Look! Up in the Tree! It's a Bird, It's a Plane, No it's...Copycat Challenge #24!

...and it just happens to be a green flying rabbit with red wings!! The inspiration for this project was actually a children's picture book with the title of The Little Rabbit Who Wanted Red Wings by Carolyn Sherwin Bailey. The basic plot of the story is that there was a little rabbit wasn't happy just being himself - he wanted to be somebody else instead. When he saw a porcupine, he wanted to have a back full of bristles. When he saw a duck, he wanted flippers. And so on. Finally, at the wishing pond, he got his wish granted and ended up with --- you guessed it ---red wings. But here is where the story gets complicated. As always in this Copycat Challenge based upon the book Blanket Statement by Vicki Haninger, there is a twist/tweak to the construction. She makes wings for a cat, and I decided to find a pattern and make wings for a rabbit. Luckily, in my file of vintage patterns I found just the pattern needed. I enlarged Vicki's cat wing pattern a bit to fit the rabbit.

The red wings are kind of special to me as they are made from the felted wool of one of my Mom's favorite winter sweaters.

Take a look at the rabbit above front on. This is after I corrected the "whoopsy" of making the face wrong the first time...

Poor thing had no neck at all! His nose headed right down with no room for sniffing out carrots!

I made a little green wool loop for the wings to fit through when the rabbit wanted to fly with those red wings. Or not when not. (Read the book to find out more.)

Here's the vintage (from 1996 - is that truly vintage at 14 years old?) Simplicity pattern that was used.

The undersides of the ears are white felt, as is the bunny tail.

Sharing this story - and rabbit- with Miss Ellie will be coming up in the next couple of years! In the meantime, though, I will try to be true to what life gives to me and the state of being content.