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Margaret

@quiltsinkidsbooks

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Love quilts, love picture books! I’m also @40_years_of_picturebooks

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It’s been a weird year, so here’s a weird post that’s not about a book.

At the time that this stationery set was produced, I was an avid teenaged correspondent - sending letters to long-suffering relatives and absent friends and sometimes getting one or two in return.
My mum always sewed and knitted for us, and her purchase of a haberdashery shop at this time was fortuitous timing with a revival of handicrafts, including patchwork, throughout the 70s. Together we started a quilt.

Mum has undergone a rapid decline in the last twelve months: physical at first and now cognitive. She’s finally achieved her desire for good permanent residential care.

So I felt a pang when I spied Betsey recently in a greeting card shoebox in the opshop. Hollie Hobbie was better known to me at the time, but I do like this hippy-crazy-gingham-pastel combo and just had to buy her.

Hallmark knows: it does indeed take enormous trust in a friend to patch your apron while you’re wearing it! And, bonus, a true friend won’t ask how or what necessitated the repair.

In the original stationery set: of paper, there were three sheets left; and four envelopes. Just enough to let special friends far away from Mum know what’s happened, and to keep an envelope just in case.

Books will be resumed soon. by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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9 days ago

“Alexander lived in a block of flats in the big city. Even though he was not allowed to have a real pet, he had Felix, a toy dog.”

In this illustration by the late great Terry Denton, Felix prepares to search for Alexander who has not returned home.
The peach-and-daffodil checkerboard quilt promises that they will both return: but it wouldn’t be an adventure without a torch, rope, and a sandwich.

Denton published this picturebook in 1985.
Felix and Alexander are endearing characters and their shared adventure plays on the ‘toy rescues boy’ story beautifully.
What most appealed to me, then and now, was the inner city as setting. The Victorian terraces crouching close to the road, alleys as canyons, and palms curving away from their previous identities as street trees. It couldn’t have been more St Kilda if it tried.
Houses rendered as terrifying faces is completely convincing but Denton’s small hero skips on bravely to save his friend : the reverse Hansel & Gretel ending is genius.

Found at the State Library Victoria - thank you, Legal Deposit.

Vale Terry.
#terrydenton #felixandalexander #checkerboardquilts @library_vic by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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25 days ago

“Early to bed
And early to rise
Makes a man healthy
Wealthy and wise.”

Hilda Boswell’s early riser shows that his wealth is not squandered on elaborate bedspreads - I love this Scrappy in contrast with his frilly, fabric-flagrant curtains. Likewise, Diddle Diddle Dumpling’s John sprawls on a plain blanket with an extraordinarily patterned valance.

Boswell used a curious mixture of olde-worlde and mid-century English suburban images in her very popular collections of rhymes and stories published in the mid 20th century.

Jenny Wren signals her independence with lavish bedding for her sick bed; Robin misses this signal and is therefore blindsided by her subsequent reneging on their agreement.

#hildaboswell #diddlediddledumpling #jennywren by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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2 months ago

‘Arriving home at six o’clock,
his parents had a dreadful shock!
They found the lion sick in bed and cried,
“Pierre is surely dead!” ‘

Sendak seldom decorated the bedding in his stories, but this checkerboard quilt pops.

Shoutout to the folks who recommended this account, on a Reddit thread sharing ideas for making quilts based on picturebook illustrations.

#mauricesendak #pierreacautionarytale by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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3 months ago

Happy 250th birthday to all of my quilting friends stateside!

#mitsumasaanno #annosusa by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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4 months ago

‘The forester’s wife put her husband to bed and brought him roast beef and sweet apples to eat. She gave Otto some apples, too. No one thought of sending him back to the woods. ‘

Ivan Gantschev’s Otto the Bear was published in 1977.
A new forester has come to the woods, and doesn’t understand that bears also like fruit from the orchard.
Banished, Otto bears no ill will to the forester who receives his own instruction on interdependence.

The quilt for his convalescence is beautiful broad stripes underscoring the rosemaling at the end of the bed.

#ivangantschev #ottothebear by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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4 months ago

“The Dwarfs immediately decided to let her live with them. If she would cook and sew and mend for them, they told her, they would take care of her.”

I’ve always loved the opening of this story: the expectant queen turns a sewing mishap into a prediction of her baby Snow White.

Bernadette Watts has used patchwork so effectively in this story - the royal robes are mismatched masterpieces.
(We know the stepmother is evil just from her off-the-designer-rack look.)
The dwarfs’ patched robes and beds are superb but the baby SW’s golden spread
Is my fave.

Most of her other picture books are in portrait format, but the choice of landscape is perfect for the small triumphant lives of the main characters.

#bernadettewatts #snowwhiteandthesevendwarfs by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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5 months ago

My mother-in-law recently turned 100. I think she knew from our first meeting that I wasn’t a princess.
Artist Sidsel Blix has depicted this scene from The Princess and the Pea with full complicity between the recent arrival and the Prince’s mother.
Some gorgeous quilts in this stack!
#hanschristianandersen #princessandthepea #sidselblix by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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5 months ago

Uccellino (Little Birdie) snuggles down in its bed, in a tree dormitory.
Love the autumn tones of the four patch quilt.

Perfect toddler tone and appeal in this Italian gem of the 1970s - one of the 900 books in Il Fondo Sergio Silva libri illustrati.

Silva was an early judge for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair awards, and this gem has been preserved.

If Uccellino’s sleeping head on the pillow isn’t hilarious enough, that the teeny bedside lamp is bigger than the moon kills me.

@fondolibriillustrati #altan by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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6 months ago

Revisiting the world’s best books from the 70s and 80s, in a library in Parma, I met a new favourite.
A bright blue oversized delight that I’d never seen: Die grosse Reise mit Opa und Steifel. The illustrations are by Scapa, a prolific cartoonist, and he’s nailed this period interior.
A fantastic striped bedcover and bonus bolster : no wonder the current arctic colourings in modern houses depresses me.
Thanks to the inspirational Vanja Passerini for showing me Il Fondo Sergio Silva libri illustrati.

#scapa @illustrated_building_cutaways by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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6 months ago

Cai Gao’s book How I Came to Be Me by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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6 months ago

Cai Gao is the worthy winner of this year’s IBBY Hans Christian Andersen award for Illustration, and I loved looking at her baby book on display at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair. A baby’s life from conception to quilt is all here - pure delight.
@ibby.international by @quiltsinkidsbooks

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6 months ago