Bee’s story for David Butler…

So, when Bee was tiny I found this book: Avalanche which was illustrated by David Butler. It quickly became one of Bee’s very most favorite books. So, when I started in on fabric design and all I had the chance to bring our copy to a Quilt Market and David graciously signed it for Bee…

Now, the reason I am bringing this up is that while I was away with the Sea Island Quilters and visiting Tabby Fabrics in Beaufort, Bee decided that she wanted to make a book to send to David; she’s just that kind of sweet and awesome child. She made up the story, which K transcribed, and did all of the illustrations; it involves some of her earliest work in representational drawing as she is generally highly skeptical of mimesis…

So, without further ado (though there will be some annotations) I present you with the book Bee wrote for David: A Three Woogawag Story…

(A woogawag is an imaginary creature Bee made up some time ago…)

(All woogawags have black eyes…)

(Imaginary Rhino comes from a Justin Roberts song. That’s the woogawag in red and green, and the imaginary grandma on the right…)

(This picture shows Imaginary Rhino’s grandma–you can see her rhino horn at the top..).

(That green blotch on the side of the policeman’s head is his cap…)

(This smiling woogawag has one green eye inside another green eye, and is therefore especially spooky…)

(This picture shows the grandpa in the upper left–he’s smiling, and you can see his heart in his chest. He’s watching over his dog, who is lying down with his four paws up in the air. See the dog’s head apparently stuck to the middle of his back, with 2 eyes and a smile? The green scribbly bit on the right is obviously their treehouse…)

(This illustration shows the policeman bending over–see his cap with a badge on it, on top of his head?–and reaching out his very large hand to capture the woogawag…)

(Two smiling woogawags behind bars, where they belong…)

(This orange woogawag wears glasses on his black eyes. He’s orange from eating so many orange planets, like the one pictured to the right…)

(Seems a rather reasonable argument, don’t you think???)

(Oh, no!!! That’s the woogawag in the middle, and the planet to the right. Looks like he’s already taken a few bites…)

(The woogawag is now blue–as any of us would be, having just had a whole planet pushed out of our tummies by a bunch of orange aliens like the one on the right…)