Mrs Echidna's Dilemma

Mrs Echidna's Dilemma

Mrs Echidna's Dilemma, written and illustrated by QLD author Betty Johnston, is a unique and exquisitely crafted children's picture book featuring entirely hand embroidered images. Mrs Echidna's Dilemma is a Bronze medallion winner at the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards.

Mrs Echidna's Dilemma takes children on an interactive journey through the Australian bush as an echidna searches for the safest place to lay her egg. Educational information about the animals appears alongside each hand-embroidered image, which took the author over 20 hours to complete a single illustration!

Originally created as a hand-embroidered quilt, Betty received an arts grant to create the book version. Each image is also embossed to heighten the experience for the reader. With a strong education narrative driving the book, Mrs Echidna's Dilemma is an exceptional children's picture book not to be missed!

Betty Johnston has studied zoology, theology, pedagogy, disabilities, and endless government policies and procedures. Over the years, she has worked as a High School teacher (Home Economics and Science), in sales, as an activity officer at a facility for young people with acquired brain injury, and for the public service. Throw into the mix raising four children and welcoming three grandchildren, all the while actively supporting her husband, who is a pastor. Her love of textile arts led to the development of educational resources for early childhood, which somehow morphed into embroidered quilts and her award-winning book Mrs Echidna's Dilemma. She is based in QLD.

Mrs Echidna's Dilemma
3e Innovative
Author: Betty Johnston
ISBN: 9780980480559
Price: $39.95

Interview with Betty Johnston

Question: Can you talk about Mrs Echidna's Dilemma and how the project of entirely hand embroidered images evolved?

Betty Johnston: Mrs Echidna's Dilemma began when my daughter asked me to make some finger puppets for her because she had a Junior Kindergarten class who had a fascination with farm and wild animals but they knew nothing about Australian animals. At the age of 2 and half to three and half years of age a child's language starts to emerge and my daughter asked me to make finger puppets to get them to start talking about Australian animals and that's where it all began.

My daughter came back to me and said "the kids love the finger puppets, but they really need a story" and I wrote the story (because mother's do these things) and then her work colleagues began borrowing the puppets and the story and I was asked to write the story down. A book wasn't on my horizon at the time, so I rang my sister who was doing her Masters in Education with Literacy as her specialty and she said that "50% of the value in children's literature was in the illustrations, have you thought about using your quilting techniques?" From there I designed a quilt, I stitched whilst I was comminuting to and from work, each day and I was having conversations with a number of people who said to me "a hedgehog" and I would say "no, that's an echidna". The reason the kids didn't know their Australian animals is because the adults knew so little about them.

Originally I was going to write information about each animal on the back of the quilt because I thought I was just making another resource for my daughter to hang in the childcare room (my daughter is teaching now). A friend of mine who owned a quilt store also had training as a Librarian who specialised in Children's Literature and she suggested that I make a companion quilt but instead of having information on the back, I made another companion quilt and that is the blackwork; you see the information under the blackwork illustration.

Whilst that was still in sketches, friends of mine in the art world suggested that I apply for a grant to convert it into a book. I approached the community and I received a grant for the cost to develop it from quilt medium to the print medium; I was introduced to a brilliant publisher and their concept was to use the tactile raised images to reflect the three dimensionality of the original artwork and that is how the Mrs Echidna's Dilemma book evolved.


Question: How important, to you, was it to include educational information about the echidna?

Betty Johnston: Very important because I had found that the average adult that I was comminuting with, who worked a really, good job in the city, knew nothing about Australian fauna and flora. When I was thinking about using the quilt in the childcare centre, my original plan, I knew they needed information because when the children got to ages of 4 and 5 they would start asking questions and the answers would be on the quilt. When I was working on the book, I had in mind that it would be a resource for people working in early childhood.

As the project began as finger puppets, I have included patterns for the finger puppets on the last four or five pages of the book. The instructions and patterns with the finger puppets are written in simple language so that the average 8 year old could follow them.


Question: You received a bronze medallion at the 2011 Independent Publisher Book Awards, for Mrs Echidna's Dilemma - how did that feel?

Betty Johnston: Absolutely stoked, that was amazing! I won the award for fiction and I believe that will open up a lot of doors, for me.

Mrs Echidna's Dilemma has been embraced in the education world and I have spoken at Universities. Recently I spoke to pre-service teachers at a lecture on reading and writing in early childhood and I presented the program that I take into schools.


Interview by Brooke Hunter