I'm Late, I'm Late, For A Very Important Date!

I have been literally counting the days until I could show you what I made for my Alice in Wonderland swap partner *grin*. I wanted to keep it top secret so that it was a total surprise so I restrained myself from sharing any hints! Today I received an email letting me know that it had arrived and she liked it and I'm so happy :)

From the information that I had I knew that she loved bunnies so I knew that the White Rabbit was a must do! The only problem was that I had no pattern *gasp*. I wasn't sure how I was going to tackle making a rabbit having never made one before.

I thought perhaps I would sew one from fabric but I was stumped. I'm a sucker for felt as you know so I knew I would have to use felt in some shape or form and then it hit me. I would create the white rabbit in a mixture of embroidery, felt & found objects!

I started by going completely high tech and sketched an outline of the rabbit onto my muslin canvas with a pencil *grin*. As I was stitching I wanted to give him the illusion of being furry so I made a hodge podge of irregular stitches all throughout his face and bottom so that he looked ruffed up and I think it turned out pretty well. If you're a pro at embroidery please don't slay me for bad form! LOL

Next was to tackle his clothing and give him a bit of a 3D effect so that he looked like he was popping off of the canvas :) Leaving the embroidery thread to just stitching on the pieces I made his tunic and collar from my felt stash. The sleeve on the right is actually sewn so that you can look right up inside of it and see his embroidered arm and for the collar I folded some blue felt accordion style and then snipped and tacked it until it fit just right :)

But he still looked incomplete. He needed a scroll and a watch since in the movie he is always checking it and yelling out he was late but I didn't want them to be flat pieces to my puzzle by using felt or more embroidery. So I hit the second hand shops until I could find an old wrist watch that was dainty enough to be his pocket watch :) I wrapped & glued some embroidery floss around a scroll made of some stiff handmade paper I had from scrapbooking and then stitched it and the dangling watch head beneath it to finish my white rabbit creation :)

I'm pretty darn pleased with how he turned out and the last little touch I added was to paint the ecru colored muslin with a bit of light blue paint in irregular strokes to give him a bit of a whimsical look. The kids actually thought that it looked a bit like he was flying and I thought that was perfect since Alice had fallen down a rabbit hole.... perhaps my white rabbit was on his way flying through his rabbit hole as well *grin*.

Such a fun swap!! If you want to see more of what others made for their swap partners you can check out the flickr group here and have fun watching the new Alice in Wonderland movie this weekend! We're definitely going and I can't wait :)

~ Rosina