This Is My Secret: The Blog and Website of Writer Kristin Cashore

This December, I discovered the Etsy shop Ever After Miniatures, which offers DIY printable miniature books. You buy the templates, print them out, then cut, fold, and paste the sweetest little openable books, which have readable pages inside.


This sort of project is made for me.

Most evenings, I would work on a few. I made them as gifts, mostly.

We have a small secret drawer at the end of our dining room table. I kept my project in there when I wasn't working on it.

At a certain point, Kevin pointed out that they would make good tree ornaments. So I started adding strings and ribbons to a few of the covers. :o)

I got a little obsessed with this idea.



Here's one of my favorite pages of Pride and Prejudice.

After they were dry, up they went!

Lovely.
I have loads more Arctic pictures to share, and will do so as time permits. Hope you're all having a nice January! As I type this, it's sleeting in the Boston area, and our temperatures are expected to be close to 0°F tonig…

I found a pattern for a 20-sided star online (called a Moravian star). 
While I printed it out, Kevin went through my wrapping paper collection and chose a really lovely one made of an old German map of Europe.
I cut out twenty of these....

...to turn into twenty of these.

At a certain point, it occurred to me that wrapping paper isn't the strongest stuff in the world. I wanted this to be a star for us to use every year, a hearty star with a long life... so I decided I needed to make understar parts out of cardstock, then attach the wrapping paper parts to the cardstock parts. I began to cut out and create twenty of these.

I also made the icosahedron (20-sided polyhedron) above out of cardstock, using the pattern below. (Here's another link to this great pattern, by Charlotte@Living Well on the Cheap!)

Of course I didn't think about the fact that I might want to blog this later, so my pictures are random and disorganized... sorry about that.
Next, I glued the twenty po…

Jane, Unlimited is out in the world now! And I leave for my book tour momentarily, so it's not really the time to be blogging about something completely unrelated, BUT -- in case you're a person who likes to plan ahead for Halloween, and a person who's handy with scissors and glue, AND a person who has lots of cereal boxes lying around....

I wanted to make sure you know about an Etsy shop called Wintercroft that sells downloadable templates for making the most beautiful masks all by yourself!

They have animal masks, polygon faces, imaginary creatures, etc. As long as you're careful to read and follow all the instructions (and enjoy this sort of thing), it's pretty straightforward. I just made this bear.





Good look at Wintercroft! And have fun! And I hope to see you on my book tour.

I finished my revision!

My next responsibility is to start the next revision (draft 7) as soon as possible.

But before I do that, I'm taking just a few days off... from revising. Not from creating things.

Those of you who were around the blog in January might remember Basil, the common house zebra. Well, after I created Basil, a request came in for Sock Sunny and Sock Tanker.

This is real-life Sunny.

This is real-life Tanker.

Sunny the dog and Tanker the cat live in Florida with two seven-year-olds. Sunny LOVES Tanker. Tanker's feelings for Sunny are more complicated, but that's neither here nor there. The point is that months and months after acquiring the appropriate socks, I FINALLY got to work.

I started with Sock Sunny, because a sock dog requires less altering of a sock zebra pattern than a sock cat does. Socks animals made from this pattern generally turn into long-faced, thin animals, not wonderfully roly-poly cats with round heads. I really wasn't sure what I …

This week I discovered that it's astonishingly easy for a person with minimal sewing skills to make a zebra out of socks.


It took me maybe two hours to make Basil, no more, no kidding. I used this wonderful sock zebra pattern/tutorial at The Sewing Directory by Caroline Short, with only minor alterations.





The main thing I altered in the pattern is that I wanted Basil to have free arms, separate from his body. If you use tall enough socks (this pair went about halfway up the shin), you'll have enough sock material in the sock you use for the head to create both the ears and a couple of slender arms, which I then hemmed, stuffed, and attached to the torso.

This was so straightforward that I'm not sure why the world isn't overrun with sock zebras.

(Basil says that would be a good thing.)