Happy Hanukkah! Nearly belatedly! In honor of the Jewish Festival of Lights, I have another Mimi paper doll available to print and color; you can get it
. There's a brief story-ette about Mimi going to a Hanukkah feast, and it includes a menorah that can stand up when assembled, as shown above. The top part of the menorah is a "pocket" in which you can insert the correct number of candles for the current night of Hanukkah (today is the 6th day of Hanukkah for 2009, so you'd insert six candles, plus the center one or
candle, which is used to light the others). I was too lazy/rushed to color Mimi and her menorah, but she looks great "colorized" with colored pencils or crayons.
Not sure why this image came out vertically; thought I'd saved it rotated...
Quick question: I've been posting various paper dolls as sort of doodly coloring pages - just pencil sketches, and no color. What do you think - should I keep doing them that way, or would you greatly prefer something more final-artish that you'd have to print in color? (Keep in mind that would likely mean I'd make even fewer of them...)
One of my favorite things about December is the variety of special days (Christmas, Hanukkah, St. Lucia Day, St. Nicholas Day, the winter solstice, etc.), and the opportunities they provide to learn about different cultures (or even just people who have different traditions). My husband and I both grew up celebrating Christmas, so that's the December holiday we celebrate with our kids, but our extended families include people from diverse backgrounds, including the Jewish faith. We live some distance from them, so our kids have only occasionally celebrated Hanukkah with those relatives. Fortunately, though, we long had a tradition of sharing holidays with neighbors and good friends who are Jewish. Their kids came over each year to help decorate our Christmas tree, sing a few Christmas songs, and have a holiday dinner, and our kids went to their house each year for a Hanukkah feast, complete with dreidel games and songs and decorations. (They always sent extra latkes home for me, the latke-fiend. Yum!)
Here's my favorite low-fat latke recipe. I don't have a photo to show you because I haven't managed to make them yet this year, but I'll try to add a picture later. These are quite tasty, though perhaps not as scrumptious as the crispy fried ones. I cut the recipe out of some newspaper many years ago; more than that I can't tell you about its origin. Sorry.
Low Fat Potato Latkes
3 lbs. potatoes (I've used both Idaho and Yukon gold)
1 onion
1/3 cup matzo meal or flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 T chopped parsley
2 eggs plus 4 additional whites
salt and freshly ground pepper, to t
This is really a test for me. I'm trying to see if I've figured out a way to add a printable pdf file to a blog posting. If it works, I have some more goodies to add soon!
Click on this link here (I hope) to take you to a black and white paper doll of Mimi and friends that you can print out, color, and play with, if you're so inclined. (To print the pdf file, click on the iPaper button on the toolbar and select print.)
You're free to use this image for non-commercial purposes, including printing it out for a class or library storytime. The picture above is of some of the pieces colored with colored pencils, cut out, glued to cereal box cardboard where applicable (i.e., Mimi, Bunny, and Frank), and assembled where necessary (i.e., the book). I'm working on making a full color, 3-D Mimi paper doll to post on my website too, and I'll link to it here as well once I finish it.
I have been ga-ga for paper dolls as long as I can remember. When we were young, my mom used to let me and my sisters pick them out at the five and dime if we'd been good on long shopping outings. My favorites were the ones that came with lots of accessories, like a crib to put the baby in, or little bowls of food with tiny spoons, etc. My grandmother also used to save the Betsy McCall paper dolls that came in her copies of
McCall's Magazine for us to play with when we came to visit. (You can find printables of these old paper doll pages at Janie's The Bleu Door site
here, as well as links to other paper doll sites.)
I really credit a lot of my skill with scissors to years of practice cutting out paper dolls and clothing. I remember too, my mom showing me how to make my own paper dolls by drawing a doll figure, taping it to the window, taping another piece of paper over it, and then drawing clothes that would fit. I made zillions of my own dolls, figuring out the engineering of accessory furniture and other items as well. And then I spent hours and hours pretending with my dolls. All those skills have served me well in my writing and illustrating!
For using paper dolls with very young children, I recommend using the Scotch Repositionable glue sticks rather than the tabs for putting clothes on - much less frustrating for tiny hands. The repositionable glue stick has a bond roughly equivalent to a Post-It Note, so it's easy to attach and remove and won't leave a huge permanent mess all over your kitchen table. Because the print outs are close to free (just the cost of paper and ink) you can let the little ones have a go at cutting them out themselves, which they'll probably do badly. One thing that makes it easier is to first cut around each piece so the paper is easier to manipulate.
I have been officially Missing in Action for the last few weeks, making sure all our key books are in the best possible positions in store for Christmas. It goes without saying that as sales in our business are so skewed to the last few weeks of the year, it takes about the same proportion of a sales persons' time and energy.
No doubt you may have already read about the marketing charges the chains charge us for those slots. However, with only a small percentage of our titles going into these coveted and much-competed for positions in the front of the store, what do we do with those titles which we love and certainly have their market, but don't have a storming TV series or a celeb's story of years welded to the crack pipe to promote them? These are the titles we like to call our "passion-sells." They are titles we hand-sell to the retailers, sometimes picking up the phone or sending early copies plus a letter from the author or editor to a head office buyer, store manager or an independent bookshop buyer. There is such a grassroots love of good books in this industry, that they, like us, look for titles which can give them a point of difference from the cacophony of big discounted Christmas titles.
A good example is Penguin's Poems for Life. This is the type of book I remember receiving as a gift when I was a young: a treasury of wonderful poetry, bringing together classics with contemporary poets, all organised along the seven ages of man from birth through childhood and love to death. We've had a fantastic response from our field sales reps, whose customers really enjoy a book which isn't dependent on anything else but it's own quality to recommend it, especially if it has appeal for all the family. It's the type of book which might get some nice reviews or mentions in gift recommendation round-ups, but what will really make someone buy it is discovering it in a bookshop. For me, that moment of discovery is one of the pleasures of shopping for books, and if we only shop to compare discounts then it's a pleasure lost. It's by making sure that somewhere in your local bookshop such treasures are waiting for you to discover, that we'll be manning the phones in the next few weeks.
Fiona Buckland, Penguin Press Sales Manager
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I'm catching up with my Illustration Friday illos and posting them with the date of the challenge so they fall in order. I'm coloring Moon and Poem right now but here is a theme combo I just finished - Geek and Discovery. This isn't me but I can so relate to being a geek and discovering girls for the first time. The girl is actually a caricature of the first girl I had a crush on. Oh, man, I'm sweating and shaking just thinking about it...
Eureka! For the past few IF postings I 've been discovering a new style and a new way of working. I feel very free. I worked straight on the computer with this one too. The topic "Discovery" immediately made me think of a bunny pirate discovering a treasure box full of carrots...well, the carrots never quite made it there.
However, I fell in love with the characters and eventually gave them names. Then I thought it would be cute if they had a discovery club of sorts and so here is the logo I made up.
Thanks for everyone's support and comments with my new style. Its very encouraging and I am so excited about it!
This week's word on another illustration website is "discovery".
I guess I'm going to take on every fairy tale ever written, one at a time. I already did "Little Red Riding Hood".
Discovery plays a big part in "Goldilocks and the Three Bears".
Leave a comment and let me know what you think.
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Woot For Hanukah! We have a small hanukah area in our home every December. And it is a busy month for us with A's bday and christmas and festival of lights (which we HAVE to celebrate since Aurora IS light and named afte light and all of those good things)
Love the mimi doll! So sweet! And it makes me feel happy to think she's kosher.
My vote is for the simple ones you can color -- my kids love them, and it doesn't cost me a fortune in ink to print.
We love all of your fun and creative ideas, templates and instructions here -- thanks so much for sharing so freely!