Hand -Stitched Sweet Bunny

I have a deep affection for bunnies. While I have never really owned a live rabbit, I feel as though I do, since our large backyard often has a rabbit or two wandering through it. I love watching them from the kitchen window, as they hop and nibble and twitch their ears.

This fondness for rabbits goes back a long way. When we were young, my sister and I loved the Garth Williams picture book, The Rabbits’ Wedding.

It is an endearing, large-format book with beautiful illustrations. It tells the story of two bunnies who fall in love and get married. I was well into adulthood before I learned that the book had been banned in some places in the south, because it was presumed to be promoting interracial marriage.

Then when I was a young adult, I once had a bizarre, joyful dream about flying over a lush forest and finding a rabbit-shaped tree. “How weird!” I thought upon arising. At that time, I was into dream analysis and I pondered whether the dream might be an homage to feminine power and fertility.

Later, when I was a new mother, I was shopping for baby books and I ran across the Margaret Wise Brown classic, The Runaway Bunny.

I flipped through it and then froze in shocked recognition, when I saw one of the Clement Hurd illustrations:

This long-forgotten book must have been the source of my dream! My mother must have read it to me when I was a little girl.

So anyway, for quite a while I’ve been toying with the idea of stitching up a little bunny rabbit. I bought some vintage wool felt at a garage sale, and among the scraps was a velvety-soft ivory color, and I immediately thought it would be perfect as a bunny belly.

For the body, I used some leftover heathery-brown wool felt from another project.

I wanted him to be standing up on his hind legs, with his front paws positioned so they could hold something… or maybe outstretched, requesting a tiny hug.

I wish you could feel how soft the bunny is! He stands about 7 inches tall, from the tip of his ear down to his fuzzy little tail.