One of the ladies who came to the first Wildflower Garden workshop earlier this month is also a member of the stitching group I go to every Monday afternoon during term time. On one of those Monday afternoons she told me she’d finished the Wildflower Garden and had added some other flowers, but that she would have liked to have added a hare. Idly I remarked that you could probably put together a decent enough hare peeping out of the grass using only the stitches used in the rest of the design, and went on with my stitching.

But her words had obviously set something in motion in the back of my brain, because a few minutes later I could see quite clearly two ears made from lazy daisies and a little face made from a fly stitch. I had a pencil handy because I was working out the best route for some wrapped bars in one of the SAL designs so I quickly got it down on paper before it disappeared.

And that’s where it would probably have ended if I hadn’t come across the paper last Saturday, when I was at home with a doodle cloth handy – a doodle cloth with stuck into a corner a needle ready-threaded with brown perle #5! It was a Lugana cloth rather than the uncounted fabric I had in mind when scribbling down the sketchy leporid, but I felt that for a quick let’s-see-how-it-works-out that would be fine. And here he is, possibly more rabbit than hare, but I like him, and he does use only Wildflower Garden stitches: lazy daisy, fly stitch, French knot and straight stitch. If at any time you have need of a quick and not too detailed bunny face, feel free to use him.

My husband suggested that I might like to add a stitch to indicate the top of his head, and of course that would be quite easy to do. I may try it and see if I think it looks better, but here I was trying to stick as closely as possible to the original doodle; also, I rather like his sketchy outline – somehow it seems to go quite well with the informality of the Wildflower Garden that inspired him!