Horn Book award

This past weekend my husband and I went to the Boston Globe-Horn Book Awards ceremony at Simmons College in Boston. It was a wonderful event, with  the word’s nicest audience — children’s book people, librarians and teachers.

I accepted an award for my picture book, Pocketful of Posies and came home with this shiny engraved bowl. My name is even spelled correctly! I immediately filled it with some wee friends, as well as my mother’s old teddy bear.

As an award winner, I was asked to illustrate a cover of the The Horn Book Magazine, which will appear in their January 2012 issue. That same issue will publish this year’s award recipients’ speeches (including mine). Here is a peek at the illustration while I was working on it. I’ll show the finished product when it is published in the magazine in a few months. The magazine also plans on making it into a poster, which they’ll have available at meetings and conferences.

As you can see, I’ve formed the Horn Book title out of found objects and felt covered wire. I showed pictures of the process as part of my presentation at Saturday’s Colloquium at Simmons. I’ll be delivering the original to the photographer, Rick Kyle later this week and am looking forward to meeting him, since he did such a great job taking the pictures for my Posies book.

A great big thank you the Horn Book for the award and the opportunity to share my work on the January cover of the magazine!