Happy New Year! 2024 turned into a busy year with house and garden renovations taking up any free time, so fitting in recycling pickups at the weekend was all we could manage. Social media and posting had to be put on hold, but with the illustrations ready it’s time to pick up where we left off.

We have now collected thousands of cans and bottles, so it’s time to think about publishing the book. There are still some collaboration ideas in the pipeline which we need to pursue, but the aim is to start ramping up socials again and then launch for October, which is Down Syndrome Awareness Month.

Click here to follow our progress – here is the final version of page 7:Below you can see my initial idea. I love this page as it shows the creative process – how to go from ideas and turn them into something that fits. So this page shows Elijah and Crumpet imagining what they could do if they collected loads of recycling.

Fatima my illustrator decided to use industrial size wheelie bins, which I liked as it shows scale! Then she nailed the right side with Crumpet and had Sapphire the cat sitting on a pile of books. My only thought was whether or not to use our three Elijah and Crumpet books, but our books are thinner and so I was happy to stick with the effect.

If you would like to preorder a copy of our recycling book (name will be revealed soon), you can order on our website – click here.

(Finally, the AI-generated image at the top was what the website editing software kindly offered to create. I thought I would see what it produced using my image as a prompt. Not a bad effort!)