Celebrating Spring!

The wind chimes are clanging, the wind whistling, the cats are plastered against the wood stove. Hail has fallen in sparadic bursts landing like pop-its on the green grass. What a strange way to begin the new cycle. I have hurriedly finished up a couple of projects, just in case... something warm and spring-like happens and the out of doors beckons.
These are the projects on the worktable. I thought it was funny that all my projects had that warm rusty brown color. I wondered if I would come back to these colors after attending my weekend workshop?

I took a great bookmaking workshop from Shawn Sheehy on Moveable Structures (wheels and pull tabs). OMG - I felt like a kindergartener on the first day of school - so excited and yet worried if I could listen and measure at the same time, or cut, fold, and glue properly! The best part about the whole thing is we walked away with our very own BOOK with 16 different structures!

This page used a string pulley to move the leaf up and down.

This funny character made from scraps is like a jack in the box.

 He kind of pops open. When the page is closed he is flat.

This pop-up piggy wasn't demonstrated in our class but

 the pattern is on Shawn's website.

 I came home and added pages to my book to see if I could use

 what I learned to create my own pull tab creations.

Here's my design for a moveable arm to move the cloud and

 flying crow up the page.  

And because I am still new at the process my violets slide up.

Matching the right illustration with the right mechanism

may take more time to learn.

But I am happy because the mechanism works!  

With luck, I may move on to first grade!

 Now that is something to celebrate since spring is slow in coming.