Sewn-Up-Saturday & Other Stuff...

In this post I made on Wednesday, there were several items of unfinished knitting...one of which I labelled as being a Very, Very, *Very* Important Project Indeed, given that I was making a decoration for The Boy's Easter Bonnet Parade at The Village school he attends.

Well, it turned out that he was still too poorly to attend the school's parade - which I thought he might be, but didn't want to risk the chance of him not having a bonnet if he was, indeed, fit and raring to go back to school (he's distraught at not being able to go back now until April 16th... although I suspect that may have more to do with the fact that he's exhausted the contents of the box I keep for when he's got, say, an Inset Day or something of that ilk. There are apparently only so many games of Draughts and Hangman one seven year old boy is willing to play with a mother who refuses to allow either of her offspring to beat her unless they actually do so of their own accord). So, I sat up most of Wednesday night diligently working on Hopper, the lilac Easter Bunny and the daffodil that The Boy had decreed should be toted in his arms, until both were finished, sewn together and completed.

Hopper & daffodil

 I was going to post this as a Finished Object Friday yesterday, but ended up without enough time to do so given that The Offspring and I ended up in the Cotswolds over-exerting ourselves with discussions as to rhino bottoms and soil depth (we lead such fascinating lives...), so thought I'd have my very own Sewn-Up-Saturday instead.

It's my blog, and I can deviate if I want to, after all.

Originally, Hopper was intended to be sewn onto the top of The Boy's straw hat, but because he was poorly, we decided to *not* perform thread through bottom surgery and leave it free as a... toy?... ornament?... thing to be toted around until the novelty wears off? Take your pick. Because it'll end up as one of those three things, I can assure you!

Then, yesterday...

The Girl, The Boy and I found ourselves in the midst of the Cotswolds, where I had a brief hour's employment and then... the remainder of the time we were free to roam around the Wildlife Park itself. The Boy took extreme delight in the fact that we were able to get close to 90 percent of the animals and birds enclosed in what was actually a very sedate, quiet, brilliantly put together little place, and even The Girl, suffering as she currently is from an advanced case of "Urgh!!!" teenage-girl-syndrome, enjoyed herself. She's definitely my daughter, though; as long as she has a camera, she's more than happy to roam and shoot...

Rhino Bottoms.

The Park is set around a converted Manor House, and on what *used* to be its front lawn - where the toffs would have played croquet, taken Afternoon Tea, and generally gossiped about the other toffs in their circles - there are now rhinos and zebras. I couldn't help but wonder how brilliant it would be to wake up in a morning, draw back the bedroom curtains and look out over a quasi-African scene of grazing rhinos and zebras in the midst of gentle Middle England, but the family who owned the Manor House no longer live in it (the bottom floor is a restaurant and the upper floors are now all offices), so I doubt very much they ever had the chance to do such a thing.

There is also a small herd of giraffe on site. I've always loved giraffes - I remember having one of the Britains zoo animal series giraffe toys when I was quite small that, if you pressed a lever, the neck would dip down to the ground. Back in the '70s, that cost me almost six weeks pocket money (so somewhere around £2) - today, such toys retail at almost ten times that...

The penguins were literally inches away from The Offspring at one point. One, in particular, waddled between the pair of them as though it were posing for each of their cameras - although it didn't stand still for long enough to get a decent shot of it. First The Girl... then The Boy... then The Girl again... and it did this for almost five minutes. It was wonderful to watch the expressions upon my children's faces as they realised that this little hand-reared penguin was actually posing for them...

... because they looked a darned sight happier than they do in this photograph! The Boy was trying to hand everyone daisies he'd plucked from the lawn and The Girl was apparently wondering when he was going to try shoving them into her hair like he usually tries to (goodness knows why he does this, he simply always has done - and now she has long hair, it's difficult to get them untangled without hurting her).

In fact, whilst I was taking this photograph of a bleeding heart dove (which I adore, in part because of how beautiful they are, but also the symbolism and mythology behind precisely *why* they have the "bleeding heart" stain), The Girl had been watching a sloth moving over her head, and gotten her hair tangled in a branch of a tree... and needed rescuing. Whilst I was patiently unwinding her hair from the branch where it had snagged, The Boy announced that he was very glad he'd had his hair shorn for the summer because otherwise he would have been caught, too...