To recover from the charting series, I present tiny mental vacation in the past. 1972 to be exact. That was the year I embroidered this jacket.



It was well before The Warner Brothers Store and WB characters being available on licensed merchandise. I drew my Roadrunner freehand from cartoons on TV. As you can see by the variant color (the official Roadrunner is blue), my Looney Tunes years were spent in front of a black and white TV.

I had a lot of embroidered clothing back then - a pair of jeans with large phoenix that wound up one leg, starting in flames at the cuff and finishing with a peacock-frilled head on the hip pocket; a blue workshirt covered with wildflowers copied from herbals; and a denim vest done in Shisha mirrorwork. Except for the denim jacket all are long gone, sold while I was in college to pay for books. You might have seen the other pieces if you wandered past the window of the Red Dog second hand clothing boutique in Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA, sometime between '75 and '78 (back when the Square was more edgy and gritty than it is in its current Urban Redevelopment/Mall of America glory). I've always wondered who bought my pieces.



My Roadrunner is done in plain old 6-strand cotton floss, mostly in chain stitch. The two-tone tail happened when the store that sold Coats & Clarks embroidery thread dropped it in favor of the DMC line. I ran out of my original stock and had to do the closest color match I could. You can barely make out the blue sig block below the front foot. When I stitched this, the denim ground was the same color blue as that block.

Elder Daughter wears this now (fraying and all), and would kill for the other pieces. They may be long gone, probably discarded from the homes of others, but I still have some of the Medieval history textbooks they funded.