Counting down to another doll show...

But it doesn't feel like "just" another doll show, since it's my first one here in Arizona.  Feels like I'm starting over, and I'm nervous.  The long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs comes to mind.

My dolls are much better than they were in the days when I first began w/ doll shows, however, so I will trust that this condition is simply nerves about who I'll meet and will I like them.  I admit it's a mark of either bull-headedness or advancing age that my concern is no longer "will they like me?"  Haha! 

I recently designed a new line of dolls I call "Zodiac Babies" because I initially thought of them with seasonal or monthly-calendar colors/themes when I began.  That set of themes has stayed with some and been abandoned with others, but the direction was useful in its way.  I have only finished one of them right down to the clothes, but others are well on their way.

For now, I'll post a photo of the little girl inspired by our years in San Antonio, and I'll post others as I get them dressed. 

Doll show post mortem...

In a word, it went well.  Not as well as the UFDC convention, but that was a one-off anyway, so now I'm jaded.  Haha! 

The actual attendance--on terms of customers and venders both--was amazingly low, and Dorothy sent out poling letters to the vendors to ask for feedback.  Turns out that most vendors did well enough, despite the low attendance, to vote Keep the Schertz Show, but Change the Dates.  This was the third show in September, so we can assume that timing was the issue.  The site itself (Schertz Civic Center) is one of my favorites--well appointed, spacious, great parking, and easy load/unload access for vendors.  So, now the date is back to August, and we'll see what happens next year. 

One of my students from the first art doll class brought her finished doll--I was so pleased to see her!  This sweet dolly was inspired by the old chinas, and Joann found an antique dress that just fit her perfectly.  Hard to believe the girl had never made a doll in her life, isn't it?

Joann's doll is there against the "class dolls" I brought in attempt to fill tables.  Since this summer's UFDC convention went so well, I didn't have quite the set-up of dolls I had planned for, and one whole table would have gone empty.  So I brought along some "works in progress" and a small display for the hands-on doll class.  I figured I like to see how an artist makes his or her art, so maybe customers would too.  Some folks were blind as ever--amazing how many people can be LOOKING at a sign, and not see it.  But there were a few collectors interested in the class, and I'll have to add a weekend class once in a while for week-day workers.

 

The Lace Lady was there, up from Corpus Christi.  Her actual name is Judy.  Of course, her Bill was there too--he's good support and stoically helps her haul and set up, sitting with her through at least half the day.  She's probably the one vendor I always purchase from at doll shows, because her selection of antique textiles is so great, and she saves me "odd bits" in a bag for a lot price.  Just enough of this bit or that to hem a petticoat or chemise.  This time I actually bought some antique slips and a skirt for the fabric, and she's promised to bring me the Swiss batiste she has, come February.  Hard stuff to come by.  She's also fun to visit with, and we like to yabber about stitching--she's a talented quilter--and creative ideas.

So the show went well, not a huge profit, but lots of fun, sold some dolls, and learned more about what works and what doesn't.  I'm getting good enough at setting up that my time is down--from the nine hours it used to take me to right around four--which includes a little fiddling around with details.

Currently I am working on another Molly Doll, a large Izannah, and a small Izannah for commissions, and enjoying the cooler fall temperatures (high yesterday was only 82 degrees!).  The little Izannah and Molly below have homes--one is on her way to Georgia, and the other will join her new mom in Florida.

Hope all is well with you!

A class doll and puppy update.

Not much to say about the puppy update--he's fine!  His stitches come out this coming Friday, but they are so far not really bothering him a bit, so he's had very little time with the dreaded Lampshade Collar. In this photo he looks really sad, but he's just lounging on the fluffy blanket. 

The class doll is from the pattern I include in both my hands-on and online doll class.  The class teaches how to make a doll using a pre-made paper clay mask, and includes a pattern for the doll and her dress.  The hands-on class includes the fabric for the doll, (with the head/torso already sewn, stuffed, and treated) and the paper clay mask. 

I'm still amazed at how many ways this simple face can go.  I've done up three of them, Dorothy did one, and I just worked up another, this one to serve as my Doll Class Spokes-Lady at doll shows.  Her hair is more of a 1940's young lady style...I've changed it a little since this photo was taken, but this is basically it.  Now to make her dress fit that era.  Maybe a ruffly pinafore apron?

Hope your weekend is lovely, dahlinks.

More finished dolls...

I've just about finished all the things I "had" to do regarding UFDC.  Of course, I'd love to have finished the OTHER half of the dolls, but as they work very well in their "in process" stages for the seminar, they're coming along anyway.

But here are two more.  I posted Tuxedo Kitty yesterday on FB, and Hugo today. 

Somebody once told me that I seldom make a doll with a smile.  I realized she was right.  I've always been a little leery of smiling dolls (call it the Chucky Factor?), so I set out to challenge myself.  These guys are okay...

Works in progress...

Between the gardening, selling two more rent houses, and preparing for the UFDC convention this summer, I'm feeling a little scattered.  My dolls are taking the brunt of it all, but maybe that's a good thing.  The ones who have sat, ignored in favor of the Izannahs, are finally being finished, and one new one is in the works because, well, just because.

I had a cleaning frenzy a while back, and during this frenzy I vowed to FINISH all the started projects so that I could start new ones later this year.  Easier said than done, but I've made a few inroads with some of the poor dears. 

This one is a cloth and clay doll with a small version of Connie's Columbian body.  She needed a wig, and I'd had a long black wig on her...but it just didn't work for me.  So she traded with a doll-in-progress, and they both seemed to benefit.  Here are photos of before and after the switch...

Baby Agnes, before

Dragonfly Dancer, before

And then I discovered that they wore the same size wig.  Hmmm....

I love the red hair!

Iridescent colors around her eyes...

 

 

While I was gathering up To Be Finished dolls, I found this poor thing, who was assembled sometime early 2013.  There was no sculpting, just an egg head with eyes...she looked pretty weird for a while. But now she's sculpted, so least she can be Weird With Attitude.  I plan to paint her as a contemplative (plotting?) version of the Queen of Hearts.

So much potential after the initial white wash!

Then there was this rabbit fellow, and his buddy.  I used a cat food can (don't tell!) and created a top to fit it, so now it's an Easter Candy Container.  Call it "Spring on Bloom Hill".  His little bucket is so tiny--way smaller than the end of my pinky finger--and it swings on its handle.

 

There seems to be a preponderance of rabbit dolls this year, but I think I'll just go with it and see what happens.  The following is the rabbit doll I'd posted about earlier (or did I?) and then some little spool dolls that sort of "fill in the cracks" at doll shows. 

Well, that's all for now.  I have chores to do, which don't involve dolls (how sad is that?).  Hope your week is fabulous, dahlink!

Jocasta

I call her that because everybody should have a name, right?  But I didn't give her a name in her Ebay Listing, because someone told me that naming them puts some people off.  Maybe so?  My answer is to compromise.  I'll give them names in the Etsy store and at doll shows, but on Ebay, they'll just be dolls.  Not sure if that counts as a controlled experiment, but oh well.

At any rate, this wee girlie went on Ebay this afternoon.  She's the first of the March Madness dolls, finished and looking for a new home.

Hope everybody has a fabulous weekend!  (My hubby has promised me we'll go get more landscaping rocks: color me happy!)

Summertime and the living is...air conditioned.

It's just about the time of year that I hibernate for summer.  Actually it's a little late for my annual indoor retreat, but I've had a job of landscaping to do, and am still (sort of) working on it.  But only a few hours in the morning, rather than six or eight hours a day like I've been doing.

HUGE changes in the yard...I'll post pictures as soon as we get the rock spread in the limestone walkway I'm digging across the front.  But all the beds I want to dig for this year are in, and now it's down to keeping it alive over the summer.  Helps to have a smaller yard!

In the meantime, the hubby has built the most wonderful sewing cubby for me, enabling me to create a multi-functional workspace with the rest of the room.  So now I have a cubicle for sewing, a wall of table space with separate areas for painting and sculpting...shelving for the Fabric Stash, and the old entertainment center he'd built ages ago for storage of all that crap I can never resist bring home.

I have dithered about this last week, knowing I could really get started if I'd just do it.  But the problem has been that I'm down to a certain hard part of doll making that wears me out, and since I began a dozen or more dolls last March (and did all the fun part), I have LOTS of this hard part to do.  Namely: hands.

The pattern piece for the separate thumb is as small as a pea in some cases, and sewing those tiny thumbs on, stuffing those tiny fingers...well, let's just say this is not an instant gratification part of the doll making.  BUT I started, so the momentum will carry me through.  Sorta like going to the gym.

Hope everyone is staying in out of the heat--or if you live in a place with cold winters and lovely summers, staying out in the sunshine.  I personally am enjoying the AC and some old movies while I sew.
Cheers!

Some of the Izannah dolls I began last March...

Wee little digits for each and every one.

Izzy Heads! Or...two thirds of a pun: P.U.

I'm learning to make plaster molds.  The basic principle is fairly simple, when you get right down to the chemistry and physics of it.  Of course, the basic principle of aerodynamic flight is simple too, but you don't see me zooming around with my arms out.

I have some Izzy head & torso sets all made up and ready to paint...I'd sculpted their faces and were happy with them, but they won't do for making a mold because they are cloth heads sewn onto bodies in a unit. 

What I need are just the heads.  So I made molds of the faces with Amazing Mold Putty.  Then I made paper clay "masks" using those molds.  Then I made heads with balled-up foil as an armature, and applied the paper clay masks of the previously sculpted faces. This took a ridiculously long time.

I'd thought this would save time, but it might have been faster to start from scratch over the foil, and re-sculpt the faces.  The proportion gave me fits, but it finally came out all right.  I ended up with four heads, three of which I was willing to use to record for posterity in pressed cloth dolls.

A friend of mine said, "Do NOT stick those good heads in plaster until you try a practice one!"  Or something to that effect.  She was right--I had not planned to do so, but that was the smart thing.  Sooooo I used the fourth head...sealed with Modge Podge and then sprayed with cooking oil as a mold release.  The head released well and without damage, and I was satisfied I could proceed with the "real" ones.

Life intervened with chores and more chores, paperwork and more paperwork.  When I did get back to the plaster, I was so impatient to get started!  SO impatient, in fact, that I...forgot the mold release spray.  By the time I realized what I had done, I was barely able to save them.  One came out with a minor scratch here and there, the other two are "in the shop" for repairs.  (The shop, in this case, is the oven where they are drying with their paper clay patches.) 

Lesson learned?  Slow down.  Breathe.  Pay attention.  Count off a checklist...whatever it takes, but don't get a-head of your self, or you will lose. your. heads. 

I would apologize for that horrible, double, almost-pun, but I really have to laugh at this point to keep from crying.  More on the Mold Making Progress later.  Right now I have to take my head(s) out of the oven.

Saying goodbye

to Emily Rose, Violet, and Amador.  They're off to find a new life.
It's been fun having them around, but I have a feeling they'll like where they're going.
Bye guys.

On Humility, Mr. Miyagi, and New Izzies.

PLEASE NOTE THE NEW URL.  (Thanks.)

I'm trying out a revised version of Dixie Redmond's Izannah Walker doll pattern, the one I got when I took her class last summer.  I made the following four dolls from her original pattern, (although one of them had a styrofoam head, so only her body was from the pattern) and learned a lot.  Here are those dolls (last two sold on Etsy, first two did not.) 

So those are Izzies #1 thru 4.  I waited a while to make more...not on purpose (I don't think), and then the bug got me and I had to try again.  Of course, initially, I did what I tend to do--which is get all excited and think I'm finished after the first attempt, which is "pretty good".  But the sad showing one of my dolls is making on an Ebay auction prompted me to get over myself and really take stock.  Nothing throws cold water on an ego like Zero Bids and this being my first time to put anything on Ebay...well, you get the picture.

So I looked at the dolls at that stage, and realized I had done what my art teachers warned about...I drew my version of a tree rather than a real tree.

Ah so, grasshopper...now it is time to
Go back.
Look closely.
And this time...SEE. 

My muse, instead of the floaty-fairy kind my writer friends all seem to have, is a stunted, grouchy, Mr. Miyagi sort of fellow.  He basically made me understand that the reason my doll isn't selling on Ebay was that she was one of my first two dolls.  But Mr. Miyagi...my other two sold for over $200 each!  Doesn't that prove I did great?  His answer: Tell that to the Watchers on Ebay. 

Hard on the ego, but true, none the less.  Then he asked me (please don't send for the guys w/ white coats...I promise I'm okay): Do you want an army of these little dolls, unsold, sitting around the house?  My answer of course was no, to which he replied "THEN STOP PHONING IT IN."  A most un-Miyagi construct, isn't it?  But I knew exactly what he meant.

So I spent another several hours, adding, subtracting...reshaping the already thrice reshaped. (I never get to use the word thrice...isn't it cool?)  Then another several hours, from breakfast to lunch yesterday. 

The revision I made to Dixie's pattern is in the head shape--a thinner neck, which I will later re-thicken, along with some basic changes in the shape of the head/face pieces.  The Revised Revision of the sewing pattern will need still more changes, but I have these four to a place that satisfies me.

They're not "there" yet.  But I'm closer.  

I didn't phone it in: I really looked this time.  

So Mr. Miyagi...back off a while. 

Besides, an army of little Almost Izzies sitting around might be kinda fun.