The Lavender Blue Dress at Edinburgh Book Festival

On August 10th there was a brilliant event at Edinburgh International Book Festival for my new picture book with Aidan Moffat: The Lavender Blue Dress.  

The room was packed as Aidan performed the lyrical, rhyming story and spoke about the release of the book this October.  Aidan's a brilliant musician (famously from Arab Strap), so the crowd was a good mix of fans of his work as well as parents and kids excited about the picture book.

The Lavender Blue Dress story is about a young girl called Mabel, who wishes (but never expects) she could have a dress for the school Christmas ball.  There's a lot of focus on handmaking and creating as a family, so as a great touch to the book there's a design-your-own dress for Mabel hidden in the jacket-flap on the hardback editions.  We thought it would be great to have a taster for this at the event, so the kids could design their own dresses for Mabel and show Aidan!

These are some of my favourite dress designs.  There were some serious budding fashion designers around, I'd wear all of those! I always love seeing kids interact with my books or illustrations, so it's really wonderful and humbling to see so many people engaged with the project.  Hoping to see more when the book's out in the wild!


Thanks very much to Cargo and Aidan/Godsal for the photos.