Tatty Tales

 

This week, I finished the tiny book of fairy tale pictures, and gave it a suitable name - Tatty Tales.  The cover is made from brushed cotton sheeting with a starry pattern. This is left over scrap from a quilt backing and is a lovely soft grey. The book measures about 7 x 7 cm, and about 1.5 cm thick, with four double pages inside. The lettering is cut from scraps of an indescribable old garment, in strips of about 2mm, and sewed round the edges, fraying furiously as I made my way round. 

My favourite of the pages is Frau Holle. I came across this story in a German book of fairy tales, which I've been reading to practice very rusty German. The advantage of reading fairy tales in another language is that you mostly know the stories, and therefore can take a decent stab at any new vocabulary. However, I had not come across Frau Holle before. 

In the story, she is visited in turn by both a hard-working and a lazy girl. She lets them stay with her, if they do her housework, and, in particular, shake her featherbed so heartily that the feathers fly, for this will make it snow in the world below. In the way of fairy tales, the hard-working girl gets rewarded with gold and the lazy one gets punished with a bucket of pitch. You can't just sit around in a fairy tale!

My picture shows the first girl hard at work shaking out snowflakes. It looks like she's been at it some time, because she's standing in a deep snowdrift. Also, the stars are out, so it must be night - surely  Frau Holle is waiting to go to bed. Perhaps the hard workers aren't always a blessing either.

The Frau Holle picture makes the centre spread in the book.

This week, I also made the rabbit's shirt. I used a bit of an old duvet cover, which had worn thin and had a subtle stripe. The sewing was very fiddly, especially round the sleeves and collar, and I was a bit carefree with the hemming, which means the bottom fronts don't quite match up. Still, I count this another success - it's not perfect, but my skills and knowledge are slowly improving. My next challenge will be some knickerbockers -the poor thing has sat around with a bare bottom for long enough. 

Bare Rabbit now has a range of clothes, none of which match!