Build a March Hare Toy for A Tot

 THE MARCH HARE by Harold Evans Kellogg

       The figure of the hare, the baseboard, and the wheels are made of half-inch box lumber. It will be necessary for woodworkers to enlarge the elements to scale using either a software program or graph paper before cutting templates.
       With a pencil mark around the figure of the hare, then cut it out with a scroll saw. Be sure to leave the piece of board between the under side of the hare and the straight line.
       The baseboard is 6 1/2 inches long and 3 inches wide. Mark it out with a ruler and a try-square and cut it out with an ordinary saw.
       Make the two wheels by marking with a pencil around a tea cup and then sawing them out with a scroll saw.
       The handle is made of soft wood. It is 3/8 inch square and 16 inches long. A portion 3 inch deep and 2 inches long is cut from one end, as shown in the diagram. The four edges of the handle may be planed, or filed partly round if desired. All pieces should be filed and sandpapered before they are joined.
       Attach the handle and the figure of the hare to the baseboard from the under side, using either small nails or screws. Make a hole about 1/8th inch in diameter in the exact center of each wheel, using either a drill. Then attach the wheels to the baseboard with large-headed nails or screws, leaving them just loose enough to turn easily.
       To decorate the toy you will need a tube of white and a tube of black oil paint, some turpentine to thin the paint, and two small brushes. Paint the handle, the wheels, and the figure of the hare white. Allow the paint to dry for one day. Then apply another coat of white paint to the same portions, and allow it to dry for a day.
       Using a piece of carbon paper, transfer to the figure of the hare the lines representing the ears, eyes, feet, and other markings. With a fine-pointed brush go over these lines very carefully, using the black oil
paint. Now apply the black paint to the baseboard and to the portion between the baseboard and the under part of the hare. Wee Wisdom, 1926

More March Hares:

• All About Cottontail Rabbits
• The White Rabbits by Edith Campbell
• Craft a Rabbit Ring Toss Game

Color Retro Easter Characters

Description of Coloring Page: Easter lamb jumping a fence, a hip Easter chick dressed for a Easter Parade, and a retro Easter Bunny wearing a plaid Sunday blazer...

Don't forget to drag the png. or jpg into a Word Document and enlarge the image as much as possible before printing it folks. If you have a question about this coloring page, just type into the comment box located directly below this post and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

Color this boy in a bunny costume...

Description of Coloring Page: vintage Easter themes, carrots, boy meets Easter rabbit, outdoors, imagine meeting the Easter rabbit...

Don't forget to drag the png. or jpg into a Word Document and enlarge the image as much as possible before printing it folks. If you have a question about this coloring page, just type into the comment box located directly below this post and I'll try to get back to you as soon as I can.

Bunnies In A Basket

Bunnies and Babies in A Red Easter Basket

Description of Illustration: large woven basket, bonnet, seven bunnies, baby sister, big sister, old postcard

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.

Easter hares painting eggs

Description of Illustration: bunny family painting eggs, table, basket of eggs, lantern, personifications, old postcard

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.

The Tale of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny

      The Tale of Peter Rabbit is a British children's book written and illustrated by Beatrix Potter that follows mischievous and disobedient young Peter Rabbit as he is chased about the garden of Mr. McGregor. He escapes and returns home to his mother who puts him to bed after dosing him with camomile tea. The tale was written for five-year-old Noel Moore, son of Potter's former governess Annie Carter Moore, in 1893. It was revised and privately printed by Potter in 1901 after several publishers' rejections but was printed in a trade edition by Frederick Warne & Co. in 1902. The book was a success, and multiple reprints were issued in the years immediately following its debut. It has been translated into 36 languages and with 45 million copies sold it is one of the best-selling books of all time.

      The book has generated considerable merchandise over the decades since its release for both children and adults with toys, dishes, foods, clothing, videos and other products made available. Potter was one of the first to be responsible for such merchandise when she patented a Peter Rabbit doll in 1903 and followed it almost immediately with a Peter Rabbit board game.

      The story focuses on a family of anthropomorphic rabbits, the widowed mother rabbit cautioning her young against entering a vegetable garden grown by a man named Mr. McGregor, who had baked her deceased husband into a pie. Whereas her three daughters obediently refrain from entering the garden, her rebellious son Peter defies his mother by trespassing into the garden to snack on some vegetables, losing his clothes along the way. While there, Peter is seen by Mr. McGregor and loses his clothes trying to escape. He finds difficulties in wriggling beneath the opening in the fence through which he'd managed to slide past earlier to invade the garden, and later finds that his abandoned clothing articles were used to dress Mr. McGregor's scarecrow. After returning home, a sickened Peter is bedridden by his mother whereas his well-behaved sisters receive a sumptuous dinner of milk and berries as opposed to Peter's supper of chamomile tea.

      Through the 1890s, Potter sent illustrated story letters to the children of her former governess, Annie Moore, and, in 1900, Moore, realizing the commercial potential of Potter's stories, suggested they be made into books. Potter embraced the suggestion, and, borrowing her complete correspondence (which had been carefully preserved by the Moore children), selected a letter written on 4 September 1893 to five-year-old Noel that featured a tale about a rabbit named Peter. Potter had owned a pet rabbit called Peter Piper. Potter biographer Linda Lear explains: "The original letter was too short to make a proper book so [Potter] added some text and made new black-and-white illustrations...and made it more suspenseful. These changes slowed the narrative down, added intrigue, and gave a greater sense of the passage of time. Then she copied it out into a stiff-covered exercise book, and painted a colored frontispiece showing Mrs. Rabbit dosing Peter with camomile tea".

^{More Related Content:}

• The Tale of Peter Rabbit at Project Gutenberg
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit Audio Book at Project Gutenberg
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit Digital Book at The University of Iowa Libraries (Flash)
• World of Peter Rabbit: A website maintained by Potter's first publisher Frederick Warne & Co.

The Runaway Bunny

"The Runaway Bunny" by Margaret Wise Brown.

Read Along by ReadaRoo Kids.

      Margaret Wise Brown (May 23, 1910 – November 13, 1952) was a prolific American author of children's literature, including the books Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, both illustrated by Clement Hurd.

      The middle child of three whose parents suffered from an unhappy marriage, Brown was born in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, granddaughter of Benjamin Gratz Brown. In 1923 she attended boarding school in Woodstock, Connecticut, while her parents were living in Canterbury. She began attending Dana Hall School in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1926, where she did well in athletics. After graduation in 1928, Brown went on to Hollins College in Roanoke, Virginia.

      Following her graduation with a B.A. in English from Hollins in 1932, Brown worked as a teacher, and also studied art. It was while working at the Bank Street Experimental School in New York City that she started writing books for children. Her first book was When the Wind Blew, published in 1937 by Harper & Brothers.

      Brown then went on to develop her Here and Now stories, and later the Noisy Book series while employed as an editor at William R. Scott. Her popular book The Little Fur Family, illustrated by Garth Williams, was published in 1946. Also in 1946, Brown wrote The Little Island and Little Lost Lamb, both under the pseudonym Golden MacDonald and illustrated by Leonard Weisgard. The former won a Caldecott Honor recognition in 1946 and the latter the Caldecott Medal in 1947. In the early 1950s, she wrote several books for the Little Golden Books series including The Color Kittens, Mister Dog and Scuppers The Sailor Dog.

      In 1952, Brown met James Stillman 'Pebble' Rockefeller Jr. at a party, and they became engaged. Later that year, while on a book tour in Nice, France, she unexpectedly died at 42 of an embolism, two weeks after emergency surgery for an ovarian cyst. (Kicking up her leg to show the doctor how well she was feeling ironically caused a blood clot that had formed in her leg to dislodge and travel to her heart.) By the time of Brown's death, she had authored well over one hundred books. Her ashes were scattered at her island home, "The Only House" in Vinalhaven, Maine.

      Brown left behind over 70 unpublished manuscripts. Her sister, Roberta Brown Rauch, after unsuccessfully trying to sell them, kept them in a cedar trunk for decades. In 1991, Amy Gary of WaterMark Inc., rediscovered the paper-clipped bundles of the more than 500 typewritten pages and set about getting the stories published.

      Many of Brown's books have been re-released with new illustrations decades after their original publication. Many more of her books are still in print with the original illustrations. Her books have been translated into several languages; biographies on Brown for children have been written by Leonard S. Marcus (Harper Paperbacks, 1999) and Jill C. Wheeler (Checkerboard Books, 2006). Have a Carrot, a Freudian analysis of her "classic series" of bunny books has been written by Claudia H. Pearson (Look Again Press, 2010).

^{More Related Content:}

• Official website
• Fan site
• Papers archived at Hollins University
• Runaway Bunny Concerto website

The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes

"The Country Bunny and The Little Golden Shoes"

Readaloud from Grandma's House YouTube.

      Edwin DuBose Heyward wrote the children's book The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes (1939).

      Heyward was born in 1885 in Charleston, South Carolina. He was a descendant of Judge Thomas Heyward, Jr., a South Carolina signer of the United States Declaration of Independence.

      As a child and young man, Heyward was frequently ill. He contracted polio when he was eighteen, then two years later contracted typhoid fever and the following year fell ill with pleurisy. Although he described himself as " a miserable student" who was uninterested in learning, and dropped out of high school in his first year at age fourteen, he had a lifelong and serious interest in literature. He passed the time in his sickbed writing verses and stories.

• Charleston Childhood: The First Years of Dubose Heyward.

The Tales of Uncle Remus by Jerry Pinkney

Get ready for all of the laughs, adventure and hip-hopping good times in this all-new imaginative and modern retelling of Uncle Remus' best-loved tales. Parents and kids alike will delight in the escapades of the most mischievous and clever Brer Rabbit as he gleefully outwits Brer Fox, Brer Bear and a whole cast of other critters! With irresistible and toe-tapping new songs and an all-star lineup of voice talent (Wayne Brady, Nick Cannon, Danny Glover, D.L. Hughley and Wanda Sykes), The Adventures of Brer Rabbit is sure to be a family favorite for years to come!

      Uncle Remus is a fictional character, the title character and fictional narrator of a collection of African-American folktales adapted and compiled by Joel Chandler Harris, published in book form in 1881. A journalist in post-Reconstruction Atlanta, Georgia, Harris produced seven Uncle Remus books.
      Uncle Remus is a collection of animal stories, songs, and oral folklore, collected from Southern United States African-Americans. Many of the stories are didactic, much like those of Aesop's Fables and the stories of Jean de La Fontaine. Uncle Remus is a kindly old former slave who serves as a storytelling device, passing on the folktales to children gathered around him.

Joel Chandler Harris

      Harris created the first version of the Uncle Remus character for the Atlanta Constitution in 1876 after inheriting a column formerly written by Samuel W. Small, who had taken leave from the paper. In these character sketches, Remus would visit the newspaper office to discuss the social and racial issues of the day. By 1877 Small had returned to the Constitution and resumed his column.
      Harris did not intend to continue the Remus character. But when Small left the paper again, Harris reprised Remus. He realized the literary value of the stories he had heard from the slaves of Turnwold Plantation. Harris set out to record the stories and insisted that they be verified by two independent sources before he would publish them. He found the research more difficult given his professional duties, urban location, race and, eventually, fame.
      On July 20, 1879, Harris published "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus" in the Atlanta Constitution. It was the first of 34 plantation fables that would be compiled in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). The stories, mostly collected directly from the African-American oral storytelling tradition, were revolutionary in their use of dialect, animal personages, and serialized landscapes.

       Remus' stories featured a trickster hero called Br'er Rabbit ("Brother" Rabbit), who used his wits against adversity, though his efforts did not always succeed. Br'er Rabbit is a direct interpretation of Yoruba tales of Hare, though some others posit Native American influences as well. The scholar Stella Brewer Brookes asserts, "Never has the trickster been better exemplified than in the Br'er Rabbit of Harris." Br'er Rabbit was accompanied by friends and enemies, such as Br'er Fox, Br'er Bear, Br'er Terrapin, and Br'er Wolf. The stories represented a significant break from the fairy tales of the Western tradition: instead of a singular event in a singular story, the critters on the plantation existed in an ongoing community saga, time immemorial.

      Harris described Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, as a major influence on the characters of Uncle Remus and the Little Boy. When he read Stowe's novel in 1862, he said that it "made a more vivid impression upon my mind than anything I have ever read since." Interpreting Uncle Tom's Cabin as a "wonderful defense of slavery," Harris argued that Stowe's "genius took possession of her and compelled her, in spite of her avowed purpose, to give a very fair picture of the institution she had intended to condemn." In Harris's view, the "real moral that Mrs. Stowe's book teaches is that the. . . realities [of slavery], under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty and tenderness all their own."
      The Uncle Remus stories garnered critical acclaim and achieved popular success well into the 20th century. Harris published at least twenty-nine books, of which nine books were compiled of his published Uncle Remus stories, including Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), Nights with Uncle Remus (1883), Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892), The Tar Baby and Other Rhymes of Uncle Remus (1904), Told by Uncle Remus: New Stories of the Old Plantation (1905), Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit (1907). The last three books written by Joel Chandler Harris were published after his death which included Uncle Remus and the Little Boy (1910), Uncle Remus Returns (1918), and Seven Tales of Uncle Remus (1948). The tales, 185 in sum, became immensely popular among both black and white readers in the North and South. Few people outside of the South had heard accents like those spoken in the tales, and the dialect had never been legitimately and faithfully recorded in print.
      To Northern and international readers, the stories were a "revelation of the unknown." Mark Twain noted in 1883, "in the matter of writing [the African-American dialect], he is the only master the country has produced."
      The stories introduced international readers to the American South. Rudyard Kipling wrote in a letter to Harris that the tales "ran like wild fire through an English Public school.... [We] found ourselves quoting whole pages of Uncle Remus that had got mixed in with the fabric of the old school life." The Uncle Remus tales have since been translated into more than forty languages.
      James Weldon Johnson called the collection "the greatest body of folklore America has produced."

^{More Related Content:}

• Joel Chandler Harris, New Georgia Encyclopedia
• The Wren's Nest, Harris's historic home in Atlanta, GA
• Robert Roosevelt's Brer Rabbit Stories
• Theodore Roosevelt on Brer Rabbit and his Uncle
• Black father: the subversive achievement of Joel Chandler Harris, African American Review
• Works by Joel Chandler Harris at Project Gutenberg
• Works by Joel Chandler Harris openly available with full text and large zoomable images in the University of Florida Digital Collections
• Uncle Remus His Songs and Sayings from American Studies at the University of Virginia
• "Death Calls 'Uncle Remus' and Whole World Mourns", Atlanta Georgian, July 4, 1908. From the Atlanta Historic Newspaper Archive
• Remembering Remus - Frank Stephenson, Florida State University

The Velveteen Rabbit

cover illustrated by Michael Green

      The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) is a children's novel written by Margery Williams and illustrated by William Nicholson. It chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit and his quest to become real through the love of his owner. The book was first published in 1922 and has been republished many times since.

      The Velveteen Rabbit was Williams' first children's book. It has been awarded the IRA/CBC Children's Choice award. Based on a 2007 online poll, the National Education Association named the book one of its "Teachers' Top 100 Books for Children."

      A stuffed rabbit sewn from velveteen is given as a Christmas present to a small boy, but is neglected for toys of higher quality or function, which shun him in response. The rabbit is informed of magically becoming Real by the wisest and oldest toy in the nursery as a result of extreme adoration and love from children, and he is awed by this concept; however, his chances of achieving this wish are slight.

      One night, after the boy has misplaced his cherished china dog, he is pacified through the presence of the rabbit, who attracts more attention from his owner from then onward as a result, to the extent of his promotion to the position of the child's favorite toy. However, when the toy rabbit's owner contracts scarlet fever, he is prescribed a trip to the seashore and is pacified upon receiving a stuffed rabbit of higher quality as a replacement for the Velveteen Rabbit, which must be burned alongside all of the other playthings due to potential bacteria. Before the rabbit can meet a painful demise, he is greeted by the Nursery Fairy, who transforms him into a living rabbit to spare him from an agonizing fate, as he'd acquired greater affection from the boy than all of the other toys and surpassed all qualifications required. The rabbit accompanies several others in rejoicing, gleefully upon having received his dream.

More Related Content:

• The Velveteen Rabbit Illustrated by William Nicholson. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., c1922 at A Celebration of Women Writers
• The Velveteen Rabbit at Project Gutenberg
• The Velveteen Rabbit (flip book with original illustrations) at Internet Archive

 

"When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real." Margery Williams' enchanting story about a toy rabbit will live forever in the annals of children's literature, coming alive through this unforgettable rendition. " Told by Meryl Streep, Music by George Winston, Illustrated by David Jorgensen

Rabbit Eating Lettuce

Description of Illustration: Victorian scrap of rabbit eating lettuce.

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.

The March Hare And The Easter Rabbit

The March Hare And The Easter Rabbit

Peter Rabbit Takes Care of Children

In this Easter funny page, Peter Rabbit says that in the future he will not host "mixed parties."

An Easter Bunny Sale

March rabbits wild, May rabbits bold,

Easter rabbits here for sale, just one month old!

Come and buy my bunnies brown,

Prizes three they've taken;

Silky ears and cotton tails-

You cannot be mistaken.

By Susan Hunter Walker, 1905

Black and White Rabbits

Description of Illustration: drawing in black and white pen or etching of rabbits, straw, black and white rabbits

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.

Large Rabbits Eating Turnips

Description of Illustration: rabbits eating, straw, barrel, rabbit hutch, spots

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.

Daisies and Eggs For Easter

Description of Illustration: pet white rabbit, painted eggs, straw, basket, daisies, Easter clip art, adorable bunny

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.

Old-Fashioned Egg Hunt

Description of Illustration: pet white rabbit, dyed eggs, barn door, text "Easter Greetings, little boy in sailor suit, vintage Easter clip art

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.

The Egg Painter

Description of Illustration: white Easter bunny paints an egg, text reads "Easter Greetings", violets, palette and paint and paint brush, yellow daffodils 

Have a question about the illustration? Just type it in the comment box and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. I only publish content that is closely related to the subject folks.