Early in the design process for "Search For The Sugar Puff Hollow" I came across an inspiring image from an old set of science booklets. The picture (below) was so dreamy and mysterious I wanted to capture elements of it for my book. It portrayed a grandeur of the forest floor that I hadn't seen before.

I went about figuring out how to make an almost life-sized tree stump. I didn't want it to be heavy so I needed a structure that was extremely light weight. This was before I had a soda stream and I was going through a lot of Perrier bottles (and feeling guilty about it). I love finding ways to recycle plastic bottles and I had begun to save the bottles just in case I could use them for the book. SO I hot-glued all my perrier bottles together and and made them into the tree stump structure.

After that I covered it with tinfoil and papier mache to create the exposed roots and the top of the stump. But what to cover it with?

I had been using yarn to cover some of my trees and really wanted a special yarn to cover the stump since it was a close-up of a tree. I had found a few sources on Etsy.com for coiled yarn. My favorite was a shop called faroeviking in Ottawa. I contacted Heidi who spun and died all of her yarns and she made me 2 skeins of custom dyed and coiled yarn. You can read more about Heidi here. It really turned out beautifully.