Marion's first text for Izzie began with a little girl asking her grandmother about her childhood.  She used her mother (the grown-up "Izzie," now a grandmother herself) as the model for the grandmother and a picture of her as a child for the little girl.  Together they looked at a photo album.

The published version of Izzie did not use the framework of a child and grandmother looking at a photo album, partly because by  1998 when it was published, the "grandmother" would have been about 120 years old.  Co-author Jerri Garretson, who rewrote and edited the Izzie stories, felt that the time period  would be confusing to readers if this framework were kept, but those stories told from mother to daughter are how the book came to be.

When Izzie - Growing Up on the Plains in the 1880s was published in 1998, it celebrated Marion Kundiger's 80th birthday and Izzie's 120th birthday.  How we wish she had still been alive to see it!

Below are two examples of Marion's original watercolors shown with the corresponding black-and-white drawings in the published book.  To see all of Marion Kundiger's Izzie paintings, click "Next" here or  below.

This is Izzie's first day of school.  When she began first grade, her big brother, Ben, just took her to the first grade classroom and shoved her in!
 

Sometimes the layout of the finished book required reversing a picture.

Izzie's brothers loved to play tricks on her.  They told her if she wasn't in bed when Santa came, he wouldn't even STOP at their house!
 

To see all the Izzie watercolors, click on "Next" below.