybird books, Enid Blyton covers and at Five Boroughs they have one that is an old Romper Room book. Very cool.

After what feels like weeks of packing… we’re off to the homeland of the authors of treasures like this, this and this.

Some book-related preparations have been made… We have tickets to Ghibli (”a portal to a storybook world” and home of creators of Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away) and we are considering a visit to Tokyo’s Thomasland for our Thomas-loving 21-month-old. He won’t remember much but perhaps the photos will last…

And finally we will have a week on the largest uninhabited island in the South Pacific visiting some friends. Can’t quite believe our luck.

I am very, very excited. See you soon.

A fabulous day for me today. It was a recipe for success: a day in the city (of Melbourne) including a visit to Metropolis (more on that later), a coffee at Degraves, a little bit of shopping and people-watching, a kids’ book illustration exhibition and a stop on the way home at a friend’s house, filled with talk of kids’ books… I. Heart. Melbourne.

It’s amazing how many ideas can be generated from one day on the town when you don’t get out as much as you used to. But I will stay focused, and the topic of this post is the aforementioned kids’ book illustration exhibition. It was called Hooked on Books, exhibited at Artplay, as posted here by Lou. The exhibition runs til 13 June, and I thoroughly recommend it to anyone interested in children’s book illustration.

The exhibition is of original illustrations from a range of Australian picture books, collected by Albert Ullin. Ullin is most famous for establishing the specialist children’s bookshop, The Little Bookroom, here in Melbourne. Ullin’s collection of original illustrations from Australian children’s books was initially driven by his desire to support young illustrators of picture books who were struggling to make a living. In 1973, he started by buying the works of Ron Brooks (illustrator of John Brown, Rose and the Midnight Cat – reviewed by Lou here – and of one of my favourites, Fox, by Margaret Wild). Later, he was approached by Peter Pavey, a friend of Brooks, who had not yet found a publisher for his illustrations. (Pavey later went on to publish One Dragon’s Dream which became a Children’s Book Council of Australia Picture Book of the Year.)

Part of the joy of the exhibition was seeing the original artworks for illustrations of books I know well - books by Graeme Base, Bob Graham, Alison Lester, Shaun Tan and Kerry Argent. Seeing the vibrancy of colour in the originals was amazing, as well as the three-dimensional aspect to works which included media such as fabric or paper sculpture. The other part of the joy for me was discovering many books I had not heard of. I took furious notes and have a new long list of books to search for in the library and in second-hand shops… Plenty of inspiration for future posts!

Backpacks for kids seem hard to come by if you are not inspired by the licensed character merchandise à la Dora, Wiggles, Bob and Bratz. But I discovered these gorgeous animal-inspired backpacks, made by Little Packrats, and tracked down their Australian distributor. These are three of my favourites:

I ordered the mouse one for Rowan, and it’s now his childcare bag. Made from thick vinyl, it’s durable and easy to clean, and the 3D ears are so cute. It is smaller than the average kids backpack, which makes it ideal for toddlers and preschoolers – small enough that you don’t attempt to overload it to make it too heavy. Having said that, it’s not really big enough to accommodate ALL our books from the library and for anyone who’s seen the back seat of my car lately, that’s just as well cos I couldn’t reasonably expect a toddler to carry that weight…

Rowan’s bag was bought with the intention that he would wear it on our forthcoming overseas trip. We are going to JAPAN! Yippee! But right now, Rowan hasn’t quite got the idea that he is supposed to wear the bag on his back, so invariably it’s me who can be seen carrying it on my shoulder. So now I’m not so sure that this bag will make the cut with all the new rules on carry-on luggage…

More posts on the travel theme coming soon. Meanwhile, Lou is having a sunny break up north, and some guest posts will be appearing shortly.

Lou and I dragged our partners and kids to the Back to Booktown book festival at Clunes on Saturday.

Clunes is situated about 1.5 hours drive from Melbourne, so it’s not really the type of drive you do for only a couple of hours at the other end, but hey, when you’re a busy mum, you take what you can get! And if at least one leg of the car trip is free of a whinging child, you’re pretty happy.

The idea behind a booktown is to create a critical mass of bookshops in order to make a small town a destination, and it’s an idea that is catching on worldwide. The first booktown was in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, and there are now more than 20 booktowns internationally. The Back to Booktown weekend at Clunes is a great way to kick-start the generation of a new booktown.

Clunes is one of those towns that feels like it’s in the middle of nowhere, but from the buildings it’s not hard to imagine it bustling with life in goldrush times. There is evidence of a flush of new life in Clunes, too, which is nice, with lots of brand-spanking newly renovated shops and a couple of swish places to eat and drink. It would be a lovely place for a weekend getaway.

You really need at least a day to explore Back to Booktown properly, and there were plenty of secondhand booksellers to visit, tucked in different buildings around the town. For a bookseller’s view of the festival, check out The Book Grocer’s post – scary stuff.

Unfortunately for Lou and I, there wasn’t a dedicated kids’ section at Clunes, but we each found a treasure at the CFA sale which cost us the grand total of 40 cents! We also bumped into a WeHeartBooks reader, which was lovely!

I’m always envious of those bloggers who show off their thrifting and op-shop finds - so here’s my token effort.

The book is Mandy Moves In by Bodil Selge, originally published in Swedish. I love the idea of the tiny little girl who has installed herself in a corner of the bookshelf with all her furniture. And the production quality of the illustrations is so beautifully of the era.

Speaking of secondhand books, if you haven’t already checked it out, go over and visit the inspiring blog Vintage Kids Books my Kid Loves, there are some beauties there…