Cloudy With A Chance Of... Ragdolls!

This past weekend was spent distressing and stuffing and sewing... and sewing and stuffing and distressing my motley crew of modern vintage rag dolls!

I used a wash of two different brown acrylic paints to give the dolls an aged and distressed look.

Not enough room for all my dollies to dry...they're all heaped up on top of each other!

The paint actually ended up drying to a strangely mottled, greyish hue. That's what i get for using linen purchased at a rummage sale. But hey... they look really old and distressed now!

I tried to make each one unique and utilize a few unconventional embellishments... like this dishcloth nose (shhhh... don't tell mom... it was a gift from her!).

Of course I had to make some sweet treats... and these 3-tiered cakes were no exception. Yum! I tried some distressed and left some plain... just to see which style looked better. I think they both have their merits. 

And I'd have to say that even though I left some things to chance... they all measured up to my expectations! I'm excited to introduce them at my first Art Show of the year in two weeks... hurray!

Giving Birth to Multiples...

Well, these dolls aren't a piece of cake (okay, well... maybe one is!), but giving birth to multiples has never been so much fun! I made lots of progress over the weekend sewing together the doll fronts, picking out just the right buttons and baubles for facial features and finding coordinating (or not!) fabrics for the backing. All my little ones are starting to show their personalities...

Some of them I thought were.... eh, just okay... but as I pair disparate textiles with coordinating elements, I'm beginning to see how much they are coming to life. This little clown is definitely pointing me in the right direction.

Anyone have a sweet tooth? I have a couple... ooops, looks like it's cracking up. Maybe too many Easter Sweet Tarts. I knew I shouldn't have had so many! Oh... and I love, I love, I love my little calendar girl! Looks like May and June are coming up... well... from 1979 that is... and this burlap wall calendar I found at a church bazaar. How bizarre.

And of course, no children of mine will being going without cake. Sweet tooths run in the family, you know. And hanging out in the back there is cloudy. He's a little off today... but we love him anyway.

I still have a few more rag dolls to sew together, but more pressing work (and I'm not talking about ironing!) has me tied up at the moment. I'm doing a custom Knock Down Doll order for a boardwalk themed wedding and need to create bride and groom artwork. Looks like Tillie's finally getting married!

But, you know all my children will be demanding my attention. They are kind of cutely adorable and very hard to resist. So, I'll keep you up to date as things progress.

Thoughtful Thursdays: Fabulous Fabric!

I'm not sure what it is about fabric... but I love it! All those amazing colors and patterns! New styles. Vintage linens. Mixing and matching swatches until my heart's content. I must confess though... I collected fabric for years before I even knew what to do with it. All I knew was that if I saw a piece of material that took my breath away... I had to own it!

I had so much fun making those rag dolls recently, that I went kinda crazy. I bought all sorts of fabric from 3 different stores... I rifled through my decades-old collection of vintage textiles... and even ripped up a few pieces of my own clothing!

My whole downstairs became a doll-making factory! The dining room table turned into a pattern station. The kitchen table became an assembly area. And when I ran out of room there, I broke out the ironing board (of course for crafts only, not for actually ironing clothes!), and turned that into a makeshift workstation.

I used combinations of fabrics that worked perfectly together and some that looked rather odd, but in a cool kinda way. I made dolls that looked like people, and turned inanimate objects into funny-faced figures as well. When all was said and done, I had made patterns and cut out pieces for more than 20 dolls!

So I guess I better get on that sewing machine and get some of these guys done lickety split! Craft Show season is soon approaching!

On The Rag...

You know how you get something in your head that you want to try and it won't get out of your head until you try it and then once you start, you just can't stop yourself until you finish... but then when you finish you want to try more and more possibilities until you've exhausted them all... but then you realize that the possibilities are endless and just exhaust yourself in the process of thinking about it? Yeah, me too!

Well, that's exactly what happened when i decided to try my hand at creating some fun and funky rag dolls from my vintage scraps and new bits of fabric. Having been inspired by doll artist Junker Jane, I thought I would try my hand at a few creatures of my own. I loved every part of the process, too! Picking out and matching fabrics was so much fun. I love mixing all kinds of funky prints.

Okay, well... maybe I'm fibbing a little about loving every part of the process. I realized that I really do love sewing... it's sewing machines that I dislike! Maybe I got a bad apple, or maybe I just don't know enough about them (quite possible), but mine keeps jamming up. But I move on and adore my fabric creations anyway. Hey... he looks pretty cool inside out though! Just don't pay attention to those extra loops of thread!

Distressing is a must for me. It really completes the folk art feel of the dolls and gives them an aged appearance. Always fun to get messy and dirty with brown acrylic paint!

Add some odd-length arms, embroidery floss hair and a puffball nose and he's all set. This orangy clown looks like a Herman to me. He's almost two feet tall! I didn't mean to make him that large, but what the heck... I went with it. Bigger is better, right?

Pinky here was actually my first (of course I started with a monochromatic pink palette!), but I didn't take too many pictures along the way because I wanted to get lost in the process.... which I did. In fact, my mind was racing with so many ideas about other dolls, that I couldn't sleep. I gave up, got out of bed, and finished her up around 2 a.m.!

She's a cutie pie and I had so much fun making her! I can definitely see more of these rag dolls in my future... as my mind is still racing and the sketchbook is filling up with lots and lots of ideas! If you're looking for me... I'll be at the fabric store!