Sophie Blackall’s new picture book: Children weave ‘story rugs’ at NPR

There is a braiding craze in the second grade class. They’ll knit anything: shoelaces, hair, friendship bracelets, the tails of their toy ponies. But Noah has nothing to braid. So his teacher takes a whiteboard cloth and tears it into three long strips.

Soon, Noah is peaking on the school bus. And in the bath. He wakes up early to do some more braiding. Other children in Class 203 begin bringing old skirts, tablecloths, and curtains to braid. The braid extends across the aisle and back. What to do with it?

Image copyright © Phoebe Wahl 2026 / Courtesy of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

“I’m going to screw it up right here. It ends up as a classroom rug,” says story rug Author Sophie Blackall. “I’ve always loved rugs made of fabric,” she says. “They’re in my house, old, and I stare at the fabrics and lay on them, wondering who wore these clothes so long ago and the stories that are woven into these rugs.”

Blackall originally wrote a version of story rug Thinking she would illustrate it herself, as she had done for all her other picture books. But in a way it almost felt too easy. Blackall explains, “When I start work on a picture book, I don’t know everything about it, but with the story I can see around the corner. I knew exactly what the book would look like if it were drawn by my own hand, and then I felt like I’d already done it.”

“My biggest task when creating the illustration was to try to minimize my anxiety about what was going on in Sophie’s mind,” laughs Phoebe Wahl, who did the illustration. story rug. Wahl used a limited palette of yellow, orange, red, light blue, light green and brown for his illustrations. “I painted them with a digital brush that mimics colored pencils or crayons,” she says. “I wanted them to feel bright and kitschy and busy in that way, like real classrooms when you walk into them, there’s often an explosion of color and texture and busyness.”

Wahl says she decided to buy pieces of real fabric to make the rags from the classroom rug stand out on the page. “I miraculously found an Etsy shop that had vintage fabric that was identical to all the patterns I needed for the book, which was really incredible,” she says. She also found a bag of yellow saree scraps from India. She scanned the fabric into her computer, “Then I could adjust the color and play with the scale a little bit and make it more vibrant within the palette of the book, while also breaking out and being the only exception to the limited palette,” explains Wahl.

Image copyright © Phoebe Wahl 2026 / Courtesy of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Like Blackall, Wahl grew up with family squalor. Her grandmother was a large rug maker, and so was her mother. Wahl remembers, “There was always this story that my great-grandmother worked so hard on her rug that she wouldn’t let anyone walk on it.” “It’s a beautiful way to preserve things that feel very precious and hold a lot of memories.”