Wednesday, January 20, 2010
A Christmas Surprise
 Oh, how I've wanted to talk about this for SO LONG and now January is here, the surprise is out of the bag, so I can show it to all of you!
Back in the Summer, I had an idea to surprise Scotian for Christmas. At Christmas we generally don't buy each other big gifts, and he's VERY difficult to buy for. So, I used the alchemy tool on Etsy to find an artist to illustrate a bedtime story we had made up for BananaMuffin after a particularly scary event for her involving seaweed. Every night she would request the same story, and every night it would change - for a while it included Super Why, her favourite cartoon at the time. Inevitably, Scotian and I would fall asleep right along with her, somewhere in the middle, so the story never fully had a proper ending. I remember more than one night dozing off and hearing myself say completely incoherent sentences, and then being jarred awake by a toddler who wanted mommy to tell the story properly!
After viewing about 50 different portfolios for people who accepted my alchemy request, I settled on Kylie, whose whimsical watercolour style I really enjoy. I sent her photos of Spunky and BananaMuffin, a word document of the story, and some suggestions. She came up with a few sketches that were right on the mark, painted them, and promptly had them in the mail.
The original paintings sat in my closet, hiding, for longer than I'd like to admit. The week before Christmas I finally scanned them, added the text, and sent the files to a printer. My hope was to visit my neighbour, Trudi to bind the book with beautiful Japanese paper...but I left it too late and Trudi was on a plane to Rome for Christmas...so, plan B - I had the book bound at a local print shop. Not quite the look I had hoped for, but it worked.
Under the tree, Scotian had no idea (I couldn't be certain that he didn't sneak a peek at the paintings...we share a closet after all) and was so touched by the book, it was definitely the hit of the Christmas season this year! I'm so glad I did it, now that BananaMuffin is nearly 5 (yikes!), the Seaweed story is well behind us, but this way, we'll always remember.
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