The Little White Horse

We have reached the half way stage in The Documented Life Project 2014 as week 26 has arrived. Our latest task was to : Add a Bible verse or a line from your favourite book. Well, if you know me you won't be surprised that it wasn't the bible I reached for! Instead I grabbed my most favourite book when I was a child which is: The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge. The little white horse in question is in fact a unicorn and if you're unfamiliar with this book I highly recommend reading it. It's a little gem, full of beautiful imagery. It has as it's theme the eternal battle between good and evil. In fact re-reading this many times now as an adult I appreciate it even more.

I used a painted background made some time ago which had just the right sky colour and then reached for my box with images I have cut out and collected over the years where I found a landscape with castle and horses (one of which was quickly turned into a unicorn by drawing the necessary horn), a rose hedge, and a lovely girl who could so easily be Maria Merryweather, the protagonist of the book.

Everything was moved around and cut to size till I was happy with the result and then glued onto the background and embellished with markers and watercolour pens.

Then I started to look for the text line in the book and on the very last page I discovered exactly what I was looking for: "she would see the little white horse, she would run towards him".  It seemed almost too easy how this one came together but sometimes such magic happens and you should accept it as a gift from the universe!

It isn't the first time this book has been my inspiration. The above small quilt was made some years ago now to celebrate the fact that I had rediscovered this book with the help of Amazon. You can find out all about that happy occurrence here.

Little White Horse in Classic Stitches

Issue 87 of Classic Stitches magazine was in my mailbox today and also in our newsagent shop in West Linton. And this issue has my article about my quiltie Little White Horse which will look familiar to regular readers of my blog as a detail of the quiltie features in the banner above. I love the layout they have provided for it in the magazine as seen above and I even like the picture of me they've used.

It has some basic instructions about how the quiltie was made but also describes how I came to make it. For those of you in the US I believe Classic Stitches is available there but you can also buy it online.

The Little White Horse, a children's book by Elizabeth Goudge, published in 1946, was my favourite childhood book. I had it in paperback version and of course in Dutch. When I moved abroad it was left with my parents and had been virtually read to bits. When they in their turn moved, it somehow got thrown out and when I wanted to retrieve it neither my mother nor I could remember either the title or the author, which made it virtually impossible to find. We naturally assumed it was a Dutch book and visited many second hand shops in The Netherlands over the years trying to locate it. All I could remember very clearly was that it concerned a unicorn and also that a governess which regularly sucked peppermint played an important role.

I could recite most of the first chapter too but this did not help to locate a copy.

I had sort of given up hope of ever finding it! So you can imagine my surprise one day when I opened my Amazon homepage and as always read My Recommendations. How it happened I have no idea but there it was: MY BOOK and it had originally been published in English and in the U.K. As soon as I read the contents I just knew I had found it again. It was re-published in paperback as there are thoughts of making it into a film. Why Amazon had added it to my recommendations will forever remain a mystery. It was synchronicity at its most beautiful! Or maybe I asked and the universe offered?!

Only thing is that I now feel that Amazon knows best and whatever they recommend I should probably get it!! So far they haven't disappointed but I'm spending a fortune on books!!!