Well now, Easter is associated with rabbits, as we know. A couple of months ago I bought a kit to make this rabbit in a small sewing shop on Gloucester Road, the street of still mainly independent shops that I blogged about earlier in the week. I am a terrible sentimentalist. If I see a lonely stuffed toy on a supermarket shelf I have to buy it. I get upset seeing them discarded in the street and start thinking about how someone once loved it and has now lost interest (you can imagine how I reacted to Toy Story). I often wonder what the poor souls in the factories in China or Indonesia feel about some of the odd designs that they have to make by the thousands. I get all sentimental about furniture in junk shops too; someone saved up for that nasty brown wardrobe once and thought it was wonderful and now it is just an embarrassment to everyone lurking in the corner of the charity shop. I daren’t go to the dogs’ home.
So, this kit was in the sale bin looking very sorry for itself and I had to buy it, even though, on reflection it wasn’t that much of a bargain. (Flo-Jo,the shop, by the way, for Bristol readers, has some very lovely prints and trimmings and is teaching sewing workshops and so is very worthy and I would like to support it.)
I was at a bit of a loose end on Monday, because I had finished two quilt tops. Yes, that’s right, two quilt tops which have been hanging around for years. In my big clear up and clear out I have reached the stage where the only way to get a view of the floor in my workroom is to finish some of the virtually but not quite done projects that are in plastic bags and almost only of interest to archeologists. I will blog about them later, but they are real proper patchwork which surprises me as much as anyone else.
Back to the rabbit. He fell into this category: the only way to sort out the bag that he was in would be to make up the kit. So I sat down and did it. I quite enjoyed it, but couldn’t resist inprovising. For example, no rabbit should be without a tail:
Or whiskers:
The little green scarf came out of another box that needed clearing out and which contained evenweave canvas from the distant past when I used to do counted cross stitch samplers. The reason he is wearing it, though is that I stuffed him overzealously and went straight through his neck. Without the scarf, he looks like he has some horrible life-threatening growth in his throat.
I am also posting this because I think you should talk about things that go wrong as well as things that go right. This was the first time that I have tried stitching arms on using buttons and I was so excited about this, and getting the paw bits the right way round, that I checked and checked and stitched them on the wrong way round:
I am going to leave it that way as a reminder to myself that when I think I know best I don’t always. He is my anti-hubris rabbit. I think I am going to call him Stan.
