Tonight is our Des Moines (Iowa) Modern Quilt Guild holiday social–can’t wait!  If you are in the area, stop by at 6:30 for an evening of fun.  We are swapping a holiday item–I whipped mine up last night (nothing like waiting till the last minute!).  More get-together details here. 

Every year, I make my nephews birthday shirts to boast their age at their birthday party.  These were last year’s (a Diego themed party) and the year before was a Curious George party (wow! They were such babies two years ago!)  This year, the older brother is obsessed with Richard Scarry’s Busytown (remember the Pig Will and Pig Won’t costumes?  Same source, and his idea..), and his little brother, fire trucks.  Originally the party was to be Busytown themed, but their Momma settled on a generic fire truck theme party.  

It just so happened that Quilting Treasures released their new line, Busytown on the Move by Richard Scarry at the beginning of October 2011, just in the knick-of-time for my nephew’s birthdays!

Seriously cute fabric, a BUSY scene with all sorts of activity going on in town, cars everywhere, including the famous pickle car, the mice driving saxophone and Swiss cheese cars, a worm driving an apple car, a rabbit driving a head of lettuce, a hog on a Harley(!), and a fox on a Vespa–

There is a televesion show out now, called Busytown Mysteries, which is how my nephews know about Richard Scarry.  He created Busytown before I was born, and what I love about this new series and the books, they haven’t “modernized” his art or the animation, the characters still look like, and are colored the same way, as I remember them in the 1970s.  Isn’t that cool?  Given the treatment of some other contemporary remakes from my childhood (don’t even get me started on Fisher Price Little People), I find this refreshing-and a nod to Mr. Scarry’s talent and genius.  Illustrations from the book, “What Do People Do All Day” (copyright 1968-still in print today!), check out Stitches the Tailor’s work table:

and Stitches is so wealthy he can hire a new house to be built (check out that bag of money!!!) don’t we all wish sewing was such a profitable profession:

Even the dressmaker works above the bank, presumably so she can deposit her ample earnings at the end of each workday…

Well, okay. Maybe not, but a girl can dream, right?!?

So for the birthday party, I bought them each a Richard Scarry book, and I made them each a shirt (recycled from their Halloween costumes!) with a Busytown fire truck fussy cut into their “number”:

And used the fabric to make them each their own pillowcase, perfect for falling to sleep on and dreaming big 3 and 4 year old dreams on…  Maybe I should make myself a birthday shirt next July to boast my new age, what do you think?  Yeah, maybe not.

Instead of using wrapping paper, I wrapped each book up in the pillowcase with their shirt as a “nametag” for whose gift was whose.

I’d like to imagine that they will be this easy to please when they are 13 and 14… 

Doubtful.  But again, a girl can dream, can’t she?