Out Of The Flowers

Here's some nostalgia-blasted crewel for your space.

In good condition with a wooden frame, this piece is based on the character Holly Hobbie, which I was visually familiar with but nothing beyond the sight of her, so I did some deep diving.

Holly Hobbie was created for the world's second largest greeting card producer (topped only by Hallmark) American Greetings in 1967 by American illustrator, Denise Holly Hobbie. Originally nameless, the blue bonnet-ed(?) character would eventually adopt the latter half of Denise's name and become a familiar image up into the 1990s. 

Did you know, because I certainly didn't, that Holly Hobbie was revamped as a HULU original television series in 2018? 

I encourage you to visit the official website and brush up on the extended Hobbie family, as well as the alliterative-associates that adorn the avenues of Collinsville, such as Amy Abbasi and Piper Parish.

From it's description, the television series focuses on middle school aged Hollie, an aspiring singer songwriter slash activist and her small town farming family. It ran for 5 seasons and has a respectable 6.6 rating on imdb.com. While perusing the cast I noticed it had a whole lot of can-con going on which led me to discover that this was filmed 45 minutes away. Here's a massive kick in the teeth about Canadian media, it's often impossibly hard to find.

I surfed around some more and found it available in Canada via two methods, on broadcast television Mondays at 7:30 PM on the Family Channel (ch. 588 on Rogers, 1556 Bell) and just 3 of the 5 seasons available on American streaming platform HULU using a VPN service. It's wild we invest so much infrastructure and funding into Canadian produced content only to see the largest print media conglomerate in Canada have it's mouthpieces tear apart our national and publicly funded broadcaster, one of the only widely accessible means of viewing this content, but this is a whole other argument and in this space, I'm supposed to be describing this vintage crewel décor.

The width of a vinyl record and just a few more inches over that height-wise, Holly scoops up her kitten from making another mess in the garden, captured in beautiful woven wool. A light and iconic image, decades travelled.