Monday, March 29, 2010

Foggy's Figgy Muesli


Now that we've revealed the answer to "what is Foggy's favourite thing to eat for breakfast?", we thought we would share his breakfast recipe with you. Cloud also contributed his recipe for Cloudy Muesli.

The recipe is uploaded as a PDF. Please let us know if you have any trouble downloading it.

Thanks again to Chef Heidi for her help in editing Cloud and Foggy's recipes.

Our giveaway winners


What is Foggy's favourite breakfast? Muesli! Foggy likes his muesli to be nice and crunchy, with cornflakes, dried fruit, nuts and lemon or vanilla yoghurt and a sardine or two on top. We'll put up the recipe in a moment (don't worry, the sardines are optional).

Thanks to everyone who entered our contest. Here are our winners:


Sunday, March 28, 2010

Sunday morning pancakes


While we're on the subject of breakfast, we thought it would be a good time to put up Snowy and Chinook's recipes for pancakes (PDF link).

As we're still finding our feet with blogging, please let us know if you have any trouble accessing the link.

Saturday, March 27, 2010

Saturday!


An outtake from Sunny with Lolly and Mild.

It's Saturday. We only have two days left before we give away copies of Foggy. All you have to do is tell us what you think Foggy likes to eat for breakfast.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Hello Baby







this post has moved here.

cococakes + children's books


We mentioned earlier that cococake in Vancouver made some fantastic mini cupcakes for our Foggy launch. Before ordering, we were looking at cococake's web site, which got us onto her (that is, Lyndsay Sung's) blog with its addictive gallery of cute cakes. We chose some simple mini cupcakes with flags and sprinkles. But! As we were looking we saw these children's book themed cakes for Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle.

One of us (*ahem* Robin) has been having trouble sleeping, thinking of the cupcake possibilities for a big birthday coming up this summer.


Thursday, March 25, 2010

Sunny and Windy in the woods



In 2000, before we had a publisher, we put out a set of postcards with pictures from Windy and we sold them at Eugene Choo and Dream in Vancouver. We included in the set two snapshots of Windy and Sunny posed sitting on logs (well, sticks really). We called the two pictures "Windy in the countryside" and "Sunny in the countryside". But it's funny, when we came across the old digital files, they were called "sensitive_windy.jpg" and "sensitive_sunny.jpg". We named them that because we thought they looked like "sensitive" folky musicians, especially with the lens flare. This was a joke we had forgotten until the files showed up.

(In the spirit of the olden days, our link to Windy today is from our first review by Shift in Japan. Ah, back in the days when Judith had just opened her studio, Steedman Design, and Robin was still studying design at Emily Carr.)

Edited to add: We still sell the books at Eugene Choo and Dream!

Monday, March 22, 2010

Buffalo collage collages




Erin from collage collage sent us these lovely portraits of Tulip the Buffalo receiving his birthday present from Snowy & Chinook. These are from a crafting session she held earlier this year. We love the bright red and green tissue against the kraft background. Also googly eyes are always great. We'll be posting more about making paper and tissue collages soon.

Colouring page for Sunny


Here is a colouring page from our second book, Sunny.

R & J collections



We have new activities to package and post, but in the meantime we thought we would show you this surprisingly accurate portrait of us. In fact, here are some samples from our collections...



Sunday, March 21, 2010

Foggy fun






We had so much fun at the Foggy launch. We'd like to thank everyone who came out and celebrated with us. Thank-you to fabulous Erin of Collage Collage and Simply Read Book for hosting the launch. And thanks to Lyndsay of cococakes for her great cupcakes. Special thanks to all the great boat-makers, artists and binocularists who manned (boyed and girled?) the craft tables.

Whether you were able to attend or not, we hope you will play along with our Foggy guessing game and let us know: what is Foggy's favourite thing to eat for breakfast?

Juice box boats and toilet roll binoculars





A party for Foggy wouldn't be complete without arts + crafts. We found a great project from Parents magazine via inchmark (which has a great tutorial showing you how to make your own juice box boat).

We also made toilet roll binoculars, which are quite useful if you get lost at sea.

Launched




Saturday, March 20, 2010

Launch today!


Our launch is today. Hooray!

Foggy music


This is quite exciting to announce...

As with Sunny and Snowy & Chinook, we have music to accompany the book Foggy.
The music is by Cowbell with guest vocals (and fantastic lyrics) by our talented and generous friends Chris Harris and Larissa Loyva.

You can listen to two of the tracks now at Simply Read's blog.

Friday, March 19, 2010

Foggy giveaway


To celebrate the launch of Foggy at Collage Collage this Saturday, we are giving away signed copies to three people. We will be announcing the winners on March 29th.

To win a copy, please tell us: What do you think Foggy's favourite thing to eat for breakfast? Email your answers to windyandfriends@gmail.com.

Special note: For those of you who haven't read the book yet, Foggy is the dog and the red- headed boy is Cloud.

Extra special note: The answer is not marshmallows, although he does love to eat marshmallows for dinner!

Colouring page for Snowy & Chinook

Over the next few weeks we'll be putting up activities from Windy, Sunny, Snowy & Chinook and Foggy for you to download.



If you have any trouble with the link, please email us at windyandfriends at gmail dot com.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Paper cicadas


These colourful paper cicadas were originally made to inhabit the reeds near Foggy and Cloud's camp site. Although they don't appear in the final book, now you know they are there, behind the scenes, chirping in a papery sort of way.

windyandfriends{dot}com

Ah, so...in our books you will find the url windyandfriends{dot}com. Here, for nostalgia, is an old page from our web site (Duthie Books, we miss you).

What happened to our web site? A few years ago our host closed, our files were transferred and somewhere along the way we temporarily lost the site. The good news is that we have emerged from the wilderness, and our new provider is stable and helpful.

For the time being, we are going to make this blog our home. Someday, we will put up a proper web site, but in the meantime, you may bookmark this blog. When we have a new site up, we will let you know.

We will be posting activities and colouring pages from the old site and also we are working on a list of places to find the books.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Windy snapshot


Looking at the bright circles from Sharilyn and Adelaide's sunshine collage made me (Robin) nostalgic for our first book, Windy. During the shoot Judith took this snapshot. I don't think we'd even finished dressing the set. Even though it wasn't suitable for the book, I loved it and had it pinned above my desk for months (you can still see the hole from the pin in this scan).

Though Windy was set in the autumn, this image is very spring-like and fresh, as if Windy is just about to wake up...which she probably is....

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Gail & Gale


Some astute readers have wondered: who is Gail? In fact, there are even a few snippets on the internet about a book called Gail. This confusion is because the dustjacket flap of Windy says:

Other books in the Windy series
"Sunny" Sunny and the Hootenanny
"Gail" Gail visits Windy on her Scooter
"Chinook" A high plains adventure
"Snowy" A winter mystery

Now the truth is that we hadn't written or shot any of these when we published Windy. We had every intention of doing so, and we did manage to do Sunny and Snowy and Chinook (a combination adventure and mystery—the mystery is what is the perfect present for a buffalo). But Gail never did become a book.

We did, however, do a scooter adventure with her and Windy and Sunny. But we changed her name to Gale.


Collage Collage


A reminder that we'll be there this Saturday.

Edited to add another reminder!

Making a lovely day


On this grey morning, maybe it's a good time to bring out this happy idea from our friend Sharilyn Wright's blog lovelydesign.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Fablernas värld


Ah, Owls. How we love owls.

windmill trees


When we were working on the set for the Windy animation tests, one of the challenges was creating much wider sets and so we set about making new kinds of flowers and trees. Chlose (a friend of Judith's daughter, Stella) made this amazing windmill tree (below) so we tried to fashion some new trees based on hers (above). Chlose's is much better, and ours remains on the cutting room floor.



Chirp outtakes (wheel painting)

Last May we made a story about wheels for Chirp magazine. We tried all sorts of wheels and cars, but we only had room for a few of our vehicles in the story. Some of the tests we did were quite funny. Our favourite one is probably the cherry-tomato-tin-can car. The tape-dispenser-jalopy and the bananamobile are quite funny, too. What would you use to make wheels?

These are are some more of the vehicles from the cutting room floor.






Rainy by Euan

When we did our book tour for Sunny, we found that one of the exciting things about the books is that they inspire children to make their own illustrated books or animations. This is partly because they are photographic, so they are perhaps less daunting than drawing or painting at a professional level. Also, our dioramas often incorporate everyday objects (such as pencils for telephone poles) and this sparks all kinds of ideas....

One of the things we'd like to do with this blog is showcase some of the amazing and cool responses that we come across from young readers.

Here is the director's cut of the short film Rainy, inspired by the test photos for Foggy, by Euan.





Rainy




When we were first developing Foggy, we considered calling the book Rainy. Our friend Sara O'Leary, who wrote When You Were Small emailed us asking about the project. We sent her some top secret test photos of Cloud and Windy (see above). Then something quite cool happened. Sara's son Euan saw the email, and made his own Rainy story. We will post it soon.