I've considered the idea of my own website for many months now, as Etsy no longer seems the best fit for my needle felting, but I want very much to continue to work on projects and characters in any spare time I have, and to connect with all of you who have followed my work over the past year or two. With my due date just a little over two weeks away, I've let time get away from me and now have been scrambling to get a website up and running before the baby comes.

So today, though the website still has kinks to work out, and sections that are barely started, including the shop portion, which will probably be empty for some months yet (until I'm settled into a schedule with the new baby), I want to introduce you to The Rabbit Trail. The Rabbit Trail features two blogs, one regular and one more occasional, a "creative" section, a food section, and a shop for my felted art. I'm excited to be incorporating more writing into my creative process again, and selling on my own site allows me much more flexibility.

I hope you'll swing over to see what I'm working on, read a post or two, or just look at the photos. But to entice you just a bit more, I'm offering a giveaway! If you visit the Cotton Tales blog you will see that my first post is in part about the March Hare, and by coincidence, I discovered that this year marks the 150th anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. So I decided to make a White Rabbit to give away to one of you lucky folks. Here are some photos of him; he's quite the dandy!

Because I'm not sure how the next few weeks will play out, I'm going to set up this giveaway a little differently than the last. To be entered to win the White Rabbit, I'd like you to leave me a comment on one of my blog posts (you won't be able to leave it anonymously, or I'll never find you if you win!) or share this blog post through Facebook. You can either do this through my Fibers of Being Facebook page, or you can click the "share" button at the bottom of this post. Please try to tag Fibers of Being in your comment, and be aware that if your privacy settings don't share your "shares" with the public, I won't be able to see that you've shared unless you are one of my FB friends. (Sorry for all the Facebook-speak!!)

I'm giving you LOTS of time to do this: deadline to be entered to win is Saturday, April 4, anytime until midnight. Only one entry per person. Depending on when baby comes, I will draw a winner sometime after that, but to allow myself a little wiggle room, I will plan to announce the winner by Thursday, April 17. I will announce much sooner if circumstances allow. U.S. residents only, please. Please contact me with any questions and thanks for helping me launch this new project!

Mad as a march hare.... it's an old idiom that inspired the zany character made famous by Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. The spring mating season inspires erratic and excitable behavior in hares; even more impressive leaping and vertical jumping than usual, and sometimes fantastic "boxing matches" between competing males or unwilling females and their would-be suitors.

Last March I found myself in a completely unexpected situation, frantically preparing for my shop to be featured on Etsy's blog and homepage for four days. It was an unforeseen windfall for my needle felting business; one for which I was unprepared and felt a little sheepish about, but which really pushed me to grow the shop and my creative vision. I survived the feature - only a touch madder than I had been before - and better for the experience.

This March I am a few weeks, perhaps only days away from meeting my (first) daughter. And yes, I think there is an element of madness to this stage of pregnancy. Not necessarily in the stereotypical way of hysterics or insomnia or uncontrollable "nesting" behaviors. What's mad is that not just my body, but my entire consciousness, has been invaded by a person I have not yet met. And that I love her beyond reason.... but all I really know about her is that she has very powerful legs, loves all kinds of fruit, and hates yoga, walking, and hot showers.

Becoming a mother is easily the maddest experience I've ever had. I am the self I've known for years but I'm also someone that I don't know well yet at all, someone who surprises me by being calm when I would usually be anxious, quiet when I would be upset, fierce when I would melt into tears.

The best way I can describe it is surrender without surrender.... letting go of what I know and feel sure of in expectation of catching hold of something better. A new relationship, a new role, a new person to love and care for, a new way of viewing the world and my place in it. And I say "better" not because I believe having children is a superior decision or situation to not choosing or being able to have children, nor because I believe that my parenting experience is going to be strictly beneficial and enjoyable for me or my daughter (if only!), but because my decision to surrender the self and life I know to something new, unknown, and potentially difficult and painful, will (hopefully) make me a better person.

The March hare is mad because it's faced with life at its barest. It has survived the harshness of winter and comes out into the fairness of spring only to find that in order to go on, in order to move forward, it must surrender itself to another. And to a self it doesn't yet know, and to new beings it doesn't yet know. Perhaps it is a sense of this helplessness that makes them leap, kick their legs in the air, twist and spin. Perhaps that's what it's like for the baby in the womb. Kick and struggle though we might, wild-eyed and stubborn, we all have to keep moving forward on this trail that is both familiar and well-worn, but also strange and new.

“I can’t go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.”

— Lewis Carroll, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

"Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!" -- The White Rabbit

The March Hare. On madness and letting go.

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