A second grade classroom is in a braiding craze. They will braid anything: shoelaces, hair, friendship bracelets, the tails on their toy ponies. But Noah doesn't have anything to braid. So his teacher takes a whiteboard rag and tears it into three long strips.
Soon, Noah is braiding on the school bus. And in the bath. He wakes up early to braid some more. The other kids in Class 203 start bringing in old skirts, tablecloths and curtains to braid. The braid stretches all the way down the hallway and back. What to do with it?
"I'm just going to spoil it right here. It ends up as a classroom rug," says Story Rug author Sophie Blackall. "I've always loved rag rugs," she says. "I have them in my house, old ones, and I stare at the fabric and lie on them, kind of wondering who wore these clothes all this time ago and the stories that are woven into these rugs."
Blackall originally wrote a version of Story Rug thinking she would illustrate it herself, like she has for all her other picture books. But it almost felt too easy, in a way. "When I embark upon a picture book, I like to not know everything about it," Blackall explains, "but with the story I could see around the corner. I knew exactly what this book would look like if it was done by my own hand, and then I felt like I'd already done it."
"One of my biggest tasks when making the illustrations was to try and overshadow my own anxiety about what was in Sophie's head," laughs Phoebe Wahl, who did illustrate Story Rug. Wahl used a limited palette of yellow, orange, red, light blue, light green and browns for her illustrations. "I drew them with a digital brush that kind of mimics colored pencil or crayon," she says. "I wanted them to feel bright and textured and busy in the way that, like real classrooms when you go into them, are often explosions of color and texture and busyness."
To make the rags in the classroom rug stand out on the page, Wahl says she decided to purchase real fabric scraps. "I did miraculously find an Etsy shop that had vintage fabrics that were like all of the patterns that I needed for the book, which was really incredible," she says. She even got a bag of yellow sari scraps from India. She scanned the fabric into her computer, "then I could kind of adjust the color and play with the scale a little bit and make it live more within the palette of the book, while also kind of, like, popping out and being the only exceptions to the limited palette," Wahl explains.
Like Blackall, Wahl also grew up with family rag rugs. Her grandmother was a big rag rug maker, and so was her mother. "There was always the story of my great-grandmother working so hard on her rag rug that then she wouldn't let anyone walk on it," Wahl remembers. "It's such a beautiful way to preserve these things that feel so precious and hold so many memories."
By the end of Story Rug, the whole class has joined in bringing scraps from home to braid into the rag rug. Not only does each piece of fabric have its own story, the kids tell each other stories as they work together. "I love the idea of these kids with all of their stories getting woven into the rug," says Blackall, "and then it being a rug that they sit on to listen to and tell more stories."
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