Daughter Elise has finally completed her highly imaginative and wonderfully illustrated children’s book, Skaritch Skaratch Munch: A Cautionary Tale. A perfectionist, she labored over every detail, as I do words, and the result is well worth all the toil she invested.

Of herself, and her book, Elise says:

“This is a project that has been very dear to me and that I have been working on for well over a year and a half now.  I wrote in the style of a reverse cautionary tale, where instead of the adults being right, (as they usually are in cautionary tales,) in this tale it’s the children who are right all along and who ultimately come up with a solution to the problem.  I always like to try out new ways of illustrating so for this book I decided to go with some major mixed media creating and I had a lot of fun experimenting with it.  I greatly admire author/illustrator Mo Willems ,and his book Knuffle Bunny is one of my inspirations for illustrating this book the way I did.”

*Before and After images below

Having lived and breathed the ongoing efforts of an artist at work for many moons, I much more appreciate all that goes into illustrating a children’s book, not to mention writing it, and the thought behind even the font size and positioning of the words on the page. And a big plus, the two darling little people featured in the book are my grandbabies Emma Rose and her big brother Ian.

I’ve always loved children’s books and took Elise to the library faithfully when she was young. She haunts used bookstores and secondhand shops and has amassed quite a collection of her favorite authors and illustrators. Sometimes she or I even buy the copies new, but considering the library she’s building we must keep an eye on the budget. Any funds she gets from her own book will probably go back into buying others.  Or art supplies…computer software….

For eager readers young and old, Skaritch Skaratch Munch: A Cautionary Tale is available in print from Createspace.com and Amazon.com

To visit Elise’s newly formed blog and learn more about this book and her other projects visit: Coloring On The Couch

Fall blew into the Shenandoah Valley last night with a big temperature drop and some much-needed rain. For most of the summer the wind is silent, but it’s really talking now, whistling around the old red barn and rattling the house.  The swifts still swoop over our pond in vigorous pursuit of insects and we’ll have many summery days yet before autumn settles in for good, but the season is a changing which inspires me to post some lovely autumnal pics with some of my favorite quotes.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
~George Eliot

No Spring nor Summer Beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one Autumnal face.
~John Donne
Elegy IX–The Autumnal.

Autumn, the year’s last, loveliest smile.
~William Cullen Bryant

“Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.”
~John Keats Ode to Autumn.

(***Pic of the Alleghenies taken by my mother)

Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil painting and autumn a mosaic of them all.
~Stanley Horowitz

Autumn’s the mellow time.
~William Allingham

Autumn is a second spring where every leaf is a flower.~Albert Camus

I cannot endure to waste anything as precious as autumn sunshine by staying in the house. So I spend almost all the daylight hours in the open air.
~Nathaniel Hawthorne

Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
~Faith Baldwin

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry’s cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.
The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I’ll put a trinket on.
~Emily Dickinson
Nature XXVII, Autumn.

Every leaf speaks bliss to me,
Fluttering from the autumn tree.
~Emily Bronte

And from one of my favorite authors:

“It was one of those autumn days, crisp and clear, when the sky has a pellucid quality which is rarely seen in other seasons.  The hedge maple had turned a brilliant yellow and the beech trees above the hedges were a deeper gold. A few hardy summer wild flowers such as knapweed, yarrow, and cranesbill still starred the verges and banks, brave survivors of summer heat and the ferocity of the recent storms.”  ~Miss Read,Changes at Fairacre