Sometime over the last couple of days I reached cat saturation point and made an elephant. Young Stumpy here was a bit of dissappointment. He turned out nothing like my sketch or his initial inspiration, a picture from one of Audrey's all time favourite books The Baby's Catalogue by Janet and Allan Ahlberg. Nevermind... Audrey likes him and he was good machine applique practice!
In any case, I wanted to show my young friend because he reminds me that I wanted to share another recent source of kiddy-related inspiration to me. I'm not sure if Playschool is aired outside Australia, but it's an excellent piece of children's programming. I hope this hasn't been written about before in crafty blog-land, I looked but couldn't find any references, if I've missed something, sorry! Anyway, what these people can't do with a cardboard roll and some pipe cleaners probably isn't worth doing. Along with half the country I grew up watching this show, so it's a bit of surpise to me to have only noticed so recently how cool the toys featured on the show are. How gorgeous is Henny Penny? Not to mention Owl, Diddle, Daisy, and even Jemima (who was the butt of so many childhood jokes for my brother and I - we thought she was a bit daggy - but look who got the last laugh, she's even still got her complete original wardrobe from the '70s!) The rest of the Playschool toys can be seen here.
