Glad Things #24

This Friday’s toppling pyramid of Glad-ness.

This week’s rather late-in-the-day Glad-ness comes from my parents’ house, where I’m dog-sitting and have otherwise spent my day constructing a GIANT pyramid of presents ready for Derby’s Ethical Christmas Market tomorrow! I’ve sold so many more cards at fairs than I used to since I made a big plywood card stand last year (now quite magnificently reinforced by my dad, so it’s not so reliant on luck and glue), so I decided I needed to up my wrapping paper display game to match. It will be like this, but bigger:

If you are thinking, what my Christmas really needs is a few sheets of Kate Slater’s finest, beautifully illustrated and 100% recycled wrapping paper, you can find it here!

I should absolutely be in bed right now, but first, the Glad-ness:

1.

On Tuesday evening I gave a talk for the AOI on working with collage for their Handmade Illustration series, and I so enjoyed chatting to Dave Bain about all things cutting and sticking. I looked back through some very old work to show how my whole paper obsession began and it sort of made me want to make ridiculous three-dimensional contraptions again. And more installations. And more books. And…

Magnus goes wild in the button factory - very early work for Magpie’s Treasure (Andersen Press, 2010).

2.

The weather was terrible on Saturday but I had the loveliest, coldest, wettest, freezing-fingers, soggy-leggings morning walk with Percy. Left to my own devices I definitely would have curled up in my pyjamas for another hour and felt a bit gloomy, but instead I laughed all the way around Stowe Pool with Percival, who bounded into the water after his tennis ball and paid no heed to the howling wind.

3.

It’s National Illustration Day, thanks to the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, which very excitingly is finally opening its doors in Clerkenwell in MAY! Let us all climb to the rooftops and proclaim ‘Mr Magnolia has only one boot!’ at the tops of our lungs. In my room here there are piles of throughly sellotaped books from my childhood (which I started looking through when I went upstairs to hunt for boxes to wrap for the pyramid). The inside of my childhood imagination is wallpapered in the work of Janet Ahlberg and Quentin Blake and Judith Kerr. A few years ago I painted this homage to the Tiger Who Came to Tea, because, really, if I could I would climb into those books and sellotape myself to their safe pages. I think that might be why I became an illustrator.¹

Goodnight,

Kate x

1. That, and the whole Year 3 / Garden Gang story, which you can read here.