For my birthday, she made me a story about rabbits, fully illustrated. She picked a topic sure to please -I previously owned a fantastically cute houserabbit called Ruby. Rube Boob Tube, to those who knew her best.The shape of the rabbit she had drawn was striking, and I thought it would be a good challenge to try and recreate it as a blackwork rabbit, and give it to her for her birthday.
My biggest challenge was the size of the pattern to fill the rabbit. I didn't want the pattern to be too dense, too small or complicated. It needed to complement the simplicity of her shape.
On the left is a picture of 'avoidance' which was me,
playing around with different patterns, or rather
the same unsuitable pattern, as I stressed about how to
'fill' the rabbit.
This was my first lesson that with sewing for other
people, comes responsibility. Your decisions matter. Someone's going to have to look at this, and like it.
Size is traumatic also - big spaces, wee pattern = too busy. Big spaces + big pattern = lazy! I decided I needed a medium sized pattern.
Eventually I tried some other patterns out, and
realised that this one was probably a better size.
I was also trying to play around a bit more
systematically with shading. Previously in the Thai Shack I just used the stitches to 'draw' in the shading - taking a step
back now and again to see which part needed more.
But I knew that really I should be training myself to think about how the pattern looks if you drop or reintroduce specific parts of it. The rows and the number of elements within the pattern helped my experimentation somewhat. I'd love to do practice this a bit more, I just find it pretty challenging - there's a lot more to it than meets the eye.
I find it a lot easier to just let the pattern fragment or collapse organically, but it's not quite as effective - particularly within an enclosed, block shape such as this. In this case I wasn't trying to create form, so much as perspective - ensuring the ear was in front of the body.
So here we have it: 'Ruby', designed by Maya, Blackworked by Aunty Helen.The ears were also a tricky shape to fill, one of most satisfying things about the drawing was that Maya had drawn the ears as one shape. I picked smaller patterns here, and tried to use one that pulled the eye downward, to retain the ear's 'flop'.
The shading worked ok now I see it again, but at the time I hated it so much I thought I wouldn't give it to her.
In fact it's taken me quite some time to show my work to anyone at all.
The outline is couched in black wool.
This project was a lesson in my inability to follow things through and stick with it. It took me about a year longer than I wanted it to, I thought about it a lot more than actually doing it, and I avoided the task in hand.
My husband and brother-in-law (Maya's Dad) are writers, and they have a lot to say on the subject of 'resistance' (avoidance) particularly when it comes to things which are actually what you SHOULD be doing, i.e. that give you the most satisfaction and fulfillment. This project was definitely a good example.
Maya I suspect would have approached this more productively (I've never known her to resist her artistic drive). She probably piled in there planting a whizz of perfectly placed pattern to depict Ruby just as she would have been if she was still here, one ear up, one ear down.
Ruby herself is another story - a house rabbit with attitude who would have chomped her way through most of my sewing, as she did my CD covers, pages of books, sofa bed mattresses, speaker cable...... if she hadn't been so darned cute I wouldn't have put up with it.
This picture is therefore sparks fond memories of her, the endeavours of my artistic neice....and my birthday storybook.
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