Just as the book arrived I found out that Tutti Frutti Productions, a UK theatre company whose work is aimed specifically at family audiences was about to start touring with a stage version of When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat. Such a lovely coincidence ensured we read the book straight away, and were then quick to buy tickets for the production which is touring to a theatre local to us in a few weeks’ time.

The auspicious signs didn’t end there – upon reading the book for the first time with M and J I experienced a rather strange sense of deja-vu – as if the book had been written for me, right here, right now.

Photo: erix!

When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat is a series of cameo descriptions of different homes a family has lived in, in their search for the right place for them, the home that would suit them all. They try living in the forest, on the church roof, in a hotel and even on the moon, amongst many other places, before finally ending up in a house that makes the perfect home for them. The book closes with the lines:

Now our house has four corners.
And our year has four seasons.
We moved here four years ago…
So … this is where we’ll live for a very, very long time.

This book spoke to me as I too have moved very many times in my life – on average staying in any one place for only three years. But it just so happens that this month we’ve been in this home, where we are now, for four years. A funny case of life mirroring art, but one which further endeared me to this book.

The structure of the book opens up lots of opportunity for flights of imagination and connective moments of empathy. What different places could you live in? What would it be like to live in given circumstances? For example, at one point the family find themselves living under a bridge, where “it smelt strange and the names of people we didn’t know were written on the pillars.”

The simple illustrations using a lot of coloured pencil (in addition to watercolour and collage) didn’t immediately grab me. Perhaps my expectations were too high given her recent accolade? They did, however, intrigue me. I imagine there were some interesting editorial discussions as a result of the content: several illustrations include German words, and these have been left in German in the English language translation, and there is also a (very small) drawing of a naked woman sunbathing – not something I imagine would be welcomed with open arms by most English publishers of picture books, although I have no worries about it at all.

If you like the work of Bruce Ingman I think you’ll enjoy Jutta Bauer’s illustrations – both have a certain “guileless innocence” about them. My girls certainly love searching out the details in both illustrators’ work even if they don’t set my heart on fire.

To go along with this book, and to prepare ourselves for our night out at the theatre (actually the show starts at 11am, but I’m sure we’ll still use it as an excuse to dress up!) we decided to try our hand at hat making. I found this wonderful, very easy to follow, charming video tutorial on YouTube all about how to make your own felted hat. The girls loved watching the tutorial – seeing another little girl do it all (with a guest appearance from a cat!) was very exciting for them, and made it seem like a very do-able project for us all. Here’s the video, which I encourage you to watch even if you’re not about to make your own hats:

The only tidbits I’d add to the instructions given in the video are these:

Here’s M covering the ball with the mohair.

Here she is having lots of fun spraying soapy water on the mohair.

Water, water everywhere, but oh so much fun for both girls (and nothing that a few towels couldn’t deal with).

The fact that the process of making the hat is quite a physical one is something that I knew would appeal to my girls. The mohair covered ball was bounced around a lot, and later on the felt got given a good beating too – both energetic activities which suited my girls to a T.

And here’s M modelling her hat!

M is very proud of having recently lost her first milk tooth…

When We Lived in Uncle’s Hat: ** (2 stars)

Songs we’ve been listening to the past few days include:

Other activities that would be fun to do after reading this book include:

Whilst Bauer is prolific illustrator, and also an author in her own right, very few of her books are available in English translation, though in yet another funny, lovely coincidence her book Grandpa’s Angel was reviewed this week on Saffron Tree.

Reading this book with my girls reminded me of a poem I love – House for Sale by Andre Frenaud (translated from the French). Its opening lines are “So many people have lived here, who loved / love, waking up and kicking up the dust.” You can read the poem in full if you scroll to the bottom of this page.

What do you love about the house where you live? If you could live in any sort of house, what would it be?

We leant the sunflower stems against each other and then tied them together with string. We covered the basic frame with various large pieces of material from my stash including a couple of saris (I’m a huge fan of saris for building dens – they are easy for the kids to use as they’re light, drape well and are easy to clip on to things, plus being slightly see-through they let in light, and of course they are often beautiful! Apologies to those of you who think this sounds like I’m repeating myself ). We used butterfly clips to fix the material to the frame – butterfly clips are relatively easy for M to use by herself and and J for some reason finds them intrinsically desirable. I like them because they are *strong* – much better than normal washing pegs/clips – I definitely recommend having a bunch of them stashed for making dens.

I put a tarp down on the grass inside the tipi and then we made our afternoon abode a whole lot comfier with various quilts, blankets and beanbags. Despite the autumnal nip in the air, you can see why the girls insisted on having their supper in the tent!

Unfortunately our beautiful home-from-home was a fleeting beauty as we are already getting heavy dews overnight with the cold air and so everything had to be dismantled before bedtime, but it was definitely worth the effort!

Whilst a supply of outsized sunflower stems may not be locally available to you, you could do this with bamboo stems (the tall ones you can get from garden centres), or anything else you can find about 2m tall (?pieces of downpipe, real tent poles, narrow planks of wood…). A few bed sheets would suffice to cover the frame and if you don’t want to use your regular sheets, you could get some second-hand ones very cheaply from charity shops (then keep them safe as part of your den building stash!).

Of course some reading also got done in our cozy tipi, including a new book for us – A House Is a House for Me by Mary Ann Hoberman, illustrated by Betty Fraser. This book was first published 31 years ago and yet I only came across this book thanks to a comment left here on the blog (Thanks again Chrissy!) – and boy am I grateful for that comment because this book is absolutely wonderful, one that I think every family and school should have, and one which I’ve now recommended to our public library too as they didn’t have a copy. I don’t know how it is that I had never come across this book before – I can only suppose that it is because it is an American book, and because we’ve got a fairly vibrant kids’ lit scene here in the UK, books from elsewhere often don’t get the publicity they warrant.

But back to this gorgeous book which is wonderful to read, great to listen to, and utterly delightful to look at. (Yes, I know I’m gushing, but it really is that good!). Mary Ann Hoberman has written a bouncing poem with strong, effective rhymes about all the different types of homes and houses one can find. She starts with the names for different animal homes, for example in the opening lines:

A hill is a house for an ant, an ant.
A hive is a house for a bee.
A hole is a house for a mole or a mouse
And a house is a house for me!

As the book progresses Hoberman widens her interpretation of “home” to include all sorts of containers and their contents, for example:

Barrels are houses for pickles
And bottles are houses for jam.
A pot is a spot for potatoes.
A sandwich is home for some ham.

This imaginative redefining of “home” brings a great deal of (slightly zany) humour to the poem, which eventually ends a reminder that “Each creature that’s known has a house of its own / and the earth is a house for us all.”

This poem is a great vocabulary builder, with its inclusion of a wide variety of animal homes (eg. coop, sty, fold, hutch), but over and above this educational aspect, Hoberman’s text is simply great fun. Her creative take on “home” is really stimulating – it keys into a childlike/fairytale belief that apparently inanimate objects can have lives of their own, and before long M and I were laughing as we thought of other “homes” (“My mouth’s a home for some chocolate! or “My bed’s a home for my ted” “Your armpit’s a home for a tickle!”). The rhymes always work well and make the book a pleasure to read aloud, as well as appealing to young ears (I think the sing-song rhythm is why J, at just 1, enjoyed listening to this book with us).

So the text is definitely a winner… but then there are the illustrations… and they are so very lovely, detailed and beautifully coloured, creating a world that I simply want to step into and be part of. Each time the line “A house is a house for me” is repeated, Betty Fraser has drawn a different childhood den – the stuff of dreams – from tree houses and seaweed shelters at the beach, to under-the-table retreats, or a blanket thrown over the washing line. M has spent quite some time pouring over the images, enjoying finding tiny details (like the inclusion of a small owl and pussycat in a pea-green boat sailing on the ocean which is home to a whale) in the illustrations which fill each page to bursting. Betty Fraser’s style reminded me of some of the Little Golden Books – her use of colour in particular gives her images a vintage feel.

One final point I think is worth making is that with A House Is a House for Me you get quite a lot of book for your money – over 40 pages – which seems to be a lot for a £5 picture book these days.

A House Is a House for Me:

Whilst outside we didn’t listen to any music, but we have recently had on some goodies: Elvis Presley’s version of There’s no place like home, Home on the Range sung by Roy Rogers and Build My House by Woody Guthrie.

For some more den inspiration take a look at this great round up of outdoor dens from The Crafty Crow – check out the link to Ikat Bag in particular as she has a really inspiration list of links for table tents – I have drooled so much over these I think I shall now have to make one for a christmas or birthday present for me the girls…

What good memories have you got of making dens as a kid yourself, or with your own kids?

Jessica and Tom have a lovely big blue sofa which is just perfect for bouncing on, but when they’re not using it as a trampoline they transform it into all manner of backdrops for their adventures. Sometimes the sofa is a big blue hot-air balloon, other times a submarine or an elephant which Jessy and Tom ride on through the jungle. Unfortunately the sofa has seen better days and one morning disaster strikes:

While Tom was trying to beat his own World Record for non-stop bouncing, there was a hug thud and the whole room shook. Our big blue sofa isn’t bouncy anymore.

Tom and Jessy are forlorn. Seemingly nothing can replace their much loved sofa, but – without giving the game away -  in the end all comes good and the duo do get a new platfrom on which to practise (albeit when no-one is looking) for the Sofa Olympics.

The book has been a huge hit here (I’ve already ordered our own copy) because it is so humourous for kid and adult alike, and because it perfectly captures several oft-repeated moments of family life – the parents “requests” for the kids to stop bouncing, the negotiations which take place to stave off bedtime, and the discovery of all sorts of treasures down the back of the sofa, to name but a few. The illustrations are bold and cheerful, reminding me a little of Lauren Child‘s style mixing drawing and collage. An added bonus, especially for my 1 year old, is that the sofa’s blue pattern is printed on raised soft fabric, perfect for running your finger over. This printing technique is put to use particularly well in the illustration showing the dusty expanse left behind once the old sofa is taken away.

Having read Our Big Blue Sofa for the umpteenth time M decided to turn our sofa into an “Egypt Princess Tent”, and the following day into an ark. To aid the architect I supplied several bulldog and butterfly clips (stronger than clothes pegs), the least dirty bamboo canes from the garden and – most successfully – a circular laundry ring from Poundland. By hanging this off a hook we have in the ceiling for Christmas and birthday decorations it provided the perfect way to hold up bits of sari material and net curtain we’ve collected from various charity shops for our dressing up stash.

Other bits and pieces we have found useful for building dens of one sort or another inside include:

• the drying rack – not very stable on its own, but good for a wall with support like chairs at either end.

• extra larges sheets or table clothes – we’ve found TKMaxx  a good place to pick these up cheaply.

• sample curtains (often given away or bought for next to nothing) from furnishing stores (ask for the remnants bin).  What’s nice about these curtains is that they are often very decorative and make the den rather swankier than just using plain sheets, but they are heavy and the kids can find them frustrating to clip up (this is why I like sari material and net curtains as the kids can hang them up and move them around easily by themselves).

• A blow-up camping mattress adds luxury to an under-the-table den.

• Self adhesive hooks – available in DIY stores

When we had tidied away the ark we steeled our nerves and investigated what lay down the back of our sofa to see how it compared to the lists in Our Big Blue Sofa. If you’re house-proud you should perhaps look away now…

We turned our finds into a museum, complete with artifact labels. I loved how M chose to group things together (the straw went with the cutlery – “they’re cafe stuff, mum”, whilst the bird stickers went under “Office suplies” – definitely my sort of office!) My favourite find was a packet of tomato seeds, and I honestly don’t know how so many teaspoons found their way underneath the cushions. Hmm. So having laid the soul of my sofa bare, are you willing to see what delights your sofa holds?!

All in all this new find of a book as provided us with plenty of hours of fun, both reading and playing. The only downside to Our Big Blue Sofa is that M now feels fully legitimised in jumping on our sofa: “But Mum!! I’m Jessy and I’m practising for the World Championships!”. To this I just have to smile and admit sometimes I too wouldn’t mind doing just the same.

Our Big Blue Sofa:  

The motivational soundtrack to M and I’s olympic training sessions included Jump by Van Halen and Jump with you Baby by BB King.  As a result of reading Our Big Blue Sofa I’m determined to finally get around to making some big bean-bag seats for the girls – then they’ll also have their own little sofas to get comfy in when reading their favourite books