I’ve followed the work of artist Dan-ah Kim for several years now, and I’ve even got a few of her pieces up on the walls at Paper Tiger, so I was ecstatic when I saw that she’s released her first children’s picture book, If I Lived in the Sky.

photo via Dan-ah Kim

I’m such a sucker for a good night sky illustration, and Dan-ah’s pretty amazing at those. Her paintings have a lovely textural quality, often incorporating additional layers of paper or fabric as well as stitched elements in addition to the textured surface of the paint itself, and while a lot of that depth is lost in book format, the mixed media still comes through and it’s a breathtaking little book. Mine’s already come in the mail and if you’d like a copy of your own, it’s available for $11.84 on Amazon.

I’ve had starry skies on my mind a lot lately (I recently finished reading The End of Night, by Paul Bogard – a book I would highly recommend it to anyone who is a human) so it’s no surprise that when I stopped by my local yarn store after getting this package in the mail I walked away with a couple of skeins of Tosh Merino Light in the Stargazing colorway.

It’s an exceptionally difficult color to photograph accurately, but it’s all deep rich blues, with purples and greens thrown in, rather like the Northern Lights. The sense of depth, of light and of shadow, is the hardest thing to capture in a photo. It’s pretty remarkable. I got to thinking that it would look really lovely as some kind of beaded shawl – where the beads are like stars – and then I remembered Audry Nicklin’s Southern Skies and Celestarium, two circular shawls that are celestial maps of the sky over the southern hemisphere and the northern hemisphere, respectively. Could there be a more perfect set of patterns for a colorway called “stargazing”? So I’m pretty sure my three skeins will become a Celestarium, eventually. I say “eventually” because I’ve got a few patterns to wrap up before I can dedicate that much time to a personal project (and more on those upcoming patterns soon).

Fore more starry-related goodness, I’d also recommend Find the Constellations and The Stars: A New Way to See Them by H. A. Rey, of Curious George fame.