Monday, September 27, 2010

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".







7 comments:

Karen M said...

Jade, this is really cool. I love the texture that the bobbles add. Will you be sharing the pattern somewhere once you have it just like you want it?

d. moll, l.ac. said...

Very cool!!!!!!

The Fab Furs said...

That should make the grandson a bunny fan! Looks great!

Anonymous said...

I love it Jade!!!!!

Clovie Boy said...

Looks good!

Jade said...

Thanks, all! The pattern will be available upon request once I get a couple of details tweaked out in the two-color version.

Lisa said...

Jade, that is too cute! Want one!!!!!