week of 05.10.15

This has been such a refreshing week. To begin with, I had a lovely Mother’s Day. I spent the day with my daughter and husband picking buttercups at the Blandy Experimental Farm / Arboretum. It is a beautiful and peaceful place, offering a grand view of Virginia. My only regret is that I was so taken up in my surroundings that I forgot to take photographs. I am especially kicking myself for not capturing the walking path lined with dogwood trees. It was magic, pure magic. Luckily my husband snapped a few shots when we stopped to play in one of the fields.

As for the rest of my week, all of the sprouting tuber mimics have been finished, photographed, posted for sale and the sold ones are all packed up and ready for a trip to the post tomorrow morning. There is a certain lightness I feel after completely finishing a doll/dolls. A chapter has been closed and I have the excitement of beginning something fresh. I have started a new project this week and I am so looking forward to see how it progresses.

I have come to the conclusion that sculpting during the week is just not feasible for me at this time. My daughter is a spitfire and I have to be able to toss down whatever I am working on with a seconds notice to scoop her up before she wreaks complete havoc. The clay I use is messy and dries relatively quickly, making it not at all conducive to constant stepping away, occasionally for long periods of time. While I am itching to start sculpting, it will have to wait until the weekend when I have another pair of hands around to help stop my pretty little tornado.

Sewing work, on the other hand, is ideal for me to be working on during the week. And so I have started crafting something that has been whirling around my head for quite some time: a large(ish) scale cloth and clay doll. I made the pattern for the lower body and have almost finished the embroidery work on the two sides. I am using muslin stained with an avocado pit & skin (it rendered a pale pink color that I unfortunately couldn’t capture in the photographs) and coffee stained thread. It’s been tedious (however enjoyable!) work and I am pretty sure I will cry if this doesn’t come together how I want it to.

This doll will tie into another project that I will just touch on briefly. My husband and I recently worked on a small 12 panel comic for a local publication and we had such an enjoyable experience finally creating something together that we want to do more. I have written a few more short stories to be made into comics, one of which will feature the cloth and clay doll. Our hope is to spend the summer creating enough comic shorts to compile into a self-published book.