A day to rest and play

I have finished 5 more costumes for the paper dolls I'll be giving my mother on Saturday when we have our Christmas gathering.

It actually was a lot of fun creating these, so now I just have to do a couple more background drawings and put the whole packet together.

I'm hoping to have all of that done today.



Meantime, yesterday I was resting my back, and finished up this wool hat that will be the first of my pieces to be sent off to a charity group for 2008.

This is knit of a double strand of homespun, and it was actually very easy once I got through the "how do I do garter stitch in the round" stupidity -- its nice that I could call our family knitting expert (my sister) and have her 'splain it to me!



And under the catagory of "out of site, out of mind", you may recall way last June I was talking about working on an art doll. (If you want to refresh your memory, here's a link to that post.)

At the time I was thinking about entering it in a competition, but I just never got it done for that, and frankly I sometimes (ok, MOST of the time) have a hard time making something for some pre-stated theme, and if I'm going to enter something somewhere, I need to have something in process already that will just (by magic?) fit the theme. But I digress.....

Anyway, one of my Christmas presents was the Winter 2008 Art Doll Quarterly (and if you haven't seen this publication, you really should take a look), which got me excited about finishing this doll project with a theme of my very own.

Soooooo, this is the completed face .... the base is made of a cotton blend fabric, filled with polyfill and the entire face covered with size 15 seed beads (size 11s didn't allow for enough detail to get this look). So now I can sew the head onto the body (which has been sitting headless since June), and I'm thinking about wigging.

My new idea about this has to do with a twist on an old theme. For ages there has been a tradition of Peddlar Dolls which usually are depicted as an elderly lady accompanied with all of the sewing notions she is "peddling".

I'm thinking about using the idea of the multi-media artist as the theme, and including items that reflect all of the many materials and techniques that I use to create all of the pieces I do. We'll see how this all comes together.

So today there will be wrapping of presents for Saturday's gathering, and finishing of paperdolls and scrubbing and soaking a dry cure ham (which will be Saturday's dinner) and along the way some work on some other projects too....

time to get moving