One Patch of Blue

In 2017, Marthe Jocelyn created a pair of wordless board books, One Piece of String (https://www.umanitoba.ca/cm/vol23/no36/onepiece.html) and One Red Button (https://www.umanitoba.ca/cm/vol23/no36/onepiece.html). As in the two earlier books, these two titles, Yellow Ribbon and One Patch of Blue also each feature an object as the central character.

When young readers/viewers first meet the objects in Jocelyn’s opening collage, they are both “doing” what they are “supposed” to do: the blue patch is covering a hole in the knee of a boy’s blue jeans while the yellow ribbon is holding a girl’s braids in place. However, Jocelyn foreshadows that the patch and the ribbon will not be maintaining those “traditional” pragmatic roles as the patch has become unstitched and is floating away while one of the two yellow ribbons has become undone and is flying off the page. Over the next 21paper collage illustrations, some single pages and others double-page spreads, the patch and the ribbon are transformed. The blue patch finds new life as, for example, a ferris wheel gondola, the blue sky, water in a fish tank, a snowman’s hat, one of the lenses in 3-D glasses, a dog’s name tag and a recycle box. Among its many transformations, the ribbon becomes a lion’s mane, mustard on a hotdog, chopsticks, a pencil, a winter scarf, a flower and a flute.

Like the two earlier board books, Jocelyn’s collages continue to be alive with colour and textures, and they invite their young viewers to not just locate the repurposed patch or ribbon but to explore the pages’ details.

As I said in reviewing Jocelyn’s two earlier titles, though the books’ board book format suggests a preschool audience, art teachers in schools might want to acquire One Patch of Blue and Yellow Ribbon to use as exemplars for divergent artistic thinking.