Shawl Friday

It's been a summer of reading about Laura Ingalls Wilder and Rose Wilder Lane. I'm not quite sure what keeps pulling me to find out what made them tick. Perhaps it's the closeness of their archives, housed down the road in West Branch Iowa.

Studying new picture books, I have found I really love Mo Willems. And I adore his early readers. Thank you, Debbie Dunn for introducing me to them.

So what does this all have to do with shawl Friday? Sketching lions for the new Lion Brand healing shawl cards (http://cache.lionbrand.com/cgi-bin/pg.fcgi?page=prayerShawlCards.html ), I looked for a visual guide. The lions were my first attempt at anthropomorphizing. I thought Maurice Sendak and his Little Bear illustrations would be most helpful, but it was the spareness of the Mo Willems elephant and pig that guided my hand.