One Little Urchin

While shell seeking in Naples, Florida, Jim and I haven't found too many sea urchins.  

Just this one...

This guy had washed up on shore after a big thunderstorm, having lost all of his spines in the pummeling surf.

Normally, the purple sea urchin looks something like this...

Its skeleton covered in very sharp spines that cause a painful wound to the human who steps on one!

Once the sea urchin dies, all of its spines drop off and you are left with a beautiful, pale dotted skeleton underneath.   

In researching this little purple sea urchin, I learned that the urchins belong to the Phylum Echinodermata, which also includes sea stars and sand dollars.  Echinoderms have five-fold symmetry which isn't readily apparent in the sea urchin while it's alive and its skeleton is covered in spines.  

But once the spines fall away, you can see the symmetry very easily.   I was happy to discover this because it helped me to define an embroidery approach for creating my own little textile urchin.

I found the illustrations in this post at Bibliodyssey...a great site full of all kinds of wonderful photographs/illustrations. And Bonus!  Everything posted on the site is under a Creative Commons license which is great.  Thanks to Megan of Elmsley Rose for pointing it out to me. 

I used the divisions of the five-segments illustrated in the picture below to create an embroidery pattern of sorts...

I struggled a bit trying to decide how best to sculpt this little urchin.  Finally I decided to embroider a circle onto water-soluble fabric...

The water-soluble fabric does two things.  First it stabilizes the embroidery stitches by helping secure them more firmly to the fabric circle.  And secondly, the glue in the stabilizer gives the fabric circle some body which, I hoped, would help the globular, raised cloth of the urchin hold its shape...

While the stabilized, embroidered circle was still damp,  I stitched around the outside of the circle to draw it together in typical "yo-yo" fashion...

I then stuffed the inside with half of a felt bead to give that yo-yo some three-dimensionality.  I  cut out a center circle in the top and, using a stylus while the fabric was still damp, I scuplted the yo-yo into a round biscuit.

Then I let it sit to dry, the stabilizer helping the little urchin to hold its shape.

As I applique the little urchin to the block, I'm hoping that some of the folds from the yo-yo gathering will smooth out.  

I'm not quite ready to decide where to place it on the block or if I should need to make more...

So for now I'll just let him hang out with the guy I found on the beach.

See you next time.