Animal Friends book

I've finally sewn up my own copy of my Spoonflower baby book Animal Friends. I have two copies so I have one in my Etsy shop.

I added quilt batting to the cover to give it some structure. But all the other little pages are just soft cotton fabric - perfect for chewing.

I sewed up one of the little animals that comes with the book just to see how it would look. One tip if you make them yourself is to roughly cut out the shapes, then line them up together by holding them up to the light. Pin them in place. Then after you sew them together you can trim them. I just added wavy lines around the animals anyway, you don't need to sew exactly on the lines!

If you'd like to sew your own, the fabric is available in my Spoonflower shop here.

Read more...

Spoonflower baby book

Spoonflower photos here

My latest Spoonflower contest was a baby book. Mine is called Animal Friends and it fits on a fat quarter. With a yard you get two books and two sets of matching stuffed animal characters.

My entry was #8! As before when you're in the top ten your fabric is printed by Spoonflower and becomes available for sale. You can find my book here.

I thought I would show some pictures so you can see it larger and also how the pages look in spreads once the book is cut out and arranged.

You can click on them to see them larger. Here they are:

Today I did a little tweak to the file so that the page numbers would line up perfectly because when I created these spreads I noticed some that were slightly off. Also I lightened the background blue on page one a bit. Overall this one was a lot of work but a really fun project!

Read more...

Spoonflower baby book and feathers print

My Snowy Feathers fabric was #3 in the Spoonflower contest this week! I didn't overwork this one because I wanted a sketchy look, but I wasn't sure about it.

Sometimes you just can't see your work clearly. So I was very happy it did well, and once again I get to see a photo of my fabric (before it arrives in the mail) and it's available in my shop now.

Next contest is the baby book contest, which I had so much fun doing. Well, and I worked really hard on it. I was doing revisions up until the last minute. This is mine:

*click on the picture to see it larger.*

It's designed so that you get a complete book in a fat quarter, and I created mine so that if you order a yard you get two books plus two sets of stuffies:

You can see everyone's baby books and vote for your favourites here.

And lastly, here's a new bird clutch, this time in a green plaid fabric I got at the Workroom from Karyn at one of the vintage Trunk shows. Because as much as I love Spoonflower, right now for me it's still all about City of Craft!

Read more...

Jane Eyre cover

Ever since I've bought my Wacom tablet, I've been pretty excited about developing my digital style. Here's another sample book cover I created. This one is for Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, one of my favourite books.

Here's a detail:

And creating all these new samples has inspired me to update my website at www.clairelouisemilne.com.

In craft news, I'm on the waiting list for City of Craft so I may or may not end up with a spot. I will definitely be at A Handmade Holiday, though, a show organized by Kid Icarus. Here are the details:

Show Details:
Saturday, December 3rd, 2011
11am to 6pm at St. Stephen-in the-Fields Church
(located off College on Bellevue St.).

I'll remind you about this show closer to the date and show some photos of the wares I'll be bringing.

Read more...

A Friend for Mr. Granville

This is the latest book I've illustrated, called A Friend for Mr. Granville by Gillian Richardson, published by Scholastic Canada. My copy from the publisher arrived amidst all the busyness of December and I've been showing it to friends but am just getting around to posting it here. I'm quite proud of this book, I really loved the story and I enjoyed working on the illustrations. There were 24 greyscale illustrations to do for the inside as well as the colour cover.

This book was first published in 1997. My edition is a levelled reader (called Moving up with Literacy Place) to be sold to schools. This means you can't buy this edition in a bookstore, which is something I still aspire to.

Here are some more of the illustrations: The story is about a boy who visits a senior's home with his class. He notices one man who is always sitting looking out the window on his own and only lights up one day when he sees a family playing with a dog outside. The boy decides to try to arrange for this man to have a dog of his own. Of course it doesn't happen easily, the boy and his friends do extra chores to try to earn the money for the dog, only to find out that the senior's home won't take him!I tried to make the dog the kids chose look as lovable as possible. Who wouldn't want this dog??And here's a detail of the cover. For me, finally seeing printed copies of books I've illustrated is one of the best parts of being an illustrator. My other thrill is getting new projects to work on and knowing I'll be busy. I just found out this week that I have another project coming my way from one of my favourite clients which made me feel cheerful about the new year (although very busy because I'm still working on another book while we're trying to assemble our IKEA kitchen!). Starting out as a freelance illustrator a couple of years ago turned out to be my most difficult "new job" experience ever, but definitely the most rewarding.

Thanks for reading!

Read more...