Two honey mimics are moving right along. The bodies and heads have been cast and sanded. Their limbs are complete. One dress is complete (although, I still may make a small ruff collar for her) and the other is about a third of the way finished. A have a bowl that is multiplying ornaments. I will be filling any holes from air pockets tonight and will start painting tomorrow or Wednesday. My goal is to have these two finished up this week. Here is a peek of them unpainted with their limbs and clothing pinned on. All of the fabrics are dyed with either tea or turmeric... or a combination of the two. 
Everything has to be finished prior to June 3rd for Awesome Con. I have to really kick myself into high gear this month. I know there is more that I wanted to comment on, but I am feeling rather brain dead today and am drawing a complete blank. Oh well, I will assume it was nothing of great importance. Time to get back to sewing!

This month has been going smoothly without any progress stagnation. It is so refreshing after the first three months of this year being so bumpy. I believe I mentioned before that I had to move all of my mold making and casting from my home when my daughter was born, so I am only able to work on casting on the weekends. My time was limited last weekend, but I was able to cast the first honey mimic and a set of ornaments. I did not, however, have time to sand, drill, and glue the doll and ornaments. I will get to that this weekend and be able to paint her in the next couple of days. I was able to finish (or nearly) the honey dress this week. I still have a bit of embroidery to complete on the skirt and I am going back and forth about whether I want to make a cap for her. I ordered some new fiber today for wigs, so I will more than likely hold off completing her until that arrives. This dress was a lot of work, but I am in love with it.
I am including a few bonus pictures of the vermilion mimic no. 1. It is a nice overcast day today and I wanted to take some outside shots of her. I managed to get three test shots inside before my camera battery completely died. I really need to be better at checking how much juice it has more frequently.   

It is late and I am exhausted, so I am going to refrain from writing much. The first mimic in the Vermilion & Honey series is finished. More pictures (and dolls!) to follow.

I have been productive as a bee this week, even with the weather taking a dive back to cold. Over the weekend I had enough time to run one round of casts that yielded one mimic and three ornaments. With the vermilion doll now painted, her limbs completed last week, and progress on her clothing being at about 40%, she should be all finished up next week. This go around I will be finishing dolls up one or two at a time, so by the time the shop update rolls around in June you should know everything that will be available well in advance. I think this will be a lot less stressful on my end. I may have said all of this in my prior post; I can't recall and the squirming toddler on my lap isn't giving me the time to go look. 
Anyway, back to the progress from this week. As I said, the vermilion doll has been cast and painted. I still need to seal her this evening and I am toying with adding some splattering to her. I tried dyeing fabric with turmeric for the first time. The first round wasn't great. I added way to much ground turmeric and became distracted, leaving the fabric soaking much too long. The color came out way too bright and saturated for my tastes. I dyed the fabric again with some black tea, hoping that would help darken and dull it. That seemed to do the trick. Round two of turmeric dyeing went much better. I added very little and took the fabrics out quickly in intervals of 30 seconds, 1 minute, 2 minutes, and 15 minutes. I was more than pleased with the results. I am incorporating all of the dyed fabrics into the honey mimic by sewing very small honeycomb shaped pieces together to make her bodice. It is a lot of work, but I think the end result will be more than worth it.  

Because everything has been going so smoothly these past few weeks (insert sarcasm filter), almost down to the moment I finished up the mimics and started to take photographs my daughter came down with a fever. I was able to capture a few shots of the oatmeal mimic before illness struck. So, while I had announced the shop update for this Friday, I am going to push it back to Sunday the 20th. 
Photographs of the others will be trickling in over the next couple of days. 

I am finally nearing the finish line for this batch of mimics. I have the third one mostly wrapped up; I still need to finish her apron/over dress tonight. Oh, and of course the wig. I should be able to finish the fourth and final mimic over the weekend. So, stayed tuned as next week I will announce the shop update. The pricing will vary for each doll, but will range from $500 to $600 USD. 
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My daughter helped me take these photographs this morning. The dried beans were her edition. She is amazingly sweet with the dolls. She understands they are fragile and "mommy's work"; so while she is fascinated by them, she doesn't touch them. Instead she just hovers around them and soothingly coos at them as if they needed to be reassured. It warms my heart.

What a week... I am sewing my fingers off whenever I have a moment to do so in an attempt to have everything finished by next week. A number of sleepless nights due to toddler nightmares, a battle with a cold virus, and a horrific flare up of pain from TMJ has made my progress less than what I had hoped by the end of this week. I just cannot seem to "get it together" this winter. I am hopeful that spring will bring with it a little order and energy into my life.
Anyway, I have finished up one of the charcoal mimics (well, minus the wig). The stitching is a lot more time consuming than I had anticipated, however I think the effect has been worth all the effort. I have not scheduled anything for this weekend besides finishing up the other two, so I should still be on track for having everything finished and the ready to be posted for sale by the second week of March.

Also, as a side note, if you have e-mailed me over the last couple of months and I have not written you back, I will get on it sometime in the next week or two. I have the horrible habit of reading messages then answering them in my head, all the while neglecting to actually type out my response. When I am in the throes of working on pieces I tend to be even worse with this habit. So, once everything is finished and I have a little clarity I will set aside time to write everyone back.

Progress this week has moved so incredibly slowly. I finished the paint work on two more mimics, stained some fabric, finished up one set of limbs and nearly finished a second set. My little one is going through a lot of life changes this past month and it has rendered her understandably slightly more clingy than usual. Most of my time is being spent with her and when she finally falls asleep I have very little energy left for anything besides laying in my bed and staring off into space. My goal is to have the four mimics + three sprouting tuber ornaments finished and ready for a shop update by the first week in March. The threadbare doll I had started won't be finished by then, so I'll save finishing her for the following shop update in early June.