I’ve been on a doll making kick lately. My current project is still a secret squirrel (old cartoon reference) project so I can’t show you any pictures yet, but here are some of the more recent non-secret squirrel projects.
This is a kinda bizarre wire and bead chick with a push mold face made of paper clay. Her hair is just wads of thread ends and angelina glued to her head (I think that’s what I did anyway). I save all my thread ends in a beautiful glass pitcher that I picked up at a junk sale and you’d be surprised how often I dig use them in some project. She currently hangs out on the fridge and slightly freaks out the grandkids.
I’d like you to meet Steampunk(ish) Steve. He’s my 1st paperclay hand-sculpted guy. His face and torso are sculpted over wads of foil and I painted him with plain old fabric paint when the clay was dry. I think he’s moderately successful for a 1st try. His clothes are made from the stabilizer from the inside of regular old guys ties.The stabilizer was just cut and hand-stitched on the body without any particular plan or thought. I use the actual outside of tie to make small bags – which I had planned on posting but for some reason, the pictures don’t want to show up….anyway, he has a powerpack filled with paper beads, on his back made from a plastic media storage thingy that would have been in the landfill. The eyeballs are from the infamous stash of eyeballs mentioned in a previous post. The potions bottle attached to his waist is a nitro bottle (empty- expired, not used) from my hubby and Steampunk(ish) Steve has a few small gears and doodads for extra power. He was great fun and I can see myself exploring this further.
This is my loooong legged lady. She has wire bones and has been wrapped with batting and layers and layers of fabric strips with miles of handstitching holding the whole thing together. Her corset top was made by tons of free-motion stitching over piles of thread ends enclosed in water soluble stabilizer, which was mostly rinsed out. Her hands and face were made separately and attached after the body was completed. Her huge diamond is a REAL diamond – or maybe a rhinestone button. Her hair is some roving that was dyed and accidentally felted by my friend DebH (SeaAirArts.blogspot.com – go look, I’ll wait here). She is inspired by a doll in one of my books. I don’t know the name of the book at this point, but if anyone is interested let me know and I’ll be glad to post the info when I unearth it from the studio debris.
I have many, many more dolls laying about my dwelling but I’ll save them for another day.
In the meantime, I’d like you to meet some of my sock monkeys. I was actually going to tell you about Fred (another cat -but don’t tell him, he thinks he’s my baby), but apparently his pictures are off in the interweb land with the tie bags…I blame sunspots…
Fiber Shenanigans 
