EDAC 2006 class dolls

This is the wall hanging I made in Fran's Sarray class. It was such an easy and fun class I enjoyed it very much. I am not a collage person but Fran's class made it all seem so easy.
Thank you Fran for a wonderful class.


This is the doll I made in Christine Shiveley's 2 day class. We first painted the the doll with light paint then applied the crackle medium then it was allowed to dry well and then we painted whatever skin colour we wanted and then gave it a coat of Mode podge. My crackles turned out rather larger than I wanted. Also I realised afterwards that I should have gone for a lighter shade of base coat more in line with the brown colour. Then the crackles wouldn't have stood out so starkly against the brown and distracted the face painting. It is hard to paint on a dark brown and on top of that the white crackles didn't help much. But now I know. Christine's class was just wonderful. She gave us so many tips and tricks and I learnt a lot in her class. The class was well paced and I never felt rushed. The doll is still not complete. I think I will change her head gear and have to give her a cuff instead of the ribbons. Also the ribbons hanging on the front will have to go. I will make something out of the same fabric as the jacket to compliment it. I have some ideas and still working at it with my thinking cap on. Hope I am over the hump of my creative low.

This doll I won in the opportunity item. It is made by Laura Lunsford and is just perfect for my kitchen.

I also took Marcia's bead encrusted bangle class. It will take a while for me to finish the bracelet but I am already loving it the way it is turning out.

You will find some of the pictures I took at EDAC in my Yahoo photo album
http://photos.yahoo.com/citrnolla

Silly me!!!

Teee.... heee... kept wondering why there were not posts of course clean forgot that I had put them on moderation. Must have some time done it unknowingly.
Linda thanks I wouldn't have checked if you hadn't reminded me LOL! My brain must have gone to sleep.

Thanks for all your posts and kudos on the Fairy. She actually has a little story to go along with it. So here it is:

Latanya is a little lonely fairy travelling far and wide over land and sea and mountains and valleys searching for a true friend.
One fine enchanted morning during her travels she meets a human. They both smile at each other and are friends forever. The fairy has a tiny amount of fairy dust which she sprinkles over the human which helps this human to fly with her over far away lands and seas. They laugh and they play and sing and listen to the streams singing their joyful tunes. As night falls she realises that the human friend has to return to her own place where there is no room for the fairy. So silently and sadly they both bid farewell to each other.
You can see her sometimes roaming in the early morning mists a lonely figure wishing those enchanting moments would come back. Sometimes she is the lonely figure sitting under the stars and staring into the distance wistfully. She doesn’t have anymore fairy magic left as she used all of it on her friend so doesn’t know where her friend lives. She doesn’t even know her friend’s name, and neither does her friend, as during those magical enchanting moments she thought that those moments would never end. Sometimes she wishes intensely that she would have her magic back to bring her little human friend back to her and then they could once again laugh and sing and play joyfully.

It is rather a silly or corny story but I am not a story writer. Just thought the Fairy looked a bit
wistful so a little story would be nice to go with her.

While I am gone...

While I am away I thought I would at last unveil my doll which I have been keeping it a secrete. I don't think anyone from EDAC will look at it now. This is the doll that I was asked to make for the table decoration. It will be auctioned off at the end of the conference. I wonder how much she will fetch. Hope she will do well. Ok I better be off to bed now. Got to get the morning plane.
Catchya all later

Time to go to New Mexico

Yes it is on top of me suddenly. I am off to New Mexico for my conference yipeee!!!
5 whole days of creative fun and meeting up with old and new friends. I really need this break. Have been feeling rather jaded and this horrible tummy bug has really got me down. Although I know I am not fully prepared I know I am going to have great fun in Christine Shively's class and look forward to learning some new and exciting stuff and return will lots of new creative ideas. So I won't be posting for a while.





Another exciting event to look forward for me is the Knitting an Stitching show in October. This event is the largest in Europe and one can look at some amazing art works by some of the best fiber artists of Europe. One also gets to do workshops and buy lots of wonderful stuff.
Again this year Barbara Willis, Patti Culea will be having their lovely booth of cloth dolls. Above all this year Ray Slater from England is organising an exhibition of cloth dolls by UK artists. Ray, Barbara and Patti have been tirelessly promoting cloth dolls in UK and we are beginning to see the results. There are some wonderful cloth doll artists emerging and cloth dolls are beginning to take a place in the art world at last in UK.


Ray is also producing a Directory of Cloth dollmakers in UK. The above sample picture is not very clear but it should be along those lines. I have been invited to exhibit a couple of dolls and these dolls will be traveling in UK. The names are not very clear in the above leaflet but they will be traveling to Harrogate as well so I won't be seeing them until after December.

The long awaited and much needed rain arrived today!! Woo hooo I don't have to carry cans to water the garden.
Do you see the grass it is almost brown but in 2 days it will be green.
Had to walk to the station to take the train to work today and I could see the ground was so hard that the water just ran in riverlets or just stagnated in the fields.

Sugar has disappeared!!!

I am so sad that the my first ever cloth doll 'Sugar' that I made has disappeared. It is the one in pink in this picture. We had a cleaning lady come in every week and I know she is the only one who could have taken her as she had free run of the house while we were away at work. For some months I have noticed food stuff disappearing but I never thought she would touch my dolls. I also notice some of our linen is missing since. We have now stopped her. I don't care about the foodstuff or the linen but I do care that she took my DOLL!

Sorting out fabrics for EDAC

Last night I sat down and started sorting out the fabrics for EDAC. Here are some that I am going to take with me. Some of the ladies have already booked them for themselves. I think my bag will be raided as soon as I land there tee.. hee...

Paintings that evoked some fond memories

Today I came across my old oil painting pad which I used to use during my school holidays. Actually I thought I had lost it but oh I was so thrilled to find it hiding amongst my other things and was very pleasantly surprised to see these two paintings which I had started but never finished in the pad.
The first one is a painting of the place where I grew up, a hill station nestling amongst the Sathpura ranges known as Pachmarhi. It brought back so many memories. I remember I wanted to paint this picture of the lake and that particular spot was my favourite spot from the road which used to skirt the lake because of the view. All the views were lovely but this one was my favourite. I think I had grand ideas of painting this picture. I thought I could paint like Constable or Turner LOL! I remember being quite disappointed when it didn't turn out the way I had pictured it so I left it unfinished.
Anyway let me give you a small tour of the painting. On the far right hand side there was a little hillock on which was my Dad's office. You can't see it as it was hidden amongst the trees. It was a lovely old Colonial type building. By the way most of the area that you see in the picture belongs to the Army. So as you move along towards the left far beyond you see a clump of trees those are supposed to be Eucalyptus trees and there was a big Banyan tree under which the Indian Army Bands used to practice. As you move along again still further to the left you see the bridge. Oh what fun we used to have as kids there. During our summer holidays my friends and I would tag along behind our brothers and come fishing here. Not that we caught anything but it was fun. Since my dad was in the army and being such a small place everyone knew everyone else so we kids were sort of tolerated by the army camp people.
The bridge that you see is a concret bridge which replaced an old wooden bridge as some of the planks had disappeared. It used to be very exciting for us as kids to cross this bridge. Now moving again towards the left you see some tents and some buildings. Well there were rows and rows of them still further left which is not in the picture. Those were the tents for the soilders. If you look closely you will see very close to the lake couple of pens. They were not used but I guess during the time of British Raj they would have been used. Those used to fasinate us but we were not allowed to go near them. That big hill straight ahead was known as Club Hill at first because there was a club at the foothills. Later on it came to be known as Pachmarhi hill. Although this hill was not the highest point but the panoramic view of the whole town was fantastic. We used to often climb it during our holidays. You see that house on the hillock on the opposite side. One of my friend used to live there. We would often walk back together from school and her dog would spot us from far and come running to meet us. It would then take the bag from my friend and take her home. A pity our house couldn't be seen from any part of the lake otherwise I would surely have painted it. It was just past my dad's office. All the mountains you see in the background are supposed to be the Sathpura ranges.

I tried to copy this horse from a card and found that I ran out of space for its tail so thats where I left it.




After all that nostalagia I come to the present. Some pictures of the flowers in my garden. Today was a lovely day and I did a bit of gardening. That's it for today.

Fairy Perch

Well this is the perch I have made for my fairy. I think I can show this to you.The flower and the leaves on the stem are ready made but the seat is made by using paverpol. I wanted the doll to sit on the stem of the flower but knew it would not be able to support the weight of the doll. So I made a seat and you know me, anything that can be done easily I do it. Not much brainwork required here. First bent a wire and wrapped it around the stem to make the base then wrapped this base with dyed linen dipped in paverpol and let it dry. This steadied the base. I then dyed some thin linen with some green colorhue which was lying around. I know colorhue is for silk fabrics but I used it for this linen to try it out. After all I thought, it was going to be covered with paverpol so what did it matter what dye I used. The colour has not faded. I purposely left it near a window where the sun comes in. I then bent thin wire into the shape of leaves and stuck this dyed thin linen onto it and cut out the leaf shapes and applied the paverpol with brush onto the leaves and made it lean onto the base. It stuck to it! Once it dried it was amazing how strong it became. I think one can even make some lovely fairy wings with this stuff. It is wonderful stuff. I am going to try out something else soon but got to finish my fairy first.

Now it is there and now it is not!

I have not posted for a while simply because nothing exciting has been happening at my corner of the world and nor have I been productive with my doll making. Well I have a doll in the making unfortunately as I said earlier I can't show her to you yet. I will post her picture just before I leave for the States next month.
As you can see weekend passed by with getting rid of the pond that we had. We found it very time consuming to maintain it. All it did was breed frogs and mosquitoes and goodness knows what. The fish disappeared as breakfast for the herons sometime ago. The foxes also kept chewing up the tubing for the filter system. So now we are building a rock garden which should look nice once it fills out and have got a pebble pond in its place. At least we can hear the noise of water falling even though there isn't a water fall only a small cascade of water overflowing into the pebbles. Also the birds can have a dip in the water. You cannot see in the picture but water comes out of the big stone at the centre of the pebbles and spills over and there is a small shallow area where the water collects so the birds are happy and so are we.

Saturday I went for my dollclub meeting. We had a workshop of how to make felt dolls. I came back with a head its not much of a head but still a head. I seem to be making only heads lately ha!

The sun was out at last!

At last the sun was out and the weekend was just beautiful. I took advantage of it and just relaxed in the garden with my nieces who came to visit us. Oh it is so lovely to feel the sun. Feels as though it is years since I saw the sun!
I also did some work on my fairy's perch. I experimented with Paverpol. Sorry can't show you yet. But all I can say is I am very pleased with it.
Today back to work and guess what, the weather is still beautiful. The weather changes constantly here that no wonder we get excited over just a fews hours of sun in this country as well as we talk more about the weather than anything else!!
Glad to know that Paris is having the sunshine as well Isabelle. So now I can imagine you too enjoying the sun.

Some pictures of the lovely climbing roses in the garden



This little bee was very very busy





Thought this tree looked beautiful in the sunshine the picture doesn't do it justice. The yellow is almost golden in the sunshine.

Some pictures to share

Here are some pictures of Paris that I took

This is Place de la Concorde



This is the famous wide avenue Champs Elysees it was a cold and windy day but not so cold as England
Another view of Place de la Concorde a bit brighter now



A street artist at work

Had to rest my legs after all that walking

Who could come away without the picture of this famous landmark? Whenever I have been to Paris I have always taken one picture of it.

'Paris' magic never wanes

I got back last evening from Paris. I have always loved Paris so the magic never wanes for me whenever I visit it. I love the lovely tree lined boulevards the beautiful buildings and the soft french accents.
We just walked and walked and didn't actually visit any museums or other places of interest as we had seen those already. I would have liked to have gone to a museum but thought I wouldn't put my husband through that as visiting museums is not his favourite pass time. We did go to Pompedu and looked at it from the outside. My husband was quite intrigued by the building.
On Monday I met up with Isabelle. I was so thrilled to meet her. She was exactly as I had imagined her to be. Petite, lovely and has such beautiful hair and above all as a person she is lovely. She made special time to take us to some of the lovely fabric and trim stores inspite of her tight schedule.
We met at the Opera metro station. I was so scared that I would miss her that I kept staring at every girl that resembled even remotely like Isabelle. At one point I nearly ran behind a girl who had beautiful hair like Isabelle and was petite and wearing glasses. Whew! it was a close call I am sure I would have freaked that girl if I had approached her. But Isabelle was so sure she would recognise me that she didn't even say where at Opera we would meet. Suddenly I saw her appear beside me like magic and all was well from then onwards. She took us to Bouchara and the other fabric shops. The trims were lovely in Bouchara but I had to restrict myself to a few since they were pricey. I did manage to get some lovely fabrics and suede from Sacré Coeur fabric shops. The choice there was amazing and all under one roof. Isabelle bought some lovely fabric for herself as well. All too soon it was time for us to part. I do wish so much that we had had more time Isabelle. Next time when you come to London we can perhaps have a meal together and chat or if you have time you can come home. If we come to Paris we will make more time to spend together and we would love to meet Seb too.
Here is Isabelle and me outside on the street where they sell trims and fabrics

Gifts from Isabelle
Isabelle gave me this lovely antique lace. I simply adore it. I wanted something like this so much but because they were pricey I didn't buy any. Isabelle you must have read my mind.

This is a lovely scented box of soaps. I don't think I can pick up the courage to use them. I will perhaps put them inbetween my cloths. That way they will keep my cloths beautiful scented and will not melt away.



Earlier that weekend my husband and I went to one of the big flea markets. It was very interesting. The antiques section intrigued me a lot. There were so many things I would have liked to have bought but ended up buying some antique lace and tiny silk buttons. The silk buttons are a bit soiled but I think I can dye them since they are white. They should be ok then. I would like to wash the lace but I am not sure if I can do it with out spoiling it. Will have to ask the experts if it is ok to wash. If anyone knows could you tell me if I can wash it.

Paris here I come!

I am going to Paris for the weekend. This weekend is the Bank Holiday week here. Everyone just waits for the long weekend. It sort of puts everyone into a summery mood. Although the weather has not been anything like summer. It has been raining, windy and cold. There's nothing new about that I guess. It is a typical English weather. I hope the weather will be a bit better in Paris. I am so looking forward to the weekend. The icing on the cake will be I will get to meet Isabelle. We are going to meet up and ofcourse visit the fabric shops. Isabelle has been kind enough to fit me in in her busy schedule on Monday. In France it is a normal working day.

I would like to thank everyone for visiting my blog and putting some lovely comments. Take care all and I will be back with some more pictures and stories from Paris.

Pottery and heads

Well I have not been doing anything very interesting lately. So many other things on my mind. Just showing you a couple of heads of which one is for a swap and the other for a project I can't tell you about yet. Some hand made pottery that I got from Italy. I liked those very much as they were hand made by this artist who litterally worked behind the shop front. I saw many pottery shops but they all seemed to be made commercially. These have the natural blemishes that one would expect when they are hand made which makes it all the more interesting and quaint. The artist has taken some of the designs from old Roman tile patterns that were found in some ruins.

Blooming

Yesterday I looked out of my window and saw this creeper in full bloom. It looked so pretty so I thought I would share. Unfortunately I don't know the name for it but it is fairly common in this part of the world.

Free pattern links

Ok yahoo is being funny again so I am posting these free pattern links here.
I like the one with the pincushsion very much.

http://www.marcusbrothers.com/makeit/projects/gypsy_pin_cushions/index.html

http://www.caron-net.com/designerfiles/desmayfiles/maychrt.html

http://www.sewing.org/enthusiast/html/esb_man_in_the_moon.html

The Italian experience

We drove a lot around Amalfi Coast which has some spectacular scenaries. The roads were very windy and narrow and the drivers as mad as the Indian drivers but we survived and here I am all in one piece to tell the tale LOL!
Here is a typical village narrow road and the people still park on the road even on bends!


This is Positano a typical village nestled on the cliff side.


Another view of Positano. Residents living here generally walk up and down the steps that are built on the cliffs to get to the main town down below. It keeps them fit I guess.

The Church in Amalfi.

This is Capri where the rich and famous live. We had some delicious Icecream here but paid double the price for it than in Sorrento.



We visited Pompei and just thought it was amazing.
This is where the gladiators practiced.

These are the bodies of people found during the excavation. They are preserved by casting them in plaster.

The arena where all the important events took place


A fresco so beautifully painted



The Vesuvius in the horizone


View from Sorrento of Vesuvius