Fairy Tale Festival in Nashua

This weekend there will be a fairy tale festival in Nashua, NH. I wish it was in Nashville, TN instead! You can read more about the annual festival at Fairy Tale Festival promoting youth literacy in Nashua. Here's also a press release from the website which I'll copy below.

The 2009 SummerFun Fairy Tale Festival has been scheduled for Saturday, July 11, 2009 form Noon-3:00pm at Greeley Park. This year’s theme is Superheroes. Mayor Lozeua will kick things off with a Welcome Address and a fairy tale reading to all children in attendance.

All afternoon long there will be on-stage entertainment including musical treats from Enchanted, Peter Pan, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Mulan Pocahontas, Hercules, Beauty & The Beast & Lion King.

Other events include bounce houses, caricaturist, face painting, fairy art school, food and plenty of games. The festival concludes with a Childrens Parade at 2:45pm.

Fairy Tale Festival is free to the public, as is the vast majority of SummerFun Events. At our major events this year, Opening Day, Fairy Tale Festival and Childrens Day, we will be accepting donated food items which will be given to local food pantries.

What a charming idea! I hope all who attend have a great time and learn to love reading and fairy tales even more. There are many fairy tale related activities all around the country this summer from festivals to theatre to art. All this and no summer family movie blockbuster using a fairy tale in sight until winter...

Evacuation Plan by the Gingerbread Man

Here's a Monday morning, after the holiday, funny I discovered over the weekend on Failblog. The line is slightly different from the source material--no "and" was needed--but the source material is obviously The Gingerbread Man. It's really bad advice for an evacuation plan, of course, but entertaining all the same. Come to think of it, it didn't work for The Gingerbread Man either, so consider it a cautionary tale when planning an escape.

Princess and the Pea Craft

After digging through my files, I rediscovered this craft that I regularly used for Bedtime themed storytimes when I was working as a children's librarian. This was always a favorite with kids and parents, especially after hearing the tale by Hans Christian Andersen. With summer here and so many children out of school, I thought I'd clean it up a little and create a new pattern to share here.

When I used this craft with large groups, we used wallpaper scraps to create the mattresses as you can see in the completed image above which was made for me by one of the girls who regularly attended my storytimes.

For the SurLaLune version of the pattern, I've created some mattresses out of clip art patterns that can be colored. The bottom blank is the base of the bed or can be used as a pattern for cutting mattresses out of different paper. Of course, the bedposts and base also are wonderful when made out of brown construction paper. The possibilities for adaptation are endless, but if all you have is a printer and some white paper, that's all you need to create this craft. Don't forget to draw a pea or paste a split pea below the lowest mattress. Enjoy!



I've made the craft available in full size in three different file formats:

Princess and the Pea JPG

Princess and the Pea GIF

Princess and the Pea PNG

Printing Tips: If you are on a PC, right click over the image to get a menu and save it to your computer. Then use a photo editor program to print it without any clipping of the image. Printing it from the internet browser will most likely cause clipping unless you adjust your printer settings to print to size. Or you can copy and paste the image to a word processing program such as Word and then adjust margins to avoid clipping before printing.

This is a smaller version of the pattern for illustration purposes only. Use the links above to get bigger images.

AbeBooks: Most Expensive Book List 2008

Here's another item I'm clearing from my archives as you can guess from the date! This past January AbeBooks shared a list of AbeBooks' Most Expensive Sales in 2008.

For SurLaLune, #8 was the most interesting, a copy of Grimms Fairy Tales by Jakob & Wilhelm Grimm sold for $11,388. "A first edition, first issue copy of these famous fairy tales, including 22 etched plates by George Cruikshank. It is housed in a clamshell box." Alas, no pictures were offered--the one provided is actually a volume illustrated by Arthur Rackham instead. However, the wonders of the internet provide the opportunity to see Cruikshank's illustrations for the low price of your time and internet access. I have posted many of his illustrations in the SurLaLune Illustration Gallery at George Cruikshank. These are older scans, some of the first I made for SurLaLune from a later edition of Cruikshank's work.

Of course, Cruikshank was not a romantic and his style is not as popular as Rackham and the other Golden Age illustrators, but he was influential and popular. He was chosen to illustrate the first English translation of the Grimms' work and his drawings are insightful and humorous and had much less to draw from for inspiration since he was one of the first to illustrate the tales.

Continuing Today's Theme with Bedtime Stories Project

Also don't miss the images from the Bedtime Story Project. I admit I'd prefer to have these sheets in real life to the fabric I posted earlier by Heather Ross, but alas, they were produced strictly for this art project, not for retail distribution.

The actual project webpage has evaporated into the bit and bytes nether regions but a few blogs have posted about the project, keeping the images still available. Just yesterday InkGypsy posted about these sheets on her Once Upon A Blog... at Fairy Tale 'Sheets'. (Me waving!) Great minds and all that....

Far, Far Away Fabric Designs by Heather Ross

Heather Ross is a designer and blogger who has a new line of fabrics through Kokka of Japan with a fairy tale influence. Usually anything with a fairy tale theme in linens is strictly for little girls and consequently very twee, in my opinion, with lots of flying fairies and generic princesses. Ross's new line mostly avoids both and has definite influences, especially the Unicorn Tapestries a personal favorite of mine after seeing them in person last year at the Cloisters in New York. (I didn't expect to fall in love with them, but their intricate design, their history as forgotten horse blankets and the outright magic of them wooed me completely.)

However, there are more direct fairy tale influences especially from the Princess and the Pea and the Frog Prince. You can read more about her influences and design decisions on this page Far, Far Away for Kokka of Japan as well a more recent post in which she lists online retailers selling the fabrics internationally at Finding Far, Far Away Fabrics Online. I didn't explore all her links, but found that PurlSoho.com has fine swatches at Far, Far Away.





Thanks to Valerie S. for passing along the original post about this fabric late last year. Once again, I've been collecting stuff for a blog for a long time.

Watch This: Slagsmålsklubben

I actually started and aborted a SurLaLune blog earlier this year after frustration with a few blog programs and sites. I'm finally happy enough with this one and am digging back through my collection of links and items to share.

This little gem of an animation featuring Little Red Riding Hood has been on my list for a while to share and here it is. Perhaps you've seen it before, perhaps not, but it's worth a 2nd or 3rd viewing either way. John, the family graphic designer, fell in love with it immediately since it fits his style even better than mine.

The video was created by Tomas Nilsson as a "school assignment to reinterpret the fairytale Little red ridning hood. Inspired by Röyksopps Remind me." I recommend watching it in as big of a resolution as you can to enjoy the full effect of the minor details.

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.