Thanks be to Debbie who made and shipped me this adorable plush based on the dog toy from the My Dog, Hen book. It stands 42 inches high and is built like a battleship. I don’t know much about sewing, but that is some fine stitching. The 3D conversion is very satisfying.
Stay tuned: a downloadable pattern for the plush will be available from this website so that you too can make one of your very own. Thanks Deb!
Featuring a Hen dogtoy plush made by Debbie Trollip. Photo by staringintospace.me
Modelled by staringintospace.me
The coalshed door.
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.
In the cafe is a wall covered in photos of dogs (mostly). Being polaroids there is room for their name written in ink below.
A dog’s name says more about the owner than the animal that bears it. I called the dog in Hen Hen because it was reusing a word commonly used as a noun for something not associated with a dog. Sustainability is a key theme in the book.
Dogs reuse things a lot themselves, like sticks that are no longer a part of a tree. And old tennis balls that were once good for tennis. And shoes which they think their owners no longer need.
Dog photos courtesy of The Little Bread Pedlar (Primrose Hill).
Give a dog a tasty name and eat him. (Chinese Proverb).
Frankfurt Book Fair ist hier… so is this German edition of My Dog, Hen.
“Please send me your last pair of shoes, worn out with dancing as you mentioned in your letter, so that I might have something to press against my heart.” ― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
“Dogs dig old shoes.” – Hen.
This mouse named Waterhouse (after Alfred Waterhouse the architect), will appear in a forthcoming book for the Natural History Museum, London. The mouse, who lives in the Museum, embarks on a search outside for a new species of dinosaur which is bigger that seven male African elephants.
I am impressed by the number of buildings in London that Alfred Waterhouse designed, which I hadn’t realised were his work. But in retrospect, the style is very distinctive. Originally from Manchester, he moved his practice to London in the 1860s.
I like the idea of a mouse having his name and living in the Museum and knowing very square inch of the Museum and its contents. Unlike Waterhouse the man, the mouse is not a Quaker.
© David Mackintosh/Natural History Museum, London. 2022.
My Dog, Hen is a book about a new dog, a new home and good old common sense.
My Dog, Hen is out now.
Thanks to St Nicholas, there is a full size plush of Hen’s dog toy in production.
This one is not made by a grandmother and uses modern tailoring technologies and the finest secondhand corduroy known to man. A calico prototype is shown in the pictures.
Once complete, the doll will make the long haul from Van Dieman’s land to the New Europe where it will be put into circulation.
Seamstress Debbie Trollip (not her real name) ran this up in no time with minimal effort, for no reason.
Researching a dinosaur which lived over 100 million years ago, I learned that the Patagotitan mayorum (a sauropod) needed to eat 130 kilograms of vegetation per day to fuel its gigantic body. I’m doing pictures for a new book on the subject. I hope it will have a gatefold in it because this dinosaur is enormous. Some details follow.
Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Match Girl in a mash up with the true story of the match girl strikes of Victorian England? What a good idea.
The Little Match Girl Strikes Back, written by Emma Carroll and illustrated by Lauren Child, is out now from Simon and Schuster.
Lauren’s illustrations are rich in line, shape and texture and take the reader into a monochrome world of Victorian London – in winter, no less. There is an afterword containing historical photographs of the real match girl strikers and the interior of a match factory. If you go to East London you can see the Bryant and May match factory which is currently fashionable accommodation and free from phosphorous.
The book is printed in two colours on a very combustible woodfree paper. It was designed by gaslight using set squares and cast in metal type using the finest, most toxic lead available.
Illustrations © Lauren Child; design by profuselyillustrated.
I didn’t realise that matches were call ‘spills’ in Victorian England.
Films © profuselyillustrated, 2022.
“Physics isn't the most important thing. Love is.” Richard Feynman