I certainly hope there is not snow in the coming 48 hours, but in honor of one last crazy storm this winter-ish season, here’s one more “snow day” book that Raisin and I enjoyed. It’s one that would be fun any time of year.

Zoo Flakes ABC by Will Howell is a fabulous ABC art and craft book. Each letter of the alphabet is represented by a snowflake cut in the shape of an animal, and they are fantastically detailed. Given my son’s love of the ABCs, he loved following the alphabet in the book. I loved how it was a different ABC book, because sometimes the same old thing gets boring. There are plenty of same old thing ABC books, and we’ve read them all. We both also loved finding the image of the animal in each snowflake. As an adult, I personally loved the details in the images of the animals.

I cannot find any online page images from Mr Howell’s book to show you, and I’ve already returned it to the library. But since Mr. Howell included detailed directions on how to make our own zooflakes, we did just that.

You should know that I am completely not an artistic or crafty person. I’ve never made an attractive snowflake in my life. But I was finally successful on this project. At least, I felt like I was. There is one image below that I intended to be a sheep and my three-year-old son insists it is an octopus. Okay, then, maybe not.

Can you tell what animals I was trying for? If not, here they are. The first is a fish. It fell apart; there weren’t enough edges to keep it together. The second is people (my son calls them “Munchkins” since we went to The Wizard of Oz musical recently.) Then the four are a chicken, a sheep (sitting on his rear hunches, he looks like he just has two legs…), a cat face, and a snake. My favorite is the chicken, which is, I think, the last one I made. I was improving!