In honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday on March second, I began stitching another embroidery for the Children’s Book Quilt, from One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish:

My version is a little sleepy compared to the original, but I’m quite pleased with it. There may be a second Dr. Seuss drawing in the final collection… stay tuned.

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Here in 2012, I embroidered an image from the book: Harold in a mostly-drawn hot air balloon. I had the perfect fabric, though it seemed like it would be far too dark, so I bleached it:

I was very pleased the black and yellow did not bleach out as much as the blue did. After stitching, I colored in the moon and one star with gold fabric paint.

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Today I’ll share with you Craft Countdown item #6. It occurs to me this one was also not completely from scratch, as I had made the tracing and transferred it to wash-away embroidery paper prior to New Year’s Eve.

If you don’t know who that is, get thee to a library or book store and look up Richard Scarry, who owns the copyright. I couldn’t relocate the specific source of this particular Lowly Worm image, unfortunately, and the colors I’d written down didn’t really make sense to me, so I used a mishmash of the colors from the books I did have accessible. This was easily the most time-consuming of the ten projects, but well worth it.

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One of my favorite books as a child was We Were Tired of Living in a House, written by Liesel Moak Skorpen and illustrated by Doris Burn. The children try living in a tree, on a raft, and by the seashore, collecting an object from each but moving on when nature makes it impossible to stay. Burn’s illustrations are gorgeous, by turns excited, silly, and wistful, and full of detail. It was difficult to find one that was manageable for my project. Here is what I ended with:

Of course as I write this I am traveling, so I cannot fulfill my promise of telling you all the planned embroideries and appliques for the Children’s Book Quilt. However, I have images on wash-away paper and fabric selected for two (having decided after all to find a different Moomin picture): Sylvester and the Magic Pebble and Harold and the Purple Crayon.

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Many of the lovely historical quilts have themes, such as fans or flowers. I once entertained the notion of a quilt about my history: schools, hobbies, places I’ve lived. That idea never got off the ground, however, and the project that did is the Children’s Book Quilt.

I have a couple of shelves’ worth of children’s books despite having no children, and a few favorite illustrators – Shel Silverstein, Maurice Sendak, Tove Jansson. The children’s book quilt will have embroidered versions of illustrations from specific books, as well as applique images and motifs, and possibly even some painted images (for Leo Lionni’s books, in particular). I will give a complete rundown of the ideas I have next time I finish an embroidery piece, but for now I want to share the two I’ve done so far and talk about the process.

I use tracing paper to copy the images out of the book with a pencil, darken the main lines, and then trace them again onto wash-away embroidery stabilizing paper. Then I cut them out and pin them to fabric, stitching on the lines. I use my beloved DMC color card (I am so glad I got one before they switched from actual floss samples to photos – the sheen is different; I can’t imagine it’s as accurate) to pick floss colors if appropriate. All the embroidery is just freehand straight stitch or backstitch; when I finally put the individual pieces together I’ll use fancier stitches for edges.

The more recent is Shel Silverstein’s bearded man, from Where the Sidewalk Ends:

I realized after the fact that I fig-leafed him a bit, covering his bare behind with beard, but I am still thrilled at how well he came out – especially his feet. In the tightly-stitched areas, however, the wash-away paper is not living up to his name. It withstood rinsing in water, soaking in white vinegar, rinsing in water again, and two trips through the washing machine pinned flat in a mesh bag. Ideas are welcome.

Less recent is the Dodecahedron from Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, illustrated by Jules Feiffer.

His stitching is not as good as the bearded man (possibly I used too many strands; I can’t remember), but it will do. He had the same problem with the wash-away paper, especially in his eyes. However, the fabric, though it’s hard to tell, is white with pastel circles stitched into it, so I just re-stitched the pupils that were hidden by paper. I only noticed as I was re-stitching the eyes that his right arm is perfectly aligned with the underlying circle.

I’ve been trying to stick to books I actually had as a child. I have We Were Tired of Living In a House (the beautiful illustrations by Doris Burn, not the lame and generic new ones) in progress and something from Finn Family Moomintroll (Tove Jansson) set up but unstitched. I am dissatisfied with the fabric for the latter, though, and would probably prefer a different image, so I may break my rule and use an image from a more recently-acquired Moomin book. My first multicolor embroidery will probably be Bananas Gorilla from the Richard Scarry books, because he’s the raddest. I am a slow embroiderer, but hope to complete this quilt before I am of retirement age!

Note: the copyrights to the illustrations in Where the Sidewalk Ends and The Phantom Tollbooth are held by Evil Eye Music, Inc., and Jules Feiffer, respectively.

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