Catching up

April is a busy month for us, we have four birthdays to celebrate now (including mine) and of course Easter. For my birthday Bradley took me to Montreal for a lovely long weekend staying at the same B&B as we did before. The weather was gorgeous this time, so we had a great time walking around and I had some handmade coupons from Bradley for both a ribbon spree (see above) and a button spree (see below).
Another one of my other Bradley presents that I loved was the blue floral fabric I used to whip up this large messenger bag before going away. I used some dark brownish khaki twill for the exterior and used pale blue twill to line the inside, and the floral for the outer flap, and to line the pockets and strap. This bag turned out to be exactly what I needed, light enough to carry around all day but big enough to stuff full of extra things on the way home. The fabric is Denyse Schmidt's "flea market fancy" and comes in a variety of colours.
Other than crafts shopping we also did some geo caching (Bradley's current passion) and ended up hiking around on some nice trails on the mountain. We also saw a very inspiring show at the Beaux Arts museum, about Disney and the artists that inspired Disney. I had the thrill of seeing some of Beatrix Potter's artwork in person, including a sample illustration for Alice in Wonderland that she made to send to publishers. Why on earth she wasn't commissioned to illustrate more books before publishing her own is beyond me.

The other highlight of our trip was finally meeting my extra-talented fellow illustrator, Susan Mitchell. I'm planning to post more birthday and Susan goodies in my next post!

And finally, before leaving I was commissioned to illustrate a book for Scholastic, and so that's been keeping me busy since then. It's a wonderful story (with a lovable dog in it) and it's been a real treat to work on it. Of course I'll be sharing the artwork for that in the next little while.