Here is Esmeralda. She is a fall themed doll. After trying out several colors I decided to give her blue hair. Long time ago when I was in a junior college in India, I had taken a batik class. I decided to try out my talent again with this pumpkin batik for the apron. I am pretty happy with the result. I also beaded the apron and the skirt. The hat has lots of swarovski crystals and also sequence.
The doll is my own pattern and I also made her face mask.
This year I have made four pindolls. I am making the fifth one as I speak (in my head :-) ). The theme for May is "Favorite Candy".
January's theme was "Chinese Dragons". In February we made a pindoll from a card. I forgot to take a picture of the doll with the card so I only have the doll picture. In March we made a pindoll from a card. I do have a picture of the card and the doll together. April theme was "Circus Performers" and I made an acrobat. I could not find the picture of the bumble bee. Got to seach for that.
Alyssa is my second doll from Averil pattern by Deanna. She was very happy all along while I was making her and not to mention very patient. The buttons were so much fun to sew on and the dress was pretty easy to make too. I cut up pieces from another cloth and stitched them on the skirt cloth. Except for the vest, all the other parts of her clothing have unfinished seams with edges raveling. Her only prop is a ceramic bead made by my little girl. I used Tibetan lamb's wool for her hair which I dyed bright red.
This morning I went back to the posts from 2006 looking for the time when I first started this doll. I don't think I wrote about her back in December 2006 when I started working on her. I remember admiring a little doll in pink clothes by my good friend at the doll club and that started the whole pink colored "saga". Two of the three dolls that I started were pink. The third one was from a blue fabric. All three were Deanna Hogan's Avril pattern. I decided that I could get pretty fast at the dolls if I make them all together. I did not think it would take me so long to finish them. I love that pattern and I did finally learn to make the doll joints like she teaches. I used those joints for the third doll.
Now there is a story behind the face too. I had taken a face sculpting class from Barbara Willis sometime in 2007 and so I decided to try my hand with sculpting the head. This is my sixth head/face and I am getting a little better with them each time.
This doll has an off white skirt. I used some applique flowers and buds, some beading and a whole lot of echo quilting using a pink colored quilting thread. This doll has a paper clay face and some jazzy dark brown yarn for hair. I tried using magenta colored yarn for her hair. That was baaaad! I am working on the second doll and hope to finish her soon. I do not have names yet. Any suggestions?
Any lessons learned? Yes a few: 1. Don't start three dolls all at once. 2. Do not use the same color on both/all three of them. 3. But do make dolls which you like to make, to play with and enjoy. 4. Also do not hurry. I thought about these dolls, talked to them and created them in my head a lot of times these past couple of years. All of those lovely moments I would not have, had I finised them - all together and all at once - in December 2006.
Of all the books and patterns in that box of goodies from my garage, I was just thrilled to find my "How Many Angels Can Dance? pattern book by Elinor Peace Bailey. I feel very happy and at ease when I work on her patterns. So guess what? I picked a couple of her patterns to make gifts for Miss.N's second grade teachers. The first one is called "Arm Full of Angels" and the second one is called "Little Tyke Angel".
November theme at my pindoll club was quilts. I used the traditional quilt pattern called Sun Bonnet Sue and mixed it with the crazy quilting technique to make the pindoll.
