Skip to main content

More on messing about with moon faced dolls. As you do ...

 

Well, my Bank Holiday Monday got off to a nice start.  I've made a sale on Etsy.  I'd listed a patchwork quilt top, an English paper pieced one that I'd done ages ago but never got around to adding wadding and backing material.  I offered it for sale as a project someone else might like to complete, and it'd been listed for months, long enough for me to think only yesterday that I ought to take the listing down.  The amount I asked for the patchwork isn't anything much compared to the sheer number of hours paper piecing takes, but that's fine.  I'm more than happy to have it packaged up and ready to be posted to its new home.  Hopefully to be finally made up into a proper quilt and provide someone with warmth and a feeling of accomplishment.  
I spent yesterday morning making this very speedy little fabric bowl.  It's a bit rough 'n' ready, but I can pass that off as boho style!!!  I cut a circle out of felt, then cut a strip of felt that was as wide as I wanted the depth of my fabric bowl to be, and an inch or so longer than the circumference of the felt circle.  I sewed scraps of material on the outer side of the strip, then joined it to the circle to make my bowl's base and sides.  
I added decorative beads, sequins, running stitch, chain stitch and slightly wonky feather stitch, which was the fun part.  However, what I realised afterwards was that I should've done all that fancy stuff before I'd sewed my side strip to the circular base, not after.  
All those stitches used to embellish the scrappy patches of fabric caused the felt to shrink a little.  It means the sides pull upward, showing the circular base instead of that base lying flat.  Does that make sense?  I think you can see what I mean from the photos.  Anyway, it's not a big deal as this was just a quick let's-try-this kind of crafty make, and it's not like I'm a perfectionist!  If you're someone who makes snippet rolls, a fabric bowl would be an ideal use for your snippets, and another good way of using up those tiny fabric scraps too pretty to throw away.  
Yesterday I also finished reading this.  It's a wonderful, grim but also darkly amusing book, and Belle is quite a gal.  If you fancy a slice of murderous Norwegian-American Gothic then keep an eye out for this novel.  It'd make a cracking film, though you might be watching part of it between your fingers, grimacing and wincing as the 'heroine' wields her cleaver yet again ...
Let's move on to more wholesome pursuits, shall we?  
With these stylized dolls that I'm making, I finished this pink one, and was pretty pleased with how it turned out.  
I haven't embroidered the back of it.  
I added the beads at the base of it, but later decided they didn't look quite right.  I knew it'd bother me if I didn't undo them and re-thread them in a different arrangement.  
The details on the face are minimal, and I resisted the urge to add eyebrows or hair.  I wasn't after anything realistic, only the suggestion of features.  
A couple more of these dolls are in the production line too.  

Hope your day's going well.  More from me and my idiosyncratic crafty imaginings to come, so do wander back to my blog and keep an eye on what's happening.  Bye for now.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Threads of Freedom and charity shop bargains

  It's Saturday afternoon, and I haven't done half the things I'd meant to.  Partly because I spent most of this morning messing about with paints, stencils and the gell plate.  Never mind, everything on today's 'To Do' list will join tomorrow's 'To Do' list ... it's hardly life or death if I don't haul the hoover around the room or pull up weeds in the front garden.   I thought I'd show you what I made on Wednesday.  I'd gone to my monthly StitchArt group, and this time we did something a little different.  There's a project called 'Threads of Freedom' which is working with various community groups across the city.  It's about creating little stitched pieces, some of which will be included in a textile panel to go on display at Leeds art gallery.  There was lots of fabric we could choose from to sew with, and I picked this vintage tray cloth with the roses embroidery.   My own embroidery's not a patch on those flo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Another week's flown by ...

  Saturday's rolled around again, and it's not been the most eventful of days.  Cleaning and hoovering, a walk to the shops to buy groceries, an hour on the allotment, then home to do some odd tasks in the garden.  The strawberry plants are sending out runners, so I've been dealing with those, plus deadheading the perennial sunflowers, and cutting back the gone-over flowers on the sage and marjoram.  I'm sad to see those blooms gone as the bees loved them.  This afternoon I spent a few hours finishing 'Dawnlands' by Philippa Gregory.   It's a really good book, a page turner where you care about the characters and want to be reassured everything's going to work out well for them.  Plus you become enraged about the corruption of the so-called justice system at the time of the Stuart kings and queens, about transportation of prisoners to the West Indies, and about the vile nature of the sugar trade in the 1600s and the vast profits made from it....
Post a Comment
Read more

Folding a zine and an alternative use for a bank card

  Hello again, and excuse me while I scratch my insect bites.  I don't know what it is, but at this time of year I'm invariably itching like crazy because I've been bitten by bugs.  It seems to coincide with blackberry-picking season, but whether that's purely coincidental I don't know.  Whatever's biting me, I'm obviously a tasty morsel in their world!  I might try using a highly scented oil like Tea Tree oil, see if that deters them.  Anyway, let's get on to more pleasant matters -  I'm having a go at making a zine style booklet.  Because I didn't have any paper large enough, I joined together two A3 sheets of sketchpad paper, using torn pieces of book pages for the joining.  I thought that'd look less noticeable than packing tape or similar.  Having chosen my colour scheme I used acrylic paint and an unwanted plastic bank card to apply the paint.  Plus a stencil, sponge and modelling paste.  Applying paint with a ATM card wa...
Post a Comment
Read more