The World of Pooh A.A.Milne

After much deliberation and a total change of heart I decided to choose children’s books because I wanted a cohesive thread running through all my six books. As much of my work is nature related I have chosen to have the subject of trees as the common dominator.

The inspiration of the first piece is the World of Pooh, illustrated by E.H. Shepard, a book which I loved as a child, my mother also loved it. The last day I spent with her was the day that we moved her from her retirement home to a home specialising in dementia and while her affairs were being moved I read her the beginning of the book which is the story of Winnie the Pooh trying to collect honey from the bees except they were the wrong type of bees…… 

I used cotton which I painted as the sky, then I stencilled some ‘leaves’ before appliquéing the tree, the trunk is an old sheet and the branches a finer cotton. Once machine stitched I added another layer of ‘leaves’. The blue sky is lightly hand stitched, my bear is dyed wadding , the ballon a scrap of sari silk and I used a basic string. The rather odd bees are beads. There are two quotes from the book, the first chain stitched in the sky, “How sweet to be a cloud, Floating in the Blue” and the second chain stitched in the bottom left corner, “Isn’t it funny, How a bear likes honey? Buzz, Buzz, Buzz, I wonder why he does?”.

Detail view: