How to Draw A Bunny (Square)

When I was a little girl, my grandpa Milo taught me how to draw a bunny.

I don't remember how the subject came about; perhaps I was talking about drawing or actually drawing while over at my grandparents, but one day Grandpa said, "I know how to draw a bunny, do you want to see?"

Of course, I did. He took a pen and a piece of paper and drew this:

"There's his belly."

He drew again.

"There's his head."

And again:

"There's his ears."

The last step:

"And there's his tail. Isn't that a good bunny?"

Needless to say, the child-me was not amused, but as I got older, asking Grandpa to "draw a bunny" for my younger siblings and cousins became a source of great amusement; a little family in-joke, as it turned out, since apparently he'd pulled the same trick on my mother and her siblings as well when they were little.

It is with this bunny in mind that I have been working on a bunny square to crochet. A very simple design, or so I thought; two circles and two thin ovals in single-crochet stitch and a bobble stitch tail for a little pop-out detail.

Unfortunately, the first square I attempted was a failure, not so much because of my drawing abilities but because switching colors between background and bunny did not give me the clean edges that I needed for the bunny shape. I didn't even get halfway through the square before realizing that this wasn't looking much like a circle as a misshapen blob. I tore it apart and sulked for a bit. How hard can it be to crochet a bunny so simple?

I'd planned to put the project aside for a few days, but today (Sunday) being International Rabbit Day, I thought it would be a good day to get this fershlugginer bunny square figured out. After a bit of thought, I decided to completely abandon the idea of using two colors, except for one small spot. This is the result:

Test Square 1

Much better, although as I looked at it, another idea was popping into my head. What if I went back to the two-color plan, but used the bobble outline to define the edges?

Test Square 1 was immediately unraveled, and back to the hook I went. The results:

Test Square 2

Test Square 2 is not a finished product (and has already been unraveled), but now that I've seen how it looks both ways, I can clean it up and it'll look better. In fact., I think I'll do both styles in the colors I have and put them together 50/50. Each square took maybe about an hour to make, so it'll be a quick project. I'm already thinking about getting some yarn in more natural rabbit colors such as black, brown, tan, cream, gray and white and making an adult-sized afghan out of the squares if the baby blanket comes out well.

I think I'm going to call the pattern, "Milo's Bunny".