Summer Reading

This past Saturday was "Save Bookstores" Day, so I adventured to the distant land of Brookline and finally visited the cozy "Children's Bookshop" to find some breezy summertime treasure:

(Woah pink gingham!)

Holly Hobbie's paintings in Everything but the Horse were exactly how she described them, "an illustrated memory"...so lush and cool, like a sip of something in the shade. I hadn't read E. B. White's Trumpet of the Swan since 3rd grade. I'm rationing the delectable chapters out for summer nights and T trips. And I'm just meeting Katy Carr in What Katy Did.

When I was a kid, there was nothing so magical or hallowed as the library grounds in summer. Yum. My little wish is that someday the book covers I'm working on finally end up as summer reading: hauled on vacation, fingerprinted with jelly, sandy spine up in the grass under a tree somewhere...

Happy summer reading!

♥In memoriam: The beloved Curious George of Harvard Square; please don't forget your local bookshops this summer ♥

Summer With Alice

I'm thinking it's possibly the first day of summer vacation for some lucky kids out there today! I'll have to write an ode to summer vacation (ahhh summer reading...long car trips...sun dappled FREEDOM!) but for now I'm happily spending this summery day with Alice Kathleen McKinley while I repackage her series by the prolific Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. If I had met Alice in the 80's I think we would have been friends. Do you have any extra-special summer plans?

Grand Opening!

Hi friends, I'm so happy to announce The SHOP is open for business!

Click here to visit and find...

...the first greeting card set I've created for the Greeting Card Collection, "Audrey & Famous" (tied up with a bow!)

Also look for the first archival Limited Edition Print series of picture book spreads from Just Being Audrey, and Dotty, as well as the first small Open Edition Print featuring lady Audrey...

Closest to my heart is the previously unreleased and unpublished spread, "Audrey & the Children" as a Limited Edition Print with 50% of the proceeds going to The Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund. This spread was not included in the book. More on "Audrey & the Children" to follow...

OH, so many new prints, character collections and greeting card sets on the way, stay tuned! ♥

After many months of hard work in the off hours, I have to thank my husband, Matt, for his untiring patience, and unending encouragement as this was definitely a team effort getting this little dream off the ground. Also thankful hugs to my artist/shopkeeper friends Anne, Sarah Jane, J.Hill and Abigail LaBranche for the support!

Paris Snapshots

Window ladies, Champs-Elysées

We arrived via Aer Lingus, our lift off time dangerously close to the 6pm "Rapture"...but we made it. (Click any images to view larger)

First things first...Voilà! Des livres pour enfants...j'adore, j'adore...

I visited Les Minots, a children's bookstore in the 14th, and also stumbled on another nearby called Librairie Tropiques, where I spied my new favorite fille : JACOTTE, with her crazy carrot hair! (Illustrations by Estelle Billon-Spagnol). Also pictured above are Marie de Paris illustrated by Princesse Cam Cam and a lovely rendition of Cendrillon by Alexandra Huard.) Go lose yourself in their art blogs!

En métro! (The Boston T could learn a few tricks.)

Then we said Bonjour to Notre Dame, L'Arc, Charlemagne, Place de Concorde and every arrondissement we could manage to meet!

Matt shows off his stash of sweet french comics on his blog here.

Some drawing (and fuzzy bird spying) in the Tuileries...

Lots of "fraise" and "framboise"... My favorites french words because they taste just like they sound, listen...

A trip out to gorgeous Giverny.

Monet's water lilies.

Picnic with sweet Parisian friends Abby LaBranche (of Gloaming Designs –a blog you must visit!!) and her beau, Romain, at the Chateau Vaux Le Vicomte out in Maincy, France...buried our toes in "bouton d'or" (literally buttons of gold!) /buttercups...introduced to new species of fromage.

...and stayed till midnight to see the Chateau at night:
Paris is a new city by night. It has a glow along the Seine that is hard to capture in words or camera. You'll have to go yourself one day to see!

Merci, Merci ♥

Hot off the presses (and plane!)

Issue No. 3 Trailer from Anthology Magazine on Vimeo.

Et voilà! Woosh! We're back from Paris! Moments after my jet-lagged self walked in the front door, I found this little package waiting for me: The Anthology Spring Issue is here!

I wish I had a better word besides "dreamy" to describe how it felt to illustrate a little party scene, but that's exactly how it felt! It was an extraordinary bit of luck to get to work with magazine creators Meg Mateo Ilasco and Anh-Minh Le too. And wouldn't you know, I happened to meet two of the macarons from the painting in Paris...hmmm...

(Crunch)

Issue #3 is especially SATURATED with color, gorgeous photography, insightful artist interviews, soirée ideas, and is just about bursting its spine with creative and visual inspiration for daily life. As a reader, I always get loads of new ideas from flipping through the pages. Now available at Anthropologie too! (in stores+site) :


...and pictures from Paris to come...!