Long Time No See and A Little Bit of Lovey

Lovey 

upcycled fabric, felt, yarn, thread and vintage doll clothes.

approx 18" tall.

What does one do when one hasn't posted in months and months?

One doesn't wait any longer to make it perfect, one just posts.

And so, I'd like you to meet Lovey.

I made Lovey out of upcycled fabric and leftover felt and yarn stash. She was my daughter's fifth birthday present. I worked on her for quite a few evenings after the kids went to bed. It was good to get back into a creative habit again. I love to figure out how to do things as I go along. I actually designed her to be the same size as an American Girl type doll, well, the Madame Alexander one that my daughter has. If you look carefully, you can see that the shoes are actually store bought plastic ones. I think they are the Target brand. The adorable sailor girl outfit is actually a vintage outfit that my mother in law gave me. It has matching bloomers. The plaid tights are the legs themselves. The face is appliqued wool felt... so I guess she doesn't get thrown in the washing machine. 

 

The hair was the scariest thing to tackle. I never really knew how to do doll hair, so I searched pinterest and came up with quite a few tutorials to figure out how I was going to do it. In the end, I decided to follow the tutorial on bybido. I'm not 100% familiar with her blog, but I can tell you that her dolls are ABSOLUTELY adorable. She knows what she's doing. It's interesting how much you can learn when you search around for different tutorials. I almost never follow one tutorial. I almost always take a bit of this and a bit of that from different places. As for Lovey, I pretty much winged her until the hair, ("winged?"), and then I learned so much from the way other people sew dolls that I feel like next time it will be much easier to make one. I know for sure that I will suck it up and take out my sewing machine. The big thing scares me sometimes, but I think a machine sewed head and body would be much neater than my hand stitching. Oh I suppose I could just learn to be a better seamstress, but... oh well. It's all part of the process, and I am working on it.  

And that's what posting again really comes down to. I'm getting back to my creative habit.  I get burned out on nanowrimo and the holidays and then I'm hit with the winter blahs and the winter flu and so on. I'm becoming familiar with my pattern. I'm not sure I like it, but perhaps making peace with it would be better than just getting frustrated with myself. 

So, in the spirit of getting back to the making of art and writing and crafting, I am going to start posting again.  I have a lot of crafts that I can show you guys. I've been going like crazy for my daughters birthday party, which was this past weekend, and I have all sorts of paper crafts and such to show you. So much of it was inspired by pinterest. I wonder if my activity on pinterest and my inactivity on my blog isn't perhaps not so coincidental. Hmmm....

Anyway, here's to being productive and creative again. 

I hope to see you around.