After the story is written, we work on the book's paper-engineering all in white. In this stage, it's very important to make sure the pop-ups all work correctly! This white pop-up will become Strega Nona's home village.

Can you guess who this person is going to be? Even without Tomie's brilliant drawings you can probably guess that this will be a large pop-up of Strega Nona herself - cooking up something delicious!

This is one of the most complex pop-ups in the entire book! Strega is serving a meal at a table underneath a grape arbor. Once we make sure that all the mechanisms work, we let Tomie work his magic!

Without giving too much away, a tidal wave of Big Anthony's favorite food takes over the town! We had to build this particular pop-up many times over so that we could make sure that everything worked in sync.

Here is the town square all in white. The book shown here is called a "white dummy book" - it helps the manufacturer of our pop-up books learn how to put all the pieces together in the right places.