Runaway Bunny Easter Picture (Tutorial)

What a charming idea to renew the bond with a child that is growing up.  Pardis Amirshahi, the editor of Living Crafts magazine, provided this special guest post for Mothering.com.  I am sure if you have children you to will remember the story of the Runaway Bunny and feel the same sentimentality I felt when I read the following story.  There is a complete pictorial tutorial for this project.

Being a mother to a preteen who used to love the Runaway Bunny story (by Margaret Wise Brown) as a toddler, I thought of making a picture from the book for her as a gift for Easter this year, and wrap it with the book, which she does not even remember now.  The book tells the story of a bunny who tells his mother he has decided to run away.  The mother tells him that she’ll run after him and find him and bring him home in different scenarios, starting with the chase in the meadows.

The first time my daughter heard the story, she was two years old, at a time she wanted to be more independent and saying “no” a lot.  I often gave her a puppet show when telling her this story.  Now that she is almost twelve, going through another stage of independence yet as she enters adolescence, I thought this would be a great occasion to celebrate the sweet carefree toddlerhood days, and the fact that after twelve years, again this is the Year of Rabbit, her Chinese birth year, and again, her favorite word is “no.”

Hung on a wall or simply leaned against a book shelf, this felt scene is a reminder of the bond between a mother and a child, with hints from the Easter, the daffodils and the bunnies, and hints from the storybook, the meadow, mountain and the river.