Diaper Garden Gallery: Speckled Egg

March 2003

The soil is waking, night and day are equal, and the garden is preparing for its rebirth. Eggs are a symbol of birth and rebirth in many cultures, in colors new and sweet. In some places, we hide eggs in the garden and send the children off to look for their treasures while we hold the first big picnic of the year. If it is still cool where you are, plant your February seeds for sprouts—a pot of wheatgrass for your cat, perhaps? If it is warm where you are, maybe the children are ready to dig in the dirt and prepare for planting. Spring has come, just as you suspected it would.

Newsletter. Gather 'round. Let us tell you the tale of the 25 wives of Dwayne the Rooster. They live in a little house on the edge of the woods and roam in a big open backyard in hilly western New York. Their humans (good friends of the Fuz family) live, work, and homeschool next door. These black, orange, speckled, and grey chickens eat flax seed and lay green, orange, and brown eggs. They are the cleanest living chickens around. Probably the most exciting thing to ever happen to these chickens was the recent visit of our photographer and chicken tamer, Marc, along with tripods, flash, camera and laptop computer, standing knee deep in chickens to find just the right ambiance for the speckled egg diapers of the March Diaper Garden.

Setting. Our friend and homeopath lives in the country with chickens that are not only free range but wildly free roaming. Marc stuffed himself into a what was for him a tiny chicken house along with all of his equipment. I wasn't there to see this scene. I wish I had been. I animated the images as I played with a new photo software toy. The second frame was just an overlay of the chicken peeking inside the diaper. The tweening to animate them was automatic. Seriously, what could the chicken have been thinking--if chickens think.

Details
March 2003 Speckled egg fitted cloth diaper and cover set: inside view Yolk. That was my joke. I thought it was funny to put a big yellow spot on the inside of a diaper. Yolks were placed to be one in each diaper in the same general area in the inside back. We painted these to make their roundness random.
March 2003 Speckled egg fitted cloth diaper and cover set: outside view To create the speckled outside fabric, I did a Jackson Pollack dance over the canvas. I didn't want the colors to be evenly spaced but clustered in interesting ways. I used about 8 colors, some neutral and some not necessarily found on the average egg.
March 2003 Almost-in-One speckled egg contour diaper set The colorful doublers really brought out the bright speckles in the outside of these diaper sets. Covers were quite plain, but warn grey with multi-colored snaps made them a nice companion to a very busy diaper.
March 2003 Chick-in-Egg Finger Puppet Each chick is constructed like the finger on a glove. The egg is turned inside out, and chick is sewn to the hole in the egg, hiding the seam inside the finished egg. Original description. Organic cotton terry Chick can hid inside the wool egg then pop out to surprise baby. The chick remains the same, with little bits of wool beak and feathers. Wool egg colors vary: Raspberry, Turquoise, Gold, Brown, Natural, or Periwinkle. All match the speckled diaper.