Super simple and super fun project. Cut out a square of a picture from a magazine or newspaper. Next, glue it to a piece of paper. Then finish the drawing. See what strange and hilarious things come out of it! Title of my children’s works appear below the pictures. (please excuse the crummy phone photos.)

Alligator Loves His New Pants

Two people sitting on a couch with their heads on fire and Monster 

Pretty Darn Cute Cat

Two Donuts

Have you done any good projects lately?

Now that it’s officially summer, elsie marley is officially in summer mode. Like last year, I’m going to keep a simple summer journal. Post will be a bit shorter, a bit slap dash, just a peek into our summer days really.

If you like the idea of a simple, summertime blog I would love it if you played along! If you have a blog, use summer journal as your title. If you are more of an instgramer/twitterer/tumblrer type use the #summmerjournal hashtag. Leave a comment if you’d like to play along, so I can follow your summer journal!

The other afternoon, we played a game of Simon Says, Draw! Jean from the Artful Parent, posted about this game years ago and I’ve been meaning to try it ever since.  It’s just like the Simon Says game you played when you were little only with drawing instead. So Simon says things like:

• draw a dot
• use a blue crayon
• draw a squiggle
• pass your marker to the left
• draw three eyes
• draw seven legs
• color something purple
• color with two markers at the same time (this one was a bit hit)

You can say Simon says at the beginning of the sentence or not. That part of the game got lost and we just had fun telling each other what to draw. Everyone’s picture ends up completely different. And it’s a great game to wake up your creativity on a hot summer afternoon.

happy december! Every day of advent I will be posting a page from my coloring book for you to download.  On the first day of advent you get a fancy dancy pair of knit mittens to color. So get out those crayons and pencils and click here to download the page!

If you are extra proud of your work  feel free to show it off in the elsie marley flickr page.

and the winner is…Christine from phila craft.  She even made up a little poem for the occasion:

Elsie Marley never whines.
Her stuffed moostachios are truly fine–
Crazy Elsie Marley.

And the 1000th comment and winner of the secret prize is Julie from letter9.  You have won the first book in the make it yourself series. yee haw!

It was nice hearing from all of you.  I’ll have to do this again sometime. Leya is hosting color week this week and I’m going to join in the fun–take a little break after 100 blathering posts.

have a good week!

p.s. winners, please email me your mailing address and I’ll send off the loot.

I always appreciate it when other plush artists post about their creative process. And though I am far from an artist and my process is quite random, I did make a few drawings for some animals I want to make. Since I saw this bear, I’ve been thinking about making a doll from a pair of pants. I think this elephant looks a little like an old timey strong man from the circus, except for his puny arms I guess (I’m not very good at limbs). But we’ll see how he turns out because I’m still new to pattern making. The idea of making toys from clothes is really exciting–not just using the fabric, but integrating the look of the shirt or dress or hell the whole outfit into the finished doll. It would be like the feature Domino magazine had where they took an outfit and turned it into a room, do they still do that? I always thought that was such a clever idea, but they never seemed to get it right somehow.

I’m rambling. Here is an actual artist who makes some mighty fine plush stuff: sien keegan.