Little Bo Peep Applique

My draft of the classic "Little Bo Peep"

       The pattern below is my version of a "Little Bo Peep" figure I found on an early 20th Century crib quilt. Remember to add an additional 1/8 inch seam allowance to the pattern above after tracing each shape separately. This is a early nursery rhyme figure reminds me of the Sunbonnet Sue patterns. 

 
        Origins of The Pattern's Name: "Little Bo Peep" or "Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep" is a popular English language nursery rhyme. The earliest record of this rhyme is in a manuscript of around 1805, which contains only the first verse. There are references to a children's game called "Bo-Peep", from the 16th century, including one in Shakespeare's King Lear (Act I Scene iv), but little evidence that the rhyme existed. The additional verses are first recorded in the earliest printed version in a version of Gammer Gurton's Garland or The Nursery Parnassus in 1810. Older inhabitants of Ninfield, East Sussex (a former smuggling center) will tell you that Bo-Peep was its most famous resident. The story goes that her sheep were walked across the shore to disguise smuggler's footprints. The valley to the south of the A269 in Ninfield joins the Pevensey Level marsh area and was small-boat navigable until the Late Middle Ages. As with most products of oral tradition, there are many variations to the rhyme. The most common modern version is:

Little Bo-Peep has lost her sheep,

And can't tell where to find them;

Leave them alone, And they'll come home,

Wagging their tails behind them.

Little Bo-peep fell fast asleep,

And dreamt she heard them bleating;

But when she awoke, she found it a joke,

For they were still a-fleeting.

Then up she took her little crook,

Determined for to find them;

She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,

For they'd left their tails behind them.

It happened one day, as Bo-peep did stray

Into a meadow hard by,

There she espied their tails side by side,

All hung on a tree to dry.

She heaved a sigh and wiped her eye,

And over the hillocks went rambling,

And tried what she could, as a shepherdess should,

To tack each again to its lambkin.