Growing Imaginations

Remember how your imagination was so powerful and so real when you were you a child? Wouldn’t it be delicious to be able to let yourself go… to let the real world morph into a fantasy place of your making, if even only once in a while?

Have we got the place for you – and your kids! Little Junebugs. It’s a fairly innocuous  and pleasant looking shop, as you approach it on El Molino Avenue, but its door opens to an infinite universe of imagination and creativity.

“I wanted to create a place that’s magical, what I always wanted for myself,” says Little Junebugs’ muse Courtney Collins, who is a co-owner with Brian Flanagan and Andrea Jensen Wader. “I had a studio at home. I wanted everybody to have the same experience. My vision of something magical – the  playroom and the library that you wanted to hang out at, every spare moment that you’ve got. That’s what I’ve been hearing from the kids that are coming in here – ‘I want to to come back!’”

Little Junebugs is a new children’s retail boutique and crafting studio for curious three to ten-year-olds and their parents.  The store opens with a children’s book area (authors come to read aloud to the little darlings), but it’s the magnetic pull of the bright crafting area with its large tables and stubby kid-sized chairs that draws in the children excitedly. Here they cut, and crayon, and glitter, and fold and… create!  It’s a room where parents can be kids, too.  Both kids and parents glide into a world away and time melts.

“The great thing is you get lost in here,” says co-owner Brian Flanagan with a smile. “We often find parents saying ‘Oh my God, we just spent an hour and a half hours here, we need to go, we have to rush!’ We love that…”

“The whole point of this really is to really just bring families back together so they can come and sit down with their children and do something with them. You know, they’re not dropping them off somewhere. They’re actually involved,” explains Andrea Jensen Wader. “They can come in, they can pick out a beautiful book that we have on the shelf, they can sit on our little grass mats and read together, they can come back here in our studio and do a craft together. It’s just really fun.”

At Little Junebugs, the good old-fashioned elements of books and paper and glue and scissors let imaginations soar. The jammering, jarring blast of high technology is banished. Natural creative juices flow.

“I like when they’re at that real creative, discovery age and they’re curious and they want to learn,” continues Collins. “I didn’t think there were a lot of baby stores around here that were focusing on the preschool age. I felt that, that was missing.”

The trio tout their book collection, with well-liked children’s authors slated for readings and signings. Then there are the crafting projects that can be done anytime the store open, and scheduled projects (not classes, per se, Collins says).  They are a very proud supporter of Milk+Bookies, a non-profit organization that marries a love for books and a celebration of donating new and gently-used books to children in need.

“Some authors will actually participate in a craft that relates to the book and if not then we’ll usually design a craft that relates to the book and do that afterwards,” says Wader.

“We also have weekly crafting projects. They can either purchase a crafting project that’s in the store and bring it back here and work on it together, or they can just have kind of a free-for-all kind of crafting event where it’s $10 and there’s a section that they can choose from and they can actually just make whatever they want with the materials that we’ve provided,” Wader explains.

Flanagan captures Little Junebugs’ essence.

“The best reason to come in to the store is to walk into a world that you don’t really see anyone, indulge yourself in this magical place that we all created  and it’s a total escape. You can come in here, you unplug. Our our slogan is ‘every imagination needs a place to grow.’”

Little Junebugs (books, events, parties, crafts, gifts) is at 27 South El Molino Ave., Pasadena. Call (626) 440-7300 or visit www.littlejunebugs.com or http://www.facebook.com/littlejunebugs.