Errol, the chicken, is packed up and ready to go to Brooklyn.  He’ll be at Fact & Fancy, a new gallery/shop started by two lovely ladies from Etsy.  Rudolpho and Werner will be there too. I’m very excited about this, but right now I’m just tired.

good night.

This isn’t quite a year in review, seeing as I’ve only had this blog since September, but the pictures are all toys I designed and made since then. Really it’s more of a gratuitous pat on the back for finally getting off my ass and making the things I think up.   I’m horrible when it comes to doing new things, especially when they are creative endeavors.  The teenager in me is scared of what people will think and of failing miserably and the grown woman in me doesn’t understand where the hell the impulse to make soft toys came from anyway (there must be a Frosted Flakes joke in there somewhere).

I have a bunch of things I want to do for my kids, my husband, my house, and even my poor dogs this new year, but I would like to open up an etsy shop for me.  We’ll see. I have to make a few more things first (and I have to figure out packaging, branding, shipping, blurb writing).  I have a whole year to cross that one thing off my list.

hickety pickety my black hen

she lays eggs for gentlemen

gentlemen come everyday

to see what my black hen doth lay.

This is the first of a series I hope to do. Obviously it’s based on the nursery rhyme “Hickety Pickety.” Though I recently discovered that there are two more lines: Sometimes nine, Sometimes ten; Hickety Pickety my black hen. So I guess some eggs are in order. I’ve always liked nursery rhymes, but now that I say it, it sounds strange. My mother would read to me all the time when I was little–from the big, black and white checked Mother Goose book. And because my sisters are much older they had babies when I was the perfect babysitting age and so I read to my nieces and nephews from the same book. And then came high school and college and cigarettes and boys and I forgot completely. But having kids made me remember how lovely those short, little verses can be. They aren’t as intricately constructed as Lewis Carroll’s books and poems, though he did have his way with some (queen of hearts, tweedledum & dee), but the language is still silly and bizarre. And they haven’t been boobified by disney like the fairy tales and really they couldn’t be–some are strangely violent. They are an odd mix of drinking songs and counting rhymes passed down orally. Which I think is fantastic.Jack Sprat and his wife are in the works, but as of this moment are headless.