With Soft Toys to Sew you can make affordable, professional-looking soft toys with any sewing machine, no matter how basic. Concise, easy-to-follow instructions, clear diagrams and precise patterns mean perfect results every time.
WHERE THE LOST THINGS GO: If you like Love You Forever and I Promise I'll Find You, you'll LOVE my latest book, Where The Lost Things Go. This moving, loving book is a collaboration between a talented writer, Barbara Farnsworth and myself, to make her quirky, sweet, loveable, and reassuring story of a child who loses things and believes they'll be waiting for him a long, long, long long time from now, in heaven, come to life. Barbara Farnsworth first contacted me a year ago when her manuscript landed in my email inbox, and upon reading it, I was immediately intrigued. Her story gives a child reassurance that while something is lost, ALL is not lost. The book was also a rich canvas for an illustrator, moving as it did from indoors to outdoors, through the seasons, and filled with plenty of action.
Do you have a children's book manuscript you'd like me to view? Please visit my website at www.SheilaMcGraw.com
The mystery novel "STILL LIFE WITH CAT AND MOUSE" THE FIRST SYLVIA DRAKE NOVEL has been temporarily suspended. Soon a funnier, juicier edition will be available!
As the child of a creative couple, Sheila McGraw recalls a childhood infused with the smells of oil paint mixed with baking bread from her painter mother and cigarette smoke and freshly cut wood from her hobbyist-carpenter father. Their inspiration shaped her and she recalls spending endless hours drawing, painting and sewing, including a first attempt at embroidery at age 5 when her piece ended up inadvertently stitched to the table cloth.
McGraw began her career as an illustrator and copywriter for advertising agencies, retail fashion outlets and editorial publications. In 1986 she was approached by Firefly Books to illustrate "Love You Forever" written by Robert Munsch. As that book achieved success she began writing, illustrating, designing and photographing a string of highly successful children's and adult craft books which encompass some of her earliest influences of sewing and sculpting, painting and drawing. She also illustrated and/or wrote several bestselling children's picture books. "Love You Forever" went on to become a children's classic with more than 20 million in print and number one on the New York Times Bestseller list. McGraw's "Papier Mache for Kids" was awarded the prestigious Benjamin Franklin Award. Her artwork is widely exhibited and represented by the Loch Galleries in Canada.
Sheila McGraw lived in Toronto until 2006 when she married the criminal defense lawyer Lee McMillian and moved to his hometown of Houston Texas. She is the mother of 3 grown sons.
