With Gently Smiling Jaws

This was inspired by Lewis Carroll's parody on Isaac Watt's poem, 'How doth the Little Bee', as quoted by Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
The poem goes:

How doth the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin

How neatly spreads his claws

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws!

Obviously it had to be set in an Egyptian scene or a rabbit hole, and since rabbit warrens are dark and black on black would never have worked, Egypt was the obvious choice.

I decided that this should be an exercise in couching for effect and open canvas. I also decided to try a range of threads. The various elements to be included had, of course, to include a crocodile and fish, so I opted to have this in the foreground with Egyptian inspired motifs in background.

The pyramids are stitched in 4 strands of Marlitt, worked horizontally every other row. The thread was not drawn across the back, but brought diagonally up to start the next row so that it did not show through the unstitched areas. I prefer to use the 'finger-tip-to-elbow' measure for length of thread when starting, but in this case I used lengths of about 30" so that I could complete all the diagonal lines and the right hand slanted line with one length of thread. I did not want any change of thread showing. Marlitt has a tendency to keep its kinks when drawn from the skein, so I ran it over a damp sponge to remove them before I started to stitch. I couched the long stitches vertically with two strands of the same Marlitt. When couching, probably because the thread was passing through the canvas more often, I found that it tended to shred and that the optimum length to start with was about 10". I also used Marlitt for the obelisk.
The sky is CD Pastel couched with Madeira Metallic 33. The sand dunes are also CD Pastel couched with a gold machine embroidery thread. The Nile is couched with silver machine embroidery thread.
The Crocodile is cross-stitched in Kreinik metallic, as are the poor little fish that it is about to swallow. The background canvas is an 18 count, random-dyed sand colour. Because it was the right colour and had variations, I decided that the middle ground should be left unstitched.

I worked on this from December 2008 to March 2009. It took a little under 70 hours to design and stitch and measures 6" by 4".