Evie

My grandma Rajeevi is the inspiration behind my Evie doll. My grandma made lots of grandma's flower garden table cloths all by hand. She crocheted, knitted and sewed a lot. She sewed well into her late 80s.

The idea for making a skirt out of the grandma's flower garden pattern was in my mind for more than a couple of years. Evie's skirt took me about a year(on and off) to finish. The skirt has 360 little 3/8" hexagons and it took more than 10,400 stitches to sew it together. And yes, just like my mamama (grandma), I made it all by hand. The doll pattern is Deanna Hogan's Avril. The mask is mine. This is the third and last one of the "quilt" series of dolls I made with Deanna's pattern.

There is a story behind the embroidery on the neckline of the jumper skirt. My mom sewed me a cozy jacket (on her sewing machine, a hand cranking kind- and I did all the handcranking :-) )with some beautiful light lilac colored flannel when I was 9. And she embroidered some lazy daisies on the bottom of it. The jacked was my favorite and so I used very similar stitches on the doll. My amma (mom) made it prettier with leaves between the flowers and they were of a different color.

Doll Club Doll

Here is Ankisha. I taught the doll to some of my clothdoll club members. The mask is my own and so is the pattern.

October Pindoll.

November Jester Pindoll.

Now I am off to India!

Esmeralda

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.

Background Changes

I changed the background and the banner today. It shows that I actually visited my blog today.

Antique Style Dolls

Has it actually been three months since I made her and gave her to Miss. N's teacher as a gift? She is my second doll from Cindy's antique doll pattern. Cindy did an excellent job of teaching me to paint her and then dress her. It was a new experience for me to pick out the civil war period cloth for the dress.

Pindolls in 2009

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

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.

New Doll

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.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year! May all your wishes come true.

Welcome 2009!

Mermaids for Miss. N

My little Miss N (who isn't that little any more. She is 7!!) and her friend painted the mermaids. They had a ball painting and adding all that glitter. They both picked red hair. It was a pretty simple pattern to make and took very little time. I finished it in 2 days only because I had my kid literally "sitting" on me to finish them. Or else I would have procrastinated as usual.