The "Magic Tree House"

Sorry for the long delay in posting . . . between me being sick, my daughter being sick, and my computer dying it's been a rough month or so.  Good news is everyone is healthy again (knock on wood) and I have a new computer.  I have been crafting and here is one of the projects I've been working on.

If you are not acquainted with the "Magic Tree House" books by Mary Pope Osborne you are missing out.  Our first grader is reading various books in this series as part of her curriculum at school and they are wonderful!  Here's the gist of the storyline:  A brother and sister, named Jack and Annie, discover a tree house in the woods near their home.  It is filled with books, books and more books.  As they look through a book on dinosaurs one of them says "I wish we could go there."  The tree house begins to spin and the wind blows and then everything goes still.  They look out the window and the picture in the book is right there before them, in real life.  Turns out the tree house belongs to King Arthur's sister, Morgan, who is Camelot's librarian (of course that's not revealed until book 3 or 4).  Morgan travels through time collecting books for Camelot's library.  The author winds historical fact into her wonderful books -- so the reader is actually learning something whilst enjoying a great book.

Last spring I offered to help her multi-age program's teachers with classroom decorations and they took me up on it.  So I have been creating a larger-than-life book "cover" for each of the books the kiddos read.  I have had so much fun creating them -- I don't duplicate the original cover, my cover ideas usually come to me as Demi and I read the books aloud.  Anyway, I've created covers for the first three using a standard sized poster board, my Cricut (of course!), ink, chalk, pens and lots of adhesive.  If you'd like details on what cartridges I used, drop me a line and I'll give you the info. 

Thanks for looking!