definition- a turning aside (of your course or attention or concern)

That’s what happened to me, right after I finished Night Lady. I had the doll that became Nature lady cut out and the machine stitching done. It was time to stuff, construct and embroider. Instead I started thinking about the next project in the line- more tattooed men. I needed to gather the toile and dye it to flesh tones. I thought I would do that while working on the nature lady doll. yeah…

What happened was that I couldn’t find the scrap toile I bought on Ebay in January. It turns out to be difficult to find toile that works well- I need blue or black printed on white or cream, the images need to be clear, the scale has to be right. I somehow totally lucked out when I bought some scraps on Etsy last summer that I used on this guy. So, after looking in the obvious places, I ended up pulling everything in my studio apart, going through all the bins of fabric in the studio and then the back storage. That lead to sorting through papers, clearing out and reorganizing a bookcase, listing books to sell on Amazon (I call that as “un-buying”), packing up and shipping the 7 books I’ve sold so far (!), thorough vacuuming, etc., etc.! I did finally find the fabric, folded inside some wool fabric that was ready for dyeing. I didn’t find it until I’d given up and decided to dye the wool and so the bag got emptied and the fabric sorted. Oh well, it most certainly needed to get done.

I “processed” some recyclables- un-constructed, washed, bagged-

I pulled out all the striped fabrics that will be needed for the tattoo guys-

I did some more dye testing on various wools-

And finally- the toiles and other “soon to be tattooed people” fabrics.

And then I finished the nature lady.