Recently I looked at picture books where bedtime procrastination prevails. However what about the times when your child is desperate for sleep but harbours worries too numerous to overcome? Their efforts meet with repeated defeat. New concerns infest their sleep-deprived psyches until they convince themselves they are unable to sleep no matter what. This perpetuating […]
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By: [email protected],
on 5/10/2015
Blog: Perpetually Adolescent (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Victoria and Albert Museum, Susan Whelan, New Book Releases, Bloomsbury Publishing, Walter Crane, Dimity Powell, Book Reviews - Childrens and Young Adult, EK Books, Gwynneth Jones, childhood anxieties, Don't Think About Purple Elephants, Ilaria Demonti, Jason Hook, Wendy and the Wallpaper Cat, Mark Twain, insomnia, children's picture book, Add a tag
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By: Zoe,
on 9/24/2014
Blog: Playing by the book (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Flowers, Fairies, Dressing up, Cicely Mary Barker, Books / Libraries, Walter Crane, Flower Fairies, Add a tag
Flower Fairy Fashions from Artful Kids – a free printable to use with flower petals to create your own real flower fairies!
How to press flowers by Red Ted Art
Fairy glitter wands (and a great book about fairness) – an old post on Playing by the book
Flower fairies made from wooden beads, artificial flowers and pipecleaners – a tutorial on Spoonful.
The Flower Fairy poems set to music – I haven’t got a copy of this myself, but it could be just right for dancing to.
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 3/18/2014
Blog: Here in the Bonny Glen (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: booknotes, Walter Crane, Faerie Queene, stuff I'm reading, Books, Add a tag
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Slate and Pencil – Vania; being the adventures of Dick on a desert island
Published by Marcus Ward & Co in 1885
By: Melissa Wiley,
on 2/1/2013
Blog: Here in the Bonny Glen (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Books, Family, Fun Learning Stuff, Walter Crane, Assorted and Sundry, Coursera, Journey North Mystery Class, Grimms Tales, Lucy Crane, Add a tag
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By: [email protected],
on 5/10/2015
Blog: Perpetually Adolescent (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Victoria and Albert Museum, Susan Whelan, New Book Releases, Bloomsbury Publishing, Walter Crane, Dimity Powell, Book Reviews - Childrens and Young Adult, EK Books, Gwynneth Jones, childhood anxieties, Don't Think About Purple Elephants, Ilaria Demonti, Jason Hook, Wendy and the Wallpaper Cat, Mark Twain, insomnia, children's picture book, Add a tag
By: Zoe,
on 9/24/2014
Blog: Playing by the book (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Flowers, Fairies, Dressing up, Cicely Mary Barker, Books / Libraries, Walter Crane, Flower Fairies, Add a tag
Thinking recently about books and stories which have been shared across at least three generations of our family, I was reminded of the Flower Fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker.
It was a little like suddenly seeing the trees for the wood, as Flower Fairies have long been a favourite with my girls; they love dressing up as Flower Fairies, they’ve recently “wallpapered” their bedroom walls with Flower Fairy postcards, and with autumn now approaching, they’ve been using the dried seed heads in our garden as Flower Fairy wands; as you wave them about ‘fairy dust’ (seeds) fly out casting magic which will grow next year.
These seed heads come from poppies, love-in-the-mist, bluebells, Granny’s bonnets (also known as Columbine), teasels and cow parsley. Playing with these natural objects is such a delight – not only are they free, they are exquisite. (Poppies, love-in-the-mist and Granny’s Bonnets have the added advantage of being the easiest flowers to grow: Just throw the seeds onto soil and forget, and they’ll reward you returning year after year!)
Apart from the original collections of Flower Fairy poems and illustrations, my girls favourite book is How To Find Flower Fairies. With truly magical paper engineering, replete with hidden treasures, and lavish illustrations this is a book they treasure.
In searching for new Flower Fairy related books I came across some incredible illustrations that actually pre-date Barker’s Flower Fairies:
These images come from “A Floral Fantasy in an Old English Garden. Set forth in verses & coloured designs” by Walter Crane (1899) and I found them in the British Library’s Flickr stream.
Whilst they’re not designated as fairies, you can see why I made the connection with Barker’s illustrations. I particularly love that there are so many men in Crane’s illustrations.
A second book by Crane also caught my eye. The following illustrations are taken from “Flora’s Feast. A masque of flowers, penned & pictured by Walter Crane” (also first published 1899), and again found in the British Library’s Flickr stream.
How I would love to dress up as any one of these next World Book Day!
If your kids also love the Flower Fairies, here are some other resources that might inspire them:
What books have been shared across three or more generation of your family? If you HAD to be a flower fairy, which one would you chose to be?
4 Comments on Flower fairy wands and stunning Walter Crane illustrations, last added: 9/25/2014
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By: Melissa Wiley,
on 3/18/2014
Blog: Here in the Bonny Glen (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: booknotes, Walter Crane, Faerie Queene, stuff I'm reading, Books, Add a tag
How quickly the days pass, and the reading lists pile up!
Read with the older girls:
• Landmark History of the American People, the chapter on wagon trains
• Story of Science Vol. 2, the chapter on Rene Descartes
• Poem: “The Cord” by Leanne O’Sullivan (Poetry 180)
• The Faerie Queene Book 1, Spenser, continued
We enjoyed this lovely video of screenshots from the 1894 George Allen edition with illustrations by Walter Crane.
Read to the littles:
• Caps for Sale
• Captain Invincible and the Space Shapes
On my own:
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• revisited Lolita (sections) and listened to these three lectures on it at Open Yale Courses
By: Barbara,
on 9/12/2013
Blog: March House Books Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Books, Walter Crane, 1885, Slate and pencil Vania, Add a tag
Blog: March House Books Blog (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Books, Walter Crane, 1885, Slate and pencil Vania, Add a tag
This week's book of the week is a strange arithmetic book written and illustrated by Walter Crane.
Published by Marcus Ward & Co in 1885
In which young Dick buys a boat and taking a few necessaries, sets sail. But the wind and the weather take counsel against him and he finds himself cast up on a strange shore. The beach is made up of slates and pencils and so Dick sits down to write his sad story. At that very moment, several natives of the Island appear and take Dick to their King. Eventually, Dick is rescued and returned home.
Very early in life he was suited for a sailor
and, at the seaside, has thoughts of voyaging,
So he buys a boat
and sets sail.
But the wind and weather take counsel together,
and
Dick finds himself cast up on a strange shore,
composed principally of slates and pencils.
Then some strange figures suddenly appear,
but as they cannot come to an understanding
Dick is taken to their King, who, is engaged with an addition sum in his counting house.
Dick is shown into the parlour where the Queen offers him some honey
and sends him into the garden to help the maid do multiplication on the clothes line.
All that takes place is in strict accordance with the rules of Arithmetic.
But at the sight of a sail, Dick is very happy to go home!
I think this must be one of the oddest stories I've ever read! The illustrations, however, are a joy.
Walter Crane (1845–1915) was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most prolific and influential children’s book creator of his generation. Reed more at Wikipedia
What do you make of this odd story?
42 Comments on Book of the week; Walter Crane Slate and Pencil, last added: 9/15/2013
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By: Melissa Wiley,
on 2/1/2013
Blog: Here in the Bonny Glen (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Books, Family, Fun Learning Stuff, Walter Crane, Assorted and Sundry, Coursera, Journey North Mystery Class, Grimms Tales, Lucy Crane, Add a tag
With Beanie: did our first week’s charting for Journey North. Mystery City #1 has very nearly the same latitude as ours, judging from its photoperiod, and Bean entertained me with a list of the countries around the globe at roughly our parallel. You see why I love this project so?
(FWIW, here’s how I described it to my local homeschooling list this morning, wanting to make it clear you don’t have to be some organizational goddess to pull this thing off: “If Mystery Class sounds daunting to you, let me just add that I forgot all about it until this morning and am sitting here in my pajamas, coughing my lungs out, hair not yet brushed, huddled on the couch calculating photoperiods with [Beanie]. A few simple math problems—she’s doing most of the work. 
[Huck] is climbing on the back of the couch. Scott’s got Elvis playing. I’m checking Facebook while [Bean] does the next calculation. In case you were picturing some super-organized activity requiring a ton of preparation and concentration—this isn’t that!)
With Jane and Rose: watched the first video lecture (very short) for a Coursera class we discovered yesterday, and which Jane has signed up for: Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World. (I loved the reading list. Some great stuff there, and a number of things I’d been meaning to read with the girls this year anyhow.)
The first text is the Lucy Crane translation of Grimms’ Tales, available for free download at Project Gutenberg. The instructor (Professor Eric Rabkin of the University of Michigan) mentioned the intriguing fact that the illustrations (beautiful, just my cup of tea, see below) in this edition are by Crane’s husband, Walter Crane, who wrote about book (explained Dr. Rabkin) about the role of illustration in books. Which! Got! Me! Very! Excited! And when you put ‘Walter Crane’ into Google it autosuggests ‘Walter Crane arts and crafts movement’ Which! More! Excited! Still! My cup of tea? More like my bathtub of tea, my swimming-pool of tea. And now (having spent a bit of happy, albeit sniffly, time on teh Wikipedia and other avenues) I have added Yet More Things to Read to my impossible list.
You see what I mean?
So we zapped the Lucy Crane text to the Kindle, and I read the first story aloud to Rilla—”The Rabbit’s Bride,” which I didn’t remember at all, though I thought I’d read Grimm backwards and forwards, including some of it in German. (Digression: true story: my friend Caryn and I got banned from the high-school library for a full semester in tenth grade due to uncontrollable outbursts of giggling over an assignment for our German class. Look, you spring the original version of Rapunzel on a couple of unsuspecting sophomore girls and what do you expect? Suddenly she had twins! Zwillinge! So that’s how the witch knew she was entertaining a visitor!)
(Thing is, I fervently believed I loved that library more than anybody in the whole school. Me. Banned from a library. I couldn’t believe it. My intemperate book-hoarding habits probably spring from this brief and interminable period of deprivation.)
Anyhow, “The Rabbit’s Bride.” I did not see that ending coming. Nor the middle, for that matter.
At Huck’s naptime there was cuddling (cautious, on his part: “I don’t want to get sick, Mommy”) (sigh) and at his request, another round of the much-loved Open This Little Book, which gem I’ll be reviewing for GeekMom one of these days. (Talk about illustrations to swoon for. Delicious.)
Then lots of Japan Life with Rilla and Beanie—a game we like to play, which involves massive amounts of casual math and spatial reasoning, but of course they aren’t seeing it that way, it’s just fun.
I missed out on some of my favorite parts of the day—walking Wonderboy to school and back; my long morning ramble with Scott—but by mid-afternoon I was feeling better than I have all week, and I got outside to water my neglected garden. Was relieved to see my young lettuces are looking spruce. So are hordes of weeds.
A hummingbird, a funny solar-powered grasshopper, a cup of mint tea with honey. “I can’t believe how much I’m not sick of you,” says the mug, a gift from Scott.
Two very dirty children scrubbed clean after concocting Mud Soup or some such delicacy in the backyard.
Tonight I’m missing the much-anticipated reception for the San Diego Local Authors Exhibit at the downtown library, very sad not to be there but it wouldn’t be nice to carry this cough out in public. But I’m sure there will be something nice on TV with Scott later (he DVRs the best things) and I have two compelling books in progress on my Kindle at the moment: a gorgeous collection of Alice Munro stories given to me by one of my favorite people in the world, and a review copy of a book called Washed Away: How the Great Flood of 1913, America’s Most Widespread Natural Disaster, Terrorized a Nation and Changed It Forever—how’s that for a title that grabs you and won’t let go? So far, so gripping. The levee just broke in Dayton, Ohio. Entire houses are floating away with people on the rooves. (Roofs? What are we saying these days?) I’m chewing my nails off.
This post brought back childhood memories. Although I can remember The Flower Fairies merchandise from when I was younger I don’t really remember the books!
I was very happy my name began with C so that I could be “pretty, dancing Columbine” in the Flower Fairy Alphabet. Although with Z you got a nice one too!
Thanks for sharing those lovely illustrations.
Hi Catherine – no, I think the books are funny ones in a way for the poems are quite tricky when you’re young, and yet the illustrations can be so beguiling.
Ah yes, Charlotte, the Columbine – doubly lucky you, as columbine seed heads make super seed scattering fairy wands when dried!
Those Walter Crane illustrations are lovely! And I’ve long wished for someone to do some more diverse illustrations in the style of Cecily Mary Barker, although I’m sure they wouldn’t be quite the same.