Nedra's Tale - The Tale of Peter Cottontail

When I was a little girl this was one of my favorite books.  I loved looking at the pictures and was always concerned for Peter - the hazards in the garden were quite scary as was Mr. McGregor!!!  I could relate to Peter's antics - wanting to sneak in to eat the fresh vegetables!!  My family had a garden and I did the very same thing with carrots and tomatoes!!  Our garden wasn't so threatening thank goodness!

My goal was to depict some of the pictures in the book in a very playful style.  I had seen some machine quilted work done with black thread machine stitching which gave that feel so I used that technique.  I drew most of the objects myself and used fusible for those.  The cabbage and radishes are fussy cut from commercial fabrics and fused.   Decorative stitches were used for the vegetables in the garden and there is some machine stitching to suggest bushes to border the garden.

This was quite fun to work on though stressful.   We just returned to Savannah for the winter a week ago and I've had to unpack, clean, settle in AND finish this.  I don't work well under pressure and would have liked more time to tweak it.  It's done and I'm pleased with the whimsy of the piece but would work on the garden more.  The rows are a bit wonky and it came out bigger than I envisioned - I wanted a more subtle background.  C'est la vie!!!