Our third storybook The Squashly Feast  is available now, just in time for gifting season! In this blog post, we will take you behind the scenes and tell the tale of how a Hazel Village book is made. 

We also want to give you a little gift of our own: The Squashly Cookbook! This is a free printable cookbook with 10 original recipes from the Hazel Village animals. Huzzah!! 

In case you haven't shopped the book yet, here's our back cover blurb:

'When Gracie Cat learns that the Squash Festival is only 3 days away, she and her friends must hurry and scurry to prepare for the celebration! Luckily, Gracie knows a thing or three about cooking bountiful food to share. But even with all the little animals doing what they do best, will the Village be ready in time for the Squashly Feast?'

Every Hazel Village book starts with our founder Jane dreaming up a story for a certain Villager and making a storyboard: tiny pages with simple sketches and captions. This lets her plan out the flow of the storytelling and find a balance of full page illustrations, 2-page spreads, small artwork vignettes, and text. 

Back in 2021 when our first book The Gifts of the Year came to be, it was all Jane's handiwork. These days, Jane shares the work of illustrating with the Village's second expert designer, Sara. Some illustrations in The Squashly Feast are all Jane, some are all Sara, and many are a beautiful collaboration!

When Jane and Sara work on an illustration together, here's how it usually goes: Jane roughly sketches out a scene before drawing the Villagers on the page. Then she passes it over to Sara, who fleshes out the atmosphere and environment around the Villagers. They continue to pass it back and forth, finalizing pencil artwork and adding layers of watercolor and graphite until the page is done. 

Here is Jane's pencil artwork of Arthur Lamb gathering walnuts, with preliminary sketches of the scenery around him:

Here is the same page with Sara's nearly finished watercolor artwork of the scenery: 

Here is the finished page as it appears in the book, with final touches and Jane's watercolor painting of Arthur:

Sketch by sketch and page by page, the book begins to take shape! The book team – Jane, Sara, Raquel (art director) and Lillie (project manager/copyeditor) – met every Thursday for months, discussing the artwork and the story in depth.

Here's one example of the sorts of conversations that were had at book meetings:  

Prior to The Squashly Feast, Jane's paintings of the Lodge always included the day's weather flags hoisted on its flagpole. (If you aren't familiar, the Lodge is the animals' main gathering place, and Gracie Cat lives above its kitchen.) But would weather mouse Oliver have had time to hoist the flags yet on the first page of this book, when the sun is only just dawning as he rushes to tell Gracie that he has smelt snow on the air?

Would he already have lowered them for the night when we see a sleepy, snowy Village at the very end of the story? We decided the answer to the first question was no, and to the second was yes. That's why you don't see any weather flags in this book! 

This was Sara's first sketch of the snowy night scene:

And here is her finished painting: 

The flags were taken out in post, once we made our decision regarding Oliver's workflow. As each painting was completed, Raquel scanned and edited them, building the digital book file to send to our printer. 

Sometimes the artistic process involves creating work outside of the book pages themselves. Here you can see Jane's concept art of many animals wearing their Squash Festival costumes:

Planning it out like this helped her get her ducks in a row before incorporating these looks into the actual pages. And sometimes the original plan for a page ends up changing along the way! For example, here is Jane's first version of the pencil artwork for Max Raccoon's broccoli toast:

And here's the final version from the book: 

As you can see, the scene changed to include the feast table and show more of the animals enjoying Max's excellent toast. 

While Jane drew and painted all the Villagers, Sara drew and painted all their tasty treats. In the photo below, you can see her desk setup for an illustration of the animals' pies. She is studying reference images of real food alongside the endpapers from The Gifts of the Year and one of Jane's postcard illustrations, to make sure her artwork fits seamlessly within the Village world.

Here's how the finished pies turned out: 

And speaking of pies, let's talk about those recipes! Obviously, The Squashly Feast has a lot to do with cooking and baking delicious food. In Jane's original vision, the animals' recipes were interspersed throughout the book. The work of developing these recipes was undertaken by two industrious members of our workshop team, Leesa and Zack! 

You can watch a cozy baking vlog with Leesa on our YouTube channel: Squashly Recipe Testing

As the book evolved into its final version, four of the recipes found their homes on the endpapers and a fifth was printed on our complimentary collectible bandana for the season. But ten recipes were developed in total, so that left five with no place to go!

We couldn't let Leesa's and Zack's hard work go to waste, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to share a little treat with our Hazel Village community. We hope you'll enjoy our free printable Squashly Cookbook with all ten recipes!

🥧 The Squashly Cookbook 🥧

Here are some delicious treats we got to enjoy as these recipes were tested: 

Onion galette 

 

Pear tart

 

Squash hand pies

 

Walnut chewies, first attempt 

 

Walnut chewies, final recipe

 

Mushroom quiche

 

Baked beans

 

Well friends, that's it for today! Thank you for reading and for supporting our small business. We love  crafting stories about the Hazel Village animals and their forest home to share with all of you. We hope you will enjoy The Squashly Feast! 

Shop The Squashly Feast  Book

You might also like:

Hazel Village turns 16! A birthday reflection from Jane

A Tour of Hazel Village

Our Guide to Gifting Hazel Village | 2026

Please feel free to email any questions to hello@hazelvillage.com!