Weekly thingy and the Page of Swords/Katie Crackernuts

I LOVE Katie Crackernuts, it’s in that group of stories like East of the Sun, West of the Moon and The Snow Queen where the heroine is a girl on a quest and the dudes are largely incidental or damseled.

Also any chance to draw a woman in a rococo gown with a sheep’s head, amiright? Although I admit while Katie is an engaging and delightful and active heroine, poor Anne is entirely flat AND damseled.

Briefly (hahaha me brief? Never): Katie and Anne are two princess half-siblings. Katie is the less pretty one (according to, I dunno, beauty standards of the time) and her mother is jealous and gets a witch to enchant a sheep’s head onto Anne. Katie loves Anne, though, so she takes her off to seek their fortunes and presumably a cure for ungulate head. They arrive at a kingdom where a prince has some sort of mysterious wasting disease and no one can keep an eye on him all night to find out what’s going on (very Twelve Dancing Princesses). Katie takes on the challenge and finds out he’s going into a fairy hill every night and dancing himself exhausted (See?), and she manages to gather information three times to eventually cure him and, luckily, her sister too. Hooray, victory, Katie marries the prince, Anne marries his brother, joy all round presumably although we truly never hear a damn peep out of Anne so fingers crossed she’s happy?

I have plans for a card inside the fairy hill somewhere in pentacles, so more on that later.

Places to buy stuff!

• TEEPUBLIC: mostly t-shirts, a few other products.  Watch for sales, when shirts drop from $20 to $14!
• REDBUBBLE: Just, I don’t know, a ton of different stuff.  T-shirts are more expensive than Teepublic, but there are a lot more options.
• AMAZON: Home of the Geeky Gals Coloring Book!  Daydreams and Whimsies!  AND NOW, The Neurotic Owl Compendium!
• ETSY: paper dolls, a knitting bag pattern, and a bunch of vintage dolls of various sorts from my collection

Did I miss something?  I think that’s everything.

What’s making me a happy this week:

I got the new Omicron Covid booster! It’s clearly working because I did have some side effects, but nothing like as bad as the last booster – just two days of fatigue and sleepiness and the normal sore red itchiness around the injection site. Go get yours! I also got my flu shot at the same time and hooray for that arm being less ouchy since I am mostly a side sleeper.