- Sowbug
-
Sowbug!
I have crunched your body raw and found it foul.
Noble mulcher, wood-louse.
I have caught you in glass bottles
and seen you crawl free, your orange-pulp feet
on glass which has no friction.
Sowbug! You have filled my trailer with grey life,
and sought escape.
Non-invasive force, you do not even deign
to touch my scraps!
Funneler
of water through your tail,
crustacean needing all that you have left.
Pillbug! You who rolls but cannot funnel. You who snaps
into a pellet, whose shell is gunship grey.
You who are mistaken for the sowbug,
who must live in damper places.
You who I have seen alone and flicked
and made a marble of.
Sowbug! Who swims the air when logs are lifted.
Born of shrimp and crab, land-creature.
Science does not care to know you.
Sowbug, Pillbug, grey and humble,
I have felt your soft feet creep
across my childish hands.
I know that you have rythm,
native swimmer, living in the dark
but out of water.
I have jarred you with a scorpion for days and seen it starve.
--mngamojemo
I took this hippo
And turned it
into this Giant Isopod
It's a relative of the roly-poly sow bugs, so of course, it has to roll up too.
It is a Christmas present for Lizbeth who has been begging me to make one for months since she saw these pictures and these
Here's a few more pictures for good measure
Awwwww, isn't he cute?
One of the things I like best about doing projects like this is that I start cutting and sewing with hardly any plan at all, and at the end, it looks better than I imagined it. The shape of the final project is heavily influenced by the shapes of the pieces I have when I cut the original apart at the seams. About halfway through this bug, for instance, I was still thinking of the part that became his head as his bottom, and I was considering making his legs out of fringe or cording. I started out with just ten legs, but decided that he really did need all fourteen after I saw how sparse ten looked. It was about 3/4 of the way through that I made the final decision to give him a marine isopod tail because the hippo's nose was just about the right shape.
