I finally met Sarah McIntyre, the illustrator of 'You Can't Eat A Princess!', on Friday! I met her at Leeds station and when we first met we stared at each other for a few seconds as if to say "You DO exist." We have emailed each other for months and spoken on the phone but never met. Sarah came up to Leeds so that we could do a joint event together - the Leeds Thought Bubble Festival. Sarah is just as wonderful as I thought she would be. She's very energetic and is brilliant at drawing aliens. On Friday night we made felt aliens to sell at the festival. Sarah made name badges and posters with the greatest of ease. I coloured in an alien and made cups of tea.
The Festival was amazing. There were a lot of people dressed up as their favourite comic characters. I spotted three spidermen, two Darth Vaders and one Where's Wally (he was, disappointingly, very easy to spot.) Sarah has been to these festivals before and soon had our display and activity tables set up. We had a lot of children and grown ups sitting at our tables and designing aliens. Ellie, from Scholastic, travelled up from London to help us. I've never met Ellie before - she is so lovely.
It was an extremely busy day and we were all exhausted by the end. Sarah stayed with me over the weekend. We said a sad goodbye on Sunday morning. We are planning to do more joint events next year.
The winner of our Design an Alien competition was 12 year old Ellice. She took a lot of time over her alien. She won a signed copy of You Can't Eat A Princess! Well done, Ellice!
Here are some more entries :
