Cynthia & Bob's & 5 Cats Sampler **now with GREAT HORNED OWL & DIGITS** / needlepoint / catamount / Brer Rabbit wallpaper by William Morris

Why certainly click on the Sampler to enlarge.

Okay! I've added our GREAT HORNED OWL (Bubo virginianus)!

Okay so like our infinitessimally teeny rural hilltown is making a Celebration Quilt for the Town Demisesquicentennial or somesuch significant anniversary (for North America, this town is Very Old -- it was homestead land to reward veterans [Hessians or Prussians mostly, their names are still on our neighbors' mailboxes] of the French & Indian War, our local corner of the Seven Years War), and they invited every household to submit an original quilt square. 

For as long as the 2012 Chesterfield Quilt lasts, everyone can see a hint, in Fabric Art (like the Bayeux Tapestry [which isn't, it's the Bayeux Embroidery), of what living here meant to Eileen and Ed Kaplowitz-McCoy and the kids and mammals and maybe a bird and a lizard and a goldfish.

S.W.M.B.O. informed me of the Town Project and appointed me Household Quilt Square Designer.

I missed the deadline -- I swear she was fuzzy and not clear about the date -- but I was getting into it, so screw the Town Quilt, here is Cynthia & Bob's 2012 Needlepoint Sampler.

There is So Fucking Much going on here in all seasons -- on Monday I woke up, looked out the window, and there were eight wild turkeys in the yard -- that I feel I need to add at least one piece of wildlife. We got Great Horned Owls (at least 2, or there wouldn't be any, they come in pairs), coyotes, bats, fox, the nasty fisher cat, Wild Turkey, an invisible brown bear (we found its scat), and there is ceaseless controversy over whether we got mountain lions (puma, cougar, panther, hereabouts called catamount) or whether the local farmers extincted them 60 years ago and they have obediently remained extincted. 

I say we got no Bigfoot or Sasquatch, and we got no Chucacabra or Loup Garou either.

Although the owls threaten to fly off with a kitten (we lock all cats indoors after sundown), I am very proud and fond of the owls; when I hear their call deep in the night, it is a moment of profound magic, like gazing at a comet. So I have needlepointed one of our owls.

I framed the Sampler and hung it on the wall. The wallpaper, of course, is by William Morris, his "Brer Rabbit," inspired by the enormously popular "Uncle Remus" folktales of African-American former slaves in the Deep South by Joel Chandler Harris (a white editor for The Atlanta Constitution). Brer Rabbit wallpaper hangs on the walls of Harris' mansion, The Owl's Nest, in Atlanta, Georgia.

Okay, this is Primitive Art or Folk Art -- if you want your owls depicted by Jean James Audubon, hire a real artist what went to a conservatory or something. I am Primitive Folk.

The needlepoint alphabet is hand-created, but largely filched from sewing craft websites. It was so labor-intensive to create from scratch on MSPaint that I stopped after the letters. Traditional needlepoint samplers also display the digits 0 - 9, and punctuation marks.

OKAY I NEEDLEPOINTED THE DIGITS.

Like Paint By Numbers crapola, there are a lot of needlepoint sampler kits, where the needlepoint sewing buyer goes blind doing all the dreadful tedious hard work, but the kit provides the template design. A week or two of dreadfully hard work, but utterly no creativity or originality. Just follow the instructions, et voila! The Mona Lisa! Washington Crossing the Delaware! Abraham Lincoln! Anubis in Montmartre! Home Sweet Home!