Doll

revisiting an old friend (design).

Hope everyone had a great weekend! It was gorgeous here in Boston.

Look, look, Look! I won this gorgeous moth when Mister Finch celebrated his 2nd blog birthday- Lucky me! I am so thrilled!!!

His work is amazing and I’ve been stalking his Etsy shop for a while, looking for the perfect piece (usually what I want has just sold). This is the best though! I am going to find the right spot in my studio to hang it up. Then I can get back to his shop and start to shop again- I think my moth might need a friend.

And, I finished up this owl.

I was in the mood for a quick project and this owl body was already sewn and stuffed.

Of course I can make any project more complicated by spending hours picking through my fabrics!

Yesterday I went to the Antique and Vintage Textile Show in Sturbridge, MA. It is about an hour drive from my house and well worth it. There are some amazing things to see- it is like a museum but you can touch everything. Somehow I forgot to bring my camera- oops! If you want to go, there is another show in July and also September. May and September are the big shows, July is a lot quieter.

I had fun looking at amazing antique toile fabrics- the originals that most of what I use is reproduced from. I bought buttons. I hadn’t planned on focusing on that, but I never seem to know until I get there!

I am most excited about these-

I can’t wait to put them on a fox’s jacket!

Today was spent doing a lot of this and that. This morning I collected a pile of dolls and sewed on signature tags and wrote up and attached their hang tags. It is a boring job but it is good to get it out of the way.  I often leave it until the last minute before going to a show and that is only one of the many ways I can make myself crazy. Anyway, all done now.

more of the skeleton fabric but this time in black.

He has long sideburns.

2 pirate pals.

This is the what my son is doing in England- so amazing!

Big News! I will be in San Francisco at the Renegade Market on July 21 and 22. I’m so excited and I hope to see you there!

I’ve had a crazy week that somehow shattered my focus. I seem to be going in all directions and am trying to force myself back on track. I need to focus on finishing all the pieces I’ve started!

Isn’t this amazing skeleton toile? I thought it needed to be a pirate.

I lightened up this photo so you can see the design of the fabric. It started out black and white and I over-dyed it with blue.

We took our annual trip to Logee’s last Sunday. It always feels like a mini-vacation.

and I’m loving working with my new toiles. This one is fantastic-

I’m going to be putting these last 4 fellows into my Etsy shop soon- hopefully tomorrow afternoon. I’m still working on the men though- there will be some more new ones soon.

Here is how he looked as I was working on his face. And now he is finished-

I gave him more prominent ears-

His “belt buckle” is an antique shell button.

whoa!

If you believe that I have control over how these faces turn out, you’d be wrong. I use a water-erasable marker to mark out where the features go and draw in a rough sketch. If I had any real control, all the faces would be the same. But, as you might notice, they don’t because I don’t. I start stitching and whoever it turns out that they are, appears!

And I think this one is particularly appealing!

I spent some time in the garden over the weekend. I worked on the compost pile- which is great news because it means my back is MUCH better- Hurray! My favorite gardening toy is my compost thermometer (I’ve probably mentioned that before) and you can see here that my pile was close to 130 degrees F this morning. That’s my idea of excitement!

The first of this batch.

This toile is beautiful- clear imagery, nice fabric, great scale. Good thing I like it because the remnant I bought is 3 yards! That is a lot of tattoos.