Workshops and Witches

What a week - four days of workshops and a witch doll project dinner with Gumnutters Doll Group!
I spent a whole day dyeing every bit of cotton and velvet fabric in sight, preparing a great stash for future projects. All of this fabric has been dyed with procion dyes. This was a wonderful day with textile artist, Roberta Hodgson.

My class with the Sydney high school students was great fun, too. We did some wet felting, but it seemed to prove that glittery butterflies and love hearts are favourites amongst fifteen year old girls, whatever their background, circumstances and aspirations.

The weekend was a Gumnutters' birthday celebration with the "unveliing" of the witches travelling doll project on Friday. . There were two groups of four and the project was "a body in a bag" , with each person working on the other three group members' dolls with a theme of witches and wizards , but no wizards appeared. My multi-coloured organge/purple and green body returned, looking very mischievous, complete with a Laurel Burch cat.

On Saturday and Sunday, we spent the days with the wonderfully talented dolll maker, Ann Maullin who showed us her techniques of wrapping armatures. While this workshop has been popular in the past both in Australia and in the USA, it was inspiring to see everyone using Ann's techniques to create unique figurative art/soft sculptures. Mine isn't finished yet, but I have visions of some sort of water sprite, I think.

However, this week looks as though it will far more mundane. While most of the housework and cooking has been taken care of, this pile has been growing while I' ve been out playing. This is what greeted me this morning....

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Too Precious to Waste

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Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

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