Friday is For Relaxing

It's Friday today and I was planning on taking the day off and relaxing a bit, since I usually work through the weekend anyway. It's a rainy day and seems like the thing to do. It's almost noon, though, and I still have to go through photos and list my rat girls on Etsy, so perhaps the sitting back and being chill is going to have to happen later. Ah well, the life of a country doll maker :)

I have 5 new rats done for the week. It actually takes a lot longer to make each one than I imagined would be the case, but I am still having fun, so it's my little labor of love. I have continued to find little furniture pieces for them, and can now switch things in and out and change it up a bit. At least the rats can relax, as they have some furniture that fits them, a room to sit in, and they haven't much to do for the day other than look pretty and sit.

I seem to have gone a little miniature crazy. Besides a few more pieces of furniture, I have gone onto Amazon (usually a big mistake) and found some books on miniatures. I almost can't resist. Everything is just so darned cute! I hope I can find others who are interested in doing little 1/12 scale things. It's really quite fun.

If you don't require umpteen million books to satisfy your curiosity, a lot of the stuff can be had for cheap. There are little furniture kits and also used furniture available out there for in the $10 range, so that as a weekend project you could paint a little chair and have something to add to your scene without feeling like you spent all your hard earned money.

Hopefully you will find a bit of charm in my rats and rabbits and other tinies and see potential for your own scenes and room settings. The stuffed things also go nicely in Blythe scenes if you aren't for the teeny tiny miniature stuff.

My plan for the weekend is to make a few dresses for the rat girls and maybe look into some things for the walls of my little room box. I haven't worked on putting together any faux paintings yet, and I think that might be fun.

I am inspired a little by the old-timey children's books with their illustrations of animals in little jackets and trousers. I want my little rat girls to be a little less countrified, and more city fancy, but the works of Beatrix Potter and Tasha Tudor certainly come to mind.

We are running into a cold snap here for the week, so staying inside seems again the thing to do. It won't be long before winter hits here, and even this morning we had a tiny dusting of snow, and still there are little flakes flitting around outside my window. Nothing sticking yet, but it won't be long.  I hope this is a good weekend for you.  Stay warm.  Stay creative and always find time to play.

Cloth Invasion

I was a cloth doll artist before I got bitten by the plastic doll bug. I haven't made a cloth doll in probably 2 years. This past week I got the urge. I think it was that i had broken some plastic part while customizing a plastic doll that got me thinking, "Wouldn't it be nice to be able to just toss a doll here or there and not worry about breaking it?" I am not all that gentle with my plastic dolls. I take a lot of photos and they do get tossed to and fro. Often I have to give them a bit of freshening up after a mishap. With cloth dolls, they are really meant to be tossed here and there. Throw them on the bed, on a shelf, on a dresser. They fall on the floor sometimes. Children have been known to yank a leg off now and again. They are sweet, but maybe not quite that precious. The dolls, not the children :)

I made a basket full of dolls over the week. I think the big sad-eyed thing has gone into my brain and is trapped there and can't get out. My cloth dolls came out with giant eyes and sad faces. I deemed them orphans. There is a hill across from my home that my family and I sometimes walk up. It is called Hedgehog Hill. I am not sure why, as there are no hedgehogs in Vermont, but that's how it goes sometimes. They probably should have called it Porcupine Hill, but maybe that name was already taken. In any case, I imagined these little sad orphan girls to live in an imaginary orphanage on Hedgehog Hill and named them the Hedgehog Hill girls. They want new homes.

The faces on the dolls are handpainted and sealed. The bodies are muslin with black cotton permanent boots and a corset. They have silk, cotton, lace and tulle tattered dresses that are tea-stained or hand-dyed by me. They have yarn hair. Yarn is something I have had a lot of over the years. There is a yarn shop not that far from me that has the most glorious yarns. I buy all my yarn there. It is generally quite spendy because it is mostly natural fibers and sometimes hand-dyed or even hand-spun. I can recall paying as much as $40 a skein for some of it. At the time I was left wondering what a full sweater would cost at that price.

I am still working in plastic. I just wanted a diversion. I always seem to have one. Sometimes it's paperdolls, sometimes something else. I like the softness of these dolls and I like tattered dresses. I have a feeling I am going to need a very big basket at some point, as I had quite a lot of fun making these.

Hope if you are in the northern hemisphere, you are easing into fall and crisp weather. If you are in the southern, it must be turning green all around you and perhaps just as crisp.