Back in September 2014 I decided to make some Victorian mixed media collage and paper-clay faced art dolls. So, combining my love of dolls with my decades long experience with sewing and crafting and utilizing everything I've learned in all the online classes I'd taken I decided that was the time to make those dolls. I tend to favor stump dolls, shelf sitters, and faceless dolls and knew these would be no exception.
I wanted to utilize some of the molds I had bought several years before when I was enthralled with goddess dolls. Given I never seem to have enough time for doing what I want to do right then and there my goddess dolls had sat on the back burner for several years.
Back then I decided to make some Victorian wooden dolls - some with paper-clay faces, some with paper-clay mannequin faces, some with paper faces. Their outfits were be a combination of fabric, lace, paper, creative embroidery embellishments, ribbon silk floral, beads, etc.
For their hair I utilized some of the alpaca yarn my sister, who is the owner of Rock Garden Alpacas Fiber, had given me. I had some alpaca yarn fiber from Cosmo, Zinnia, Sunflower, Ivy,and Masquerade. All was hand-spun, but some she had single plied and some she had Navajo plied.
Back in September 2014 when I was doing a little cleaning of my craft area I had found some 3/4" wood shelf sitter shapes that my husband had cut out for me several years before. I had intended to make a painted figure of some sort out of them and decided to create two witches with paper-clay faces.
I was happy with the way the shelf sitter witches turned out so I decided to make a bunch of templates of different shapes and sizes that my younger brother and husband could use for cutting the wood dolls that I wanted to make.
Since I never do anything in moderation I ended up with several templates - okay, make that lots of templates utilizing different lengths, widths, and depths of wood. It took us a long time to draw, cut and sand the wood pieces. By the time I was finished I had 41 dolls to make. I told you I never do anything in moderation!
After working on my dolls for what seemed like weeks on end I finally finished them and they are shown in the picture above. At the time I was happy how most of them came out and unsatisfied with the way some had come out.
As with everything I do I always need to tweak them and sometimes totally revise them. I can do this days, weeks, months, years and even decades after having created them. My mixed media paper-clay art dolls were no exception. For some reason I decided to take a look at them and ended up revising many of them and tweaking others a little.
Sometimes the reason for the revision or tweaking is because I had bought a new craft supply item, gotten some new graphic images, or learned a new technique that I wanted to try. Such was the case with these dolls.
So, I spent all last week revising and tweaking them. Not only was I really happy with the way they all came out, but hubby commented that he really liked the changes as well. I think he was probably happy that they were done and the living room, which is where I've been crafting lately wasn't a total mess.
As any crafter knows, crafting is messy and it requires a lot of space and a lot of different supplies. Since I'm very particular with regards to how my craft supplies are stored and organized I had containers all over the living room. A totally organized mess in my mind. Messy in his....haha.
I know that I've mentioned many times over the years how I craft all over the house. In fact, there's probably more craft supplies and finished pieces in the house than anything else we might have. I still think I need a bigger house, but hubby doesn't have the same frame of mind. He wants to go smaller. So, I utilize whatever space I have whether it's in the living room, dining room, family room, bedroom, garage or basement. As is said I craft all over the house...haha.
I'm going to be blogging individually on some of the changes I made over the next few weeks and hope you stay tuned to see all the changes. The finished dolls are in the picture at the beginning of this post and shown in the picture below. I hope you like the revisions and tweaks I made.
Hopefully I won't revise them again. I wouldn't bet on that if I was you... haha.
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