Headless Horseman Softie

photo: Eric Diesel

At the Los Angeles County Fair last Labor Day, among the most compelling exhibits were the holiday rooms. Even on that hot, sunny day, Christmas was in full swing, but from festively decorated cakes to intricately laid out tablescapes, the most popular holidays were birthdays and anniversaries. A county fair is a harvest festival, so it follows that the autumn holidays were well reflected in the halls of domesticity. From the home canning competition that greeted visitors with walls of shimmering put-ups to the quilting exhibit that evoked wrapping up against chills yet to come, it turns out that autumn is as anticipated and popular in sunny Southern California as it is in the chilly northeast.

Unsurprisingly, I was taken by the work in the Halloween rooms. I loved a quilt patterned with the visages of movie monsters – as I wrote last month, this quilt was such a good idea so well rendered that I wish I’d have done it myself, even though I would never flatter myself that I could have. If, from that quilt to the oil painting of a famous skeleton taking a bath in blood, it was hard to forget that we were in the land of movie magic, it was equally evident that, as autumn dawns, thoughts and spirits turn towards the colonial. I loved a display of tombstones carved by jigsaw from plywood and aged with painterly technique to reflect a Revolutionary War burial ground. In the sewing competition, someone entered a gown inspired by Martha Washington’s trousseau.

The northeast comes into its own in autumn. History hangs heavy here, and during this seasonal shift, stories that go as far back as the country itself coalesce in the fallen leaves of the forests and the gathering mists of those old graveyards. The stories are carried on the peal of church bells and in the light of midnight lanterns, and it is understood, tacitly and mournfully, that they unfold on the graves of citizens whose home this was for centuries before the Mayflower set sail.

Colonial America gave birth to some of our finest writers and some of our most bloodcurdling tales. Poe worked his way from his Boston birthplace to the middle Atlantic and back up the eastern seaboard, haunted by a life as macabre as the tales he told while he lived it. Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables is built upon a disruption between the physical plane and unseen forces bound to the location by tragedy that seems always to perpetuate itself. How fitting that the house is in Salem, Massachusetts, that maritime village that teaches us the not always honorable and frequently bloodchilling lessons of our colonial past. As welcome as witches now are in Salem, they are but a drop of blood in the bucket compared to the goings on in Eastwick, Rhode Island and Collinsport, Maine. And nowhere in New England is more haunted, or influential, than the Hudson valley hamlet of Sleepy Hollow, New York. Yankees love a good argument, and that’s what you’d have if you asked the congregants at the local tavern who the most famous resident of Sleepy Hollow is: Ichabod Crane, the Hessian, or the tourists who flock to this small town by droves during the harvest months.

In this month of literary chills as well as literal ones, it is as important as it always is to dip into a book, but as any New England spinster will tell you, idle hands are the devil's playground. Inspired by both the creativity of state fair crafters and by the northeast’s place as autumn’s gatekeeper, here is a Halloween craft patterned after the ambassador of Sleepy Hollow and, indeed, of Halloween itself: a Headless Horseman softie. Softies – which you and I grew up calling huggables or stuffed animals – are a very popular craft. There are good reasons for this. Softies are usually simple to make and they are always a delight to receive. The most common format for softies is the zoo animal, but with the creativity for which crafters are justly renowned, softies exist for every species from farm animal to pond life and every corporeality from ghost to zombie. Once you get the hangman of it, it is simple to make several at a time, so consider nestling a few in the trick or treat bowl.

There is a satisfactory contradiction in making something so huggable from something so scary – but then, visitors to our urban home know all about that. Like most of our crafts at Urban Home, our Headless Horseman is inspired by the past – in this case, vintage Halloween graphics. In these old wood-cuts, which were used to create paper party media from invitations to games and decorations, the sinister figure of the Headless Horseman blazes a manic trail. In images, he is spindly in colonial clothing or raggedy in scarecrow scraps, but he always displays the wicked grin of the jack o’lantern, often amid a nimbus of flames. Urban Home's Headless Horseman isn’t quite so terrifying, but he is good for a scare, a chuckle and a hug – and yes, his head pops safely off.

Click here for the pattern and easy instructions.