Friday, March 12, 2010

Toile rescue

We moved our Alesis keyboard out of our living room and into the boy-critter's room, since he is the one who uses it most (recent repertoire alternates between: Bach minuets, The Who, Regina Spektor*, and his old stand by, Animusic). I discovered that my 9 year-old has very little appreciation for the efforts I put into the subversive toile keyboard cover. I kept finding it in a crumpled ball on the floor, hanging with the dust bunnies.

So I pulled out some natural canvas, made a (boring) keyboard cover that won't make me wince when I find it abused and rescued my toile. Last week I got some black velveteen, cut up the toile and made two couch pillows**:
So now I can hang with my aliens while watching TV.

But there are some places in the toile that are calling for more embellishment and I am trolling for ideas. Here are the locations that I want to corrupt:

Washing Lady

Empty Tree

Lady with a Rake
I'm trying to figure out if I can turn that rake into a pitchfork somehow; that, plus some devil horns and a tail could work.

Ideas? Tell me in the comments.
__________
*After a few week's worth of practice, I can now listen to the boy critter sing the "I've got a perfect body" line in "Folding Chair" without collapsing in giggles.
**By "made couch pillows" I mean that I attempted to sew two squares together with a zipper and only had to rip it out and start over twice!

4 comments:

Heather said...

The empty tree is begging for the Cheshire Cat! The rake could be a pitchfork if you 'eat' the tines pointing down with a thick bottom edge of the pitchfork. I would totally have the woman launder some money.

Kate said...

Thank you Heather! I love your ideas. Now I just have to see if my embroidery skills are up to snuff!

deb said...

It's probably only because Passover is approaching that I can so clearly see a baby in a basket floating down that river. I don't see any reason why there shouldn't be some money laundering going on at the same time. ;-)

Tricia said...

Despite the fact that I keep reading "toilet" for "toile", this is hilarious and so creative! I think you need to add a robot or two in there somewhere, for your daughter's sake. :^)