What Carry On Means To Me

It’s no secret that I absolutely adore Carry On by Rainbow Rowell. Usually, I don’t choose favourites because I love far too many books to even narrow it down to a list of ten, but I do know that Carry On is one of the books that has had the biggest impact on my reading, and whenever someone does ask me for my favourite book, it’s this one that always comes to mind. With Any Way the Wind Blows bringing the conclusion to Simon and Baz’s story, I wanted to take a moment to talk about why I love this story so much. 

my Carry On shelf so far (i have more editions i want to add and i won't rest until i get them)

I’ve been a fan of Rainbow ever since I read the blurb for Fangirl because I just knew that Cath was going to speak to me on a spiritual level, and I was absolutely correct. Fangirl resonated with me in a way no other YA contemporary has done before. As a socially anxious, fandom loving, fic consuming, classic 2012 Tumblr Girl™, Fangirl spoke to my soul. It was also the first time I’d ever seen my own anxiety accurately represented on a page. Previous books I’d read that dealt with anxiety just didn’t feel like what I was personally going through, but Fangirl did, and that has always been so important to me. 

the Carry On themed bookmark i painted!

Even though I adored Fangirl with my whole heart, I didn’t expect to utterly fall in love with Carry On as much as I did when it dropped through my letterbox in October 2015. I was excited, of course, but I had no idea that this book was about to become 90% of my personality. 

I enjoyed the first part of the book, but when Baz dramatically walked through the Watford doors and we discovered that he’d been in love with his roommate and nemesis for years, that was when I realised just how much I needed a book like this. It dragged me in like no other book had done before. 

my Watford shirt and the poster that still provides the background to my booktube videos 

After reading Carry On, I realised why I’d been in a reading slump for a while. I was tired of the same stories and the same tropes told the same way. YA fantasy was overrun with heterosexual heroes having to save the world whilst torn between two heterosexual love interests, and Carry On showed me just how much I needed to break away from those stories. I wanted characters of all identities, I wanted characters who question their ‘chosen one’ status, and stories that challenge happily ever after. 

I specifically went searching for fantasy stories with queer characters because Carry On made me realise just how much I needed them. The online fan community gave me recommendations based on Carry On, and that led me to discover a lot of the series I now adore. I ended up delving into Six of Crows and completely fell in love with it. A year later, I was able to see Rainbow and Leigh on tour together, which is one of the happiest book-related memories I have! 

the Worlds Collide tour in 2016!

When it came to compiling a list of the books that I felt had defined the decade the most for me at the end of 2019, I placed Carry On in the top spot. Despite all of the amazing and eye-opening stories I’ve read throughout the years, I know that this book is the one that changed my tastes and shaped my reading future the most. 

I’m so utterly grateful to Rainbow for sharing these stories with us, and for making me question what I want to be looking for in the books that I read. Simon and Baz will always have such a special place in my heart.

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Painting a Carry On Jacket

Can you believe we have finally reached the end of the Simon Snow trilogy? I’M EMOTIONAL. Carry On is easily one of my favourite stories of all time, something I’ve been shouting about from the rooftops since I first read the book in 2015. My love for Simon and Baz knows no boundaries. With the trilogy coming to an end this summer, I wanted to do something special. So I decided to paint my own Carry On themed jacket! 

During our first lockdown in 2020, I delved into the world of fabric painting. It was something I’d always wanted to try, so I picked up a cheap paint set and got to work on a few denim jackets I had lying around. I spent a year practicing by painting various KPOP logos that were simple enough for me to sketch out on the fabric. 

As some of you may already know, I lost my wonderful Dad to cancer right before Christmas, and it turned my world upside down. I lost my motivation for the things I loved for a while. But art was always a passion we shared, and he was constantly cheering me on. So I became determined to improve because I knew he wouldn’t want me to abandon my love for art. That was when I decided I wanted to try something more challenging in my fabric painting, and the idea for a Carry On jacket was hatched! 

I decided to go with Kevin Wada’s gorgeous cover art for the first book because I’ve always been completely in love with it. But I’d never attempted a project so complicated before, and I was so convinced it was going to go horribly wrong that I decided to work on a very worn denim jacket of mine, just in case I wanted to scrap the whole thing. 

Getting the sizing right was difficult since I’d only worked on smaller pieces before, so I printed out the refence picture to the size I wanted it on the jacket in order to mark out how tall Simon and Baz would need to be. Originally, I didn’t plan on including the dragon in the background because I had zero confidence in myself, but once I had Simon and Baz in place, I was able to pop the dragon behind them as well. 

The smarter thing to do would have been to paint in the background first, but for some reason I started painting Simon and Baz, which I 100% regretted when I realised I had to paint a dragon and a dark sky neatly behind them. I’m notoriously bad at staying within lines, so there was a lot of going back to remix the colours of the boys’ clothes in order to neaten things up. It was a long and messy process. 

Over the course of five days, I was able to get everything fully painted, and used a fabric market to neaten up some of the harsh edges. All that was left to add was their faces and the stars. 

I’m so happy with how the jacket has turned out and I love that I have something to wear that shows how much I adore this series. I’ve been wearing it out on my trips to bookshops since they reopened! It might have caused several emotional breakdowns, during which I ended up dropping some paint all over the floor, but I’m proud to be able to promote Simon and Baz out in the world.

To anyone who wants to give fabric painting a try: go for it! There are plenty of affordable paint options you can find online to get started with. If you're intimidated by what to paint, or feel like you're no good at sketching, you can always print out some shapes or something you like, cut around it and use it as a template!

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