Claudia the Crow's story...

Click on the picture to go to her auction.


Your attention please! Do not, and I mean it…. do not eat Mrs. Skeampole’s acorn flour crumpets, for ANY reason. Don’t even sniff them.

Someone put a tricky ingredient in the dough and poor little Claudia has turn into a crow after eating just one bite! Oh my!
Poor little thing! Always so well behaved, such nice manners, always following instructions and flying to follow her teacher’s orders… (sorry, no pun intended….) and now this!
She is still however, the teacher’s pet. (oops, no pun intended)
Some kids started to call her “Crowdia”. She doesn’t seem to mind. She never likes bickering. She just wiggles her little claws and hops away with her teddy bear Paul.
Claudia’s voice was always the sweetest in the choir. Now all you can hear is her constant dissonant caw, but please don’t tell her anything. She enjoys singing quite a bit. Only now she seems to feel more comfortable singing from way up on a tree branch.
It was going to be a hard task finding her a good new home as it was, with her being such a persnickety eater… and now that she has a beak? She really eats like a bird…
~*~
Now, for the details: Little Claudia is hand made, hand painted and her hands and feet are sculpted. I made her eyes with polymer, and she has long eye lashes.
She travels along with her teddy bear Paul. Luckily he didn't eat any of the crumpets.... can you imagine a crow-bear?
hummm, perhaps I need my sketchbook... :oD

2008 resolutions

OK, How is everyone doing in their New year's resolutions? I broke almost all of mine by January the 1st around noon lol

I was kind of upset earlier today because I forgot one of my favorite days yesterday, which is the Dia de Reyes, the celebration of the King Wise Men's visit to baby Jesus.
I love the bread, the getting together and the fact that we can keep stretching the holidays a bit more (good excuse to postpone the dieting) ...if only I remember!
And ALL because one of my crazy resolutions was organizing my little creative space, which ended in this huge thing, everyone involved throwing away stuff and deep cleaning the house.... I guess that takes Spring cleaning off of my list.

Usually I get a yummy Rosca de Reyes, also known as Epiphany bread, with a little plastic baby hidden in it, so the lucky person with that slice gets to make a gathering on February the 2nd. In the past that was when my grandma traditionally picked up and put away her Nativity. Everything else was already gone except for the Nativity set.

Well, back to my resolutions: Besides from creating chaos in my house, I want to post more often, also make some tutorials to help/inspire others just as I have been helped and inspired to learning about dolls, techniques and tips.

I am working on a couple of tutorials, pictures and all, so expect more info on the next few posts! For now I'll post this on doll hair:

As you can imagine, depending on the doll style and personal preference, yarn, mohair, paperclay, wire or natural hair can be used. Each of them has a way to be added, but anything can be glued.

As far as I have learned, for the mohair you have to start (to make life easier) by leaving a spot on the dolls head for the hair, as in "hole" where it comes out of, then glued some of it to the head itdelf.

Now, if you are like me and have a gazillion doll heads with no preparation for the mohair, you can do a couple of things.

One: cut clumps of mohair, glue them flat, let them dry, then glue them like extensions.
Two: glue all around previously cut (and pre-glued together to themselves) all around the head, starting from the bottom to the top, then add a hat or something to cover the last part (If you don't like the way it looks).
Three: pick the ugliest doll head you have around, practice making a hole on top, assuming it is a paperclay head! Then stick the hair in there and press it down.

I insist on having the clumps or strands already previously glued and dried, otherwise you'll find yourself sneezing mohair, all goopy-fingered and with a bald ugly doll with a hole on top.

Oh! For people interested in playing a tag-blog game, join doll4art group and list your "blahg" there, we are getting ready to play!

And talking about bald... Here's a picture of a doll that will be listed soon: Claudia the Crow

Christmas tree and general sillyness

Here's a picture of our Christmas tree.


And here's how it looks like if you wiggle the camera and play with the lights:

And here is a FUN link of how to decorate your tree if you are still not done with it.

Click HERE and enjoy.

Good bye 2007

I was reading a site about artist's blog block and how to brake the blog block with creative ideas and bring more visitors to your site. Imagine my delight!

Just when I thought all my blog problems were solved.... the postings end abruptly on September because the writter got a block and stopped posting. lol

People! c'mon! What happened to the inspiration? I know in my case eating Christmas cookies takes all my spare time at this time of the year, but hey, I have the huge responsability to keep my 3 readers up to date. So here I am (crunchin' while typing) looking busy....

Now, for the real content of today's blogging: Ta daaaaaa:
There's a great doll event from MRSBO coming this January, on the 31th.
Hhmmm... What is MRSBO? you might ask yourself suspiciously... Well, it is a group that I have been mentioning many times by now if you were really paying attention! (excuse me, that was for my cat, who was only pretending to read here) No, they won't have any tuna either.

And what's the event about?


Well, Mr. Pringle's Society of Feeble Prestidigitators is sponsoring a fund-raiser for the little MRSBO orphan dolls. All members have attempted to conjure up a doll to be sold for charity, but there is something very odd about every one of them!

You have to search MRSBO that day to see what each artist of our group came up with!
Want to take a pick at what I will be presenting for auction?

This is Cordelia.

She heard something about The Orphanage having some dolls, and she took the long walk to go there and get herself one.

You'll have to excuse us here. Cordelia is still bald, undressed and doll-less, but we are working on those matters.

~*~

On a sad note, I want to say that I will miss Dan Fogelberg and all the music he still had in him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhjYbfK9vrk

Damiana's disappointing present

Here is little Damiana!


Also here's THE VIDEO:

And now, the story I wrote for her:

Damiana's Disappointing Present

Damiana had very high hopes for this coming Christmas.
She had been a very good girl all year. Almost all year.

Outside it had been snowing and snowing, and snowing some more. That was good. It covered all those holes in the garden, and the new temporary ugly patch on the wall of the kitchen.
The Orphanage was not one of the warmest places in town to begin with, what was another little hole in the wall? At least there was a roof over their heads.
Damiana was sure no one would remember those past unfortunate incidents…

Like the crickets in Mrs. Blatherby's bedroom. It had been Damiana’s attempt to bring the outdoors in. Plus they made fun pets too. They seemed to not like real food. They didn’t even touch the oniony liver she left for them under Mrs. Blathersby’s bed.
They mostly wanted to eat cotton fabric, so it was not an extra expense. There was plenty of cotton around the principal’s room.
And they were so cheerful singing all the time. Especially at night, hop-hop-hopping here and there.

The muddy flood in the music room had been a failed attempt at decoration. She wanted to make a water fountain by the piano, because it is so nice to hear the tinkling of crystal clear water falls and piano music notes…
It had been a lot of work, too: making all those holes in the yard to gather the water outside, then carrying it up bucket by bucket since the room was on the second floor.
Regrettably the water was not so clear at that point anymore, therefore it did not tinkle quite as expected.
But that was a different matter altogether.
Unfortunately the nuns did not agree with the tinkling, the holes in the garden, the muddy stairs, or the messy piano keys.

And that accident in the kitchen? It was just that, an accident.
What’s a girl to do when her little hands and feet are cold and there’s a lonely fire in the kitchen, all alone in there? No one was using it, and it was too tiny a flame to warm up anything anyway. So… she made it bigger.

The cook, Mrs. Milleford Skimpole, said they would take weeks and weeks to fix that big gaping hole in the wall, get rid of the stench of smoke, and it would take forever to fix all the shattered glass in the windows.
The hinges on the back door were already stained, crooked and squeaky. Everybody knew that! … OK, maybe they were not so shrill before.

The worse insult for Mrs. Skimpole was that, after she complained bitterly about her Holiday Fruit-cakes being all ruined, burnt and soggy, little Damiana told her sweetly not to be sad, because absolutely no one would tell the difference.

The kitchen did not smell so bad to Damiana, just like extra-extra extra crispy gingerbread smoky cookies.

One teacher said Damiana was going to need a lot of luck-- a lot of real good, blessed and holy-water-sprinkled-on luck, to get anyone to adopt her now, with all this on her record.
Drat!
So it was going to be boring in there, and maybe colder.

Oh, but how exciting it had been to wake up on Christmas morning! She got up fast, fast, fast and went running downstairs to open her present. She wanted to be the first one getting there and start unwrapping.
She opened it, and… what a disappointment!

A pair of socks?? An old pair of stinky socks! And not even a matching pair either! All year waiting… for this?
Well, if this is what you get after being so good all year, she was not going to behave anymore.

Humm… Where are those scissors?

Damiana's present

Here are some pictures of my little doll Damiana.
She is about 8 inches tall, made out of fabric and paper clay sculpted hands, shoes and face. I put some wire in her arms so she is somewhat posable:


She is dissapointed to get socks for her Christmas present


The socks are painted, tea stained and sanded so they look very old. And they don't even match. But, the come in a nice Christmas gift box.
Poor Damiana!
I'll list her later today. First I'd like to finish the video, but my assistant had a lot of homework the past couple of days.

Meow

Hey! I have 4 readers now! Queenie told me she's visiting my blog!

Well, I thought there were four readers untill I noticed my cat has not been reading, He's only looking at the pictures...!!
... Darn cats, you can't ever trust them!

Well anyway, here I am with a new auction. And what's in the auction? Cats of course!!


They are a cute and noisy pair. Frida and Diego cat. He's wearing a bell, so the birdies know when he's coming.
You can see the auction HERE and a little VIDEO HERE

Lavender's story

So I have been telling you, my three readers, how much fun (and frustration)I've been having making dolls, and finally here is Lavender!

She is not at all what I envisioned. Right from the beginning, she decided she was going to be herself, and no matter how much I moved the clay around, she decided she was going to be... Lavender. lol
You can see her HERE.
She's up for adoption and will bring along her polymer lil'cupcake.

And how was I going to stop at just making the doll? I had to make a video!
As always I had my assistants ("Hey, don't take away the camera... where's the tripod?... No, we don't need explosion noises for the background thank you... who was eating fritos on the carpet?... where's the... never mind, I'm sitting on it")
It was a lot of fun!



I want to thank Melisa from The copper mouse here's her blog for all the info!
It's been a long time since I used my sewing machine and making little dresses is challenging but I'm loving it.

I am currently finishing a doll with a Disappointing Christmas present.
Keep an eye over here!

Here's Lavender's story:
"Once upon a time, there was a little girl lost in the forest. In the mysterious, dark forest…
She was sitting by a lavender bush, all covered in little dry leaves and lavender blooms, therefore she was named “Lavender” by the people who found her.
Her hair was blond, her cheeks rosy and her toes…. well, pretty big!

They tried unsuccessfully to find her family. No one knows who her parents were, and since she was so little she didn’t remember why she was alone in there, where her shoes were or if she ever had a donut.
Not knowing what to do with her, they took her to Mrs. Blathersby’s “Orphanage for the unattractive and mentally unsound”.
She still gets very nervous and scared if you mention the forest.

After she arrived to the Orphanage people kept calling her "Laura", "Laverne", "Larissa"... never Lavender, so she decided to give them all a little hint on her name by coloring her blond hair to a almost neon “lavender" color!
That did not work so well either, because there are still some people calling her Lisa! And some yet, call her “fuchsia”.

Lavender thinks of herself as a delicate flying fairy. Fancies herself as a shimmery moonlight dancer… although she was not graced with any beauty, or shimmer nor wings... and she literally never combs her hair.
Since she insists that fairies don’t have shoes, she keeps on going barefooted all the time through marble, rain, gravel, and twigs or sand, her feet look more like a nasty troll's, covered with calluses, bunions and are really, really bony!

Every night, right at midnight, after failing one more time at flying attempts… Lavender always tries to sneak into the kitchen to get one more cupcake, but they always catch her because of the thump-thump-thump of her wide, heavy feet.

It is said that one of the teachers left the orphanage right after that, because she couldn't deal with naughty barefooted kids who would let their tangled-up hair in wild colors, on top of everything else. But there was a witness who said the teacher was in a hurry when she left, carrying a huge trunk full of cupcakes… That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it!
The end"

What is art?

I just bumped into this little video and want to share it with my 3 readers.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I do. What is Art?
Well, let me tell you.... tehehehehe!



And then come back to see my flower pictures!

I took some nice photos of my flowers today.
My last rose of the year... such nice deep color. I am not sure if it was captured in the pic, but it is beautiful and smell delicious too.

I'm posting also images of the tropicana, ibiscus, snail vine and the Buganvillea.
Pretty soon all will go to sleep, till next year, except of the yellow bush
-whatever it's name- which seems to be an everblooming kind.

OK, here are the pictures:











Aren't they pretty?

Life's touching moments....

Today is my birthday.
I am thankful for all I have, all I am, for having such a great man for a husband, for all the people that love me, my wonderful children. One of them was even born on my same day 10 years ago, and gave me the pefect excuse to eat cake twice.

All I wanted was to have a peaceful quite day. Maybe try a couple of new projects/thechniques on the clay stuff I have been playing with... nothing too fancy. I have been frustrated for days because I am not getting the result I want.

Well, I ended up running late all stressed out since early in the morning dropping kids, hunting for teachers for unexpected last-minute-school-stuff and by the time I turned around it was mid morning.
My mom called and I thought it was time to sit and chat... start the "relaxing part" of my B-day.
Well not really... Someone was knocking down my door literally. It turned out the police were looking for some guy who gave MY address for his whatever information they had! Weird...
That got my little heart pumping.
Never had the police knocking at my door before.
It was particularly stressing, since I still had in my mind the picture of the Florida officer pepper-spraying the 15 year old girl (was in the video news couple of days ago).

I thought, heck, they do that to the young ones, what are they going to do to the.... mmmm.... not-quite-so-spring-chicken-ones ....? LOL

Well, after that episode, I kept talking to my mom for a while, hearing about some family member's problems... feeling a little homesick... missing my family...
sniff sniff... There were about 20 more calls from telemarketers who secretly decided to ALL call this day.
I decided to skip any art projects since my pulse was more like a maraca player, and I was not in a creative mood anymore, so there was no hope for it...

Later I went to have lunch with my daughter. We had a time frame before I had to take her back to school and I was getting hungry and kindof in a hurry.
As we were getting into the commercial center's parking lot, there was a line of cars so we had to stop.

And then we saw it.

One of life's touching moments: There was a couple of young people crossing the street. They moved slowly. Very slowly. One of them in a wheelchair. The other one, a youg man with a walking stick.

I looked again, just to realise he was blind. They were out for a walk, enjoying the beautiful day, smiling and talking, crossing the street.
The one that walked was blind. The friend in the wheelchair didn't seem to have much control of the arms either. But they were happy, enjoying the day.
It touched me.
I felt so blessed to see that no matter what, we can still enjoy the day.

All the stress and the hurry were gone.
I wanted to tell them I love them for being so brave, for finding a reason to smile and go out there, slowly, and face life as it comes.

I felt thankful for the gift of seeing them today. I will keep the image in my mind for a long time, and smile.

I still did not have any cake, but I am happy.