Anna Grossnickle Hines News from January 2000

	Here's Jacob checking out the bounty in the Christmas stockings. The candles were knocked out of the fireplace onto the hearth by Santa.  At Grandpa's house they always left a fire ready to start and it would be logs and newspapers that got strewn, but when you have an old house with a faulty chimney, candles are the only thing you can burn. That's how traditions evolve!
	This is the doll I made for Jacob.  I used my new sewing machine to embroider "Little Mann" on his sweatshirt. Jake's full name is Jacob Albert Mann. He's named the doll Andy. I didn't expect this gift to be as popular as the computer games or cars, trucks and motorcycles, and it wasn't, but a grandmother gets to indulge herself once in a while.

Now I'm back at work, doing the illustrations for the two Rookie Readers I wrote last year for Grolier. I'm also working on some new poems, hoping to do another poetry book illustrated with quilts.  The first collection "happened" over a period of years, so this is the first time I've selected a theme and set out to write a collection of poems.  I'm enjoying the challenge.

Another thing I've started is to try to do some free drawing everyday, hoping to improve my skills, and maybe try some new things. You can never practice too much.  It's sort of like exercising the body, which I'm also trying to do daily, stretching some of those "muscles" that don't get regular use, even though I'm always drawing for my illustrations.

As you can see from my schedule I'll soon be doing a lot of traveling, which makes it all the more important that I keep to my schedule while I'm home.  One thing I absolutely love in this cold weather is my commute--just two flights up!

Some happy news to report is that my What Can You Do? books have been collecting a few honors. They were selected by the Philadelphia Reading Round Table as their Book of the Month for September 1999,  the Please Touch Museum in Philadelphia chose them as the best "Touch and Feel" books of year for zero to three year olds, and What Can You Do in the Rain?was selected by Child Magazine for their Best Books of the Year List.

Happy 2000!
Anna

December's News:
My attention has been absorbed in finishing the quilt book.  Pieces is a collection of nature poems that I chose to illustrate with quilts.  My editor, Susan Hirschman, thought I was crazy, but she is very happy with the results.  In fact, everyone at Greenwillow is very excited about it. They have decided to publish it in their new Winter 2000 season, rather Spring 2001 as originally scheduled.  I delivered the quilts on December 2nd.
 

	Here I am working on the last pair of quilts. I cut out squares one and one eighth inches on each side and arrange them on sheets of foam.  It's a little bit like working a puzzle, trying to match up the colors.  There are 21 rows of 17 squares, a total of 357 little squares for each quilt
	After I sew the squares together they measure five eighths on a side.  That makes the sewn piece a lot smaller than one might expect.  It also makes it tricky to match the colors since so much of each square disappears in the seam.  The poems on these two pages are about summer flowers and hummingbirds.  The text will go in the white area.  The hummingbird has been cut from a printed fabric.
	After sewing the little squares together I added two hummingbirds and more flowers that I cut out from printed fabric and appliquéd on top.  In this picture I'm placing the cut-out flowers on the sewn piece.
	Here they are! All nineteen finished quilt pieces spread out on my bedroom floor.  The picture was taken on December 1, the day before I took them into New York to give them to the publisher.  It's a two and a half hour train ride into the city.
	Ava Weiss (Art Director), Virginia Duncan (Editor), and Susan Hirschman (Editor-in-Chief) are looking at the work that I've just given them.  Virginia is holding the dummy.  They are happy.  After they admired the quilts they took me out to a very nice lunch.
	Ever wonder what an editor's office looks like?  We are sitting in one end of Susan's office in the picture above and here she is at her desk.  She's a very busy and efficient person, never wasting a minute. Her walls and shelves are full of interesting things that writer's and illustrators have given her.
	This is Ava's office. She has a drawing table and computer on the other side. She isn't sitting in her desk because as soon as they had looked at the quilts she got busy checking them in and writing up the orders for what has to happen tom them next.  I don't think I've ever seen Ava sitting at her desk.  Well, yes, I did, once when she sat down to make a phone call.
	After my visit I walked down Fifth Avenue to Rockefeller Center to catch the subway.  It's about six blocks from the Greenwillow office. Since I had my camera with me I decided to take a picture of the big Christmas tree.  Just a moment before I snapped this I nearly ran into Tom Brokaw coming out of the building to the left.

Since I delivered the quilts I've been working on sketches for a new book. This one is a Rookie Reader for Grolier.  I have to finish those illustrations by the middle of March, before I start all those trips listed above.  I'm also working on some new poems.  I'd like to illustrate another book with quilts.

Spring News:
We had a hard time deciding what to do for the cover.  I had an idea, but the editors weren't sure about my sketches, and the art director was confident that she and the designers could come up with something by piecing together parts of the interior quilts.  While they mulled it over,  I was chomping at the bit to do the quilt I could see in my mind.  Finally, when the designer admitted that she was having trouble making the pieces work together for the cover, I decided I was going to make a quilt whether they wanted it or not.  I told them I was going to do and then they could decide whether to use it or not.
 

I spent three days doing this design...	...and eight days cutting and sewing the 500 or so little bits of fabric to complete the quilt top.