Busy Busy Busy

I love being busy, but when you are tired you are tired and need rest. I find rest is not in the picture for me anytime soon. Too many things I want to do, too many things I need to do and always the things you must do!

I started out this spring with my want to do list of being outside and doing some gardening and planting a few plants that were being neglected in there root bound pots. I did get that done, so now maybe they will thrive when the roots have somewhere to go.

Another thing on my want list was to do another cloth doll and a PDF pattern for my store. The cloth doll turned out to be a mermaid. Lilly loves mermaids so it inspired me to try to create one. The first pattern was ok, but needed lots of tweaking. The first face was flat, but the end result was a face with a little bit of a profile and that does look so much better especially from a distance since an Art doll is really for display only.The Mermaid in the pic below is the pattern I designed. She has wire in neck, arms and tail, so she can be positioned in different ways and I love that for display purposes. Have I ever mentioned the fact that I love to tear fabric. Funny, but true. I even decorated one of my work tables with strips of torn fabric. So it is fitting that one of the design elements is a rag fin ( torn strips of fabric).   

The Pdf is finished and in my store. I decided to go ahead and put it in even though my summer will be filled with making more, but I will be using the same pattern for them. Every doll I create takes on a life of its own. I show that in the tutorial. I started out with one face and towards the end felt the face did not go, so I changed it. I also show step by step the drawing of the face, but really each face will look different just by positioning the eyes differently or further apart. It is always so much fun to see what face appears!

Lots of pictures in the tutorial. I spent just as much time taking pictures as the making of the doll.

Will There are more mermaids to make so that will help to keep me busy busy! I will post them here as they are finished. I am calling this the summer of the mermaids and really having so much fun making them. I love to embellish and this project is great for using some of the vintage things collected.