Second hand Little Golden Books

Animal Orchestra  

 

The Little Red Hen 

I picked up a great stash of second hand children's books from the local op-shop last week, including four Little Golden Books.  Two of the Little Golden books were Animal Orchestra & The Little Red Hen - both of which I had as a child, so I was particularly excited to find them!

Animal Orchestra was illustrated by Tibor Gergely, who also illustrated two of my other favourite Little Golden Books Tootle and Scuffy The Tug Boat which I posted about when I first started writing this blog.

Animal Orchestra is a rhyming story about a group of animals and their musical instruments, with this quirky orchestra conducted by a rather large and flamboyant hippo!  And I'm sure everyone knows the story of The Little Red Hen and her attempt to get help baking some bread.

As with all the children's books I buy it's the hand-drawn illustrations that captures my attention, and these two books are fabulous examples of old-school hand painted illustrations.  There are still a couple more Little Golden Books I remember from my childhood which I'm hoping to track down, but for now I'll just delight in finding these. 

Frankie magazine

My vintage china artwork in the latest edition of Frankie magazine  

I was super excited to be featured in the latest edition of Frankie magazine!  Yay!!

I've always loved Frankie's retro vibe, so it's a real treat to have my vintage china artwork profiled and I'm feeling oh so very cool to have my illustrations in such a cute and funky mag.  I really am very thrilled to see this series of artwork in print.

There's also this free pull-out poster with my illustrations of china teacups and saucers, with a little calender on the back.  Cute!

Valentines Day surprise

Yesterday was Valentines Day, and waiting for me when I got up in the morning was this gorgeous limited edition screen print by Rob Ryan.  It's a screen print of one of his amazing paper cuts, with a beautiful message....

              Everything that is supposed to be in heaven is already here on earth

What a lovely way to start the day and I felt very, very special!

Collage cup & saucer

      Teacup & saucer, created from collaged vintage maps and various patterned papers

 

When I posted recently about my collection of envelopes, it reminded me about this little collage teacup & saucer I created a while ago.

The background is a photocopied sketch of one of my teacups and saucers, and I then used vintage map pages and various patterned papers to create collage details of the cup and saucer pattern.

I deliberatly left most of the saucer plain except for one flower and a couple of leaves, otherwise it would have become too busy if everything was collaged.  I also put a patterned background in behind some of the teacup and saucer to help it stand out from the white page.

I like the collage effect and it made a nice change from painting! 

salvaged roadside finds

    Rescued old kitchen cupboard from the side of the road with fabulous lino on the shelves

 The Jolly cat checks out the mysterious piece of furniture

                              

The old kitchen cupboard is now at home in my studio 

A couple of weekends ago I spied a couple of old 1950's / 1960's kitchen cupboards my neighbours had put out on the street as hard rubbish..... they didn't last long on the side of the road before me and Mr B whisked them into our garden for a clean up.

The first one we cleaned up is this very long cupboard with two shelves and three sliding glass doors.  It has the most amazing retro floral lino on the shelves which came up a treat after a good wash (I think the cupboards had sat in the neighbours garden shed for sometime!)  

The Jolly cat was most interested in the new addition and gave everything a good sniff to check it out!

We never had 'hard rubbish' in England.  I can remember a few months after we moved here, we started to notice piles and piles of furniture, random house objects, garden things and general rubbish piling up on the street outside peoples houses. We had no idea what was going on and were very confused!  Now we are very accustomed to hard rubbish - and it has actually become one of my favourite Australian sports ;-)

The rescued cupboard has found its way into my studio and is perfect for storing some of my bits and pieces - thanks neighbours!