Paige

Paige kitty loves school. This Fall she is starting kindergarten and she is over the moon excited about it. So excited in fact, she's had no time for Summer activities. It's been pencils and books, letters and numbers all Summer long.

***Newly added "crafters notes", etc at the end of the story

When the rest of the kids are at the swimming pool Paige is playing teacher.

And when she does go to play outside she makes sure to bring her studies along.

Paige is very pleased it is finally August because that means the first day of school is right around the corner. It also means back-to-school shopping. Paige picked out a new plaid dress, a new backpack and a new pair of shoes. She had some trouble deciding between the orange loafers and the brown t-straps but in the end the mary janes won out.

Now that her outfit is planned it's time to get her school supplies in order. We went down the the grammar school today to check out her supply list and Paige snuck a peek in the kindergarten classroom to see what it was like.

She was positively giddy after seeing the room all set up for a new year of classes. Chalkboards, little desks, cubbies and mats, globes and maps! Geography is a favorite of Paige's.

She is happy to be a Great Lakes gal!

Finally it was time to head to the store for supplies and then home to pack up her backpack.

Now that she's all set, shoes are polished, backpack is packed, ribbon tie is tied the only thing left to do is practice waiting for the bus.

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"Crafters Notes"
I don't really know where to add this stuff when I'm doing a little story like this so I'll just jam it in here at the end. Thanks for the nice comments about Paige Kitty! She was a tough one. You'd think these things would get easier but every new idea has so many challenges. It took me forever to get her kitty head right. I had to try 3 or 4 iterations before I finally was happy. And then her outfit.. I started with a kind of school uniform with a yellow blouse and pleated plaid skirt. The stuffed pleats were a wreck and the color scheme was wrong so I went with this softer plaid that started life as a thrifted men's JCrew shirt. Then there was the hat I tried to make - total bust. I think I need to start with all my hat plans on a creature without sticky-up ears! Then the shoes. I wish the wool felt was cheaper. I went through many different designs and colors before ending up with the brown mary janes. The backpack, once I finally decided on a fabric, went quickly and I was so excited when I found the number ribbon in one of my disaster ribbon drawers. I think that may be my favorite part.

For the photos, they all are linked to the flickr originals where you can click "all sizes" to see much bigger versions. I hope the site is not taking forever to load. Calling photos from flickr in uniform sizes is tricky business. Maybe I'm just doing it wrong? I've ended up linking to the largest size photo on flickr and then resizing to fit in my template.

So some materials... flannel body, wool felt stripes, eyes, nose, collar and shoes. The fabric for the backpack came from my friend Jen in Tokyo and features the mischevious Japanese racoon, tanuki

Paige will be for sale. I'm going to put her up for auction (with a backpack full of surprise goodies) as soon as Tim has a free moment to make me an emailer so I can notify the mailing list.

And how does she stand? She's sprinkled with magic fairy dust of course! or maybe it's the magic of photoshop ;)