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.