Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

Ruby Regina - beaded art doll  Years ago, I loved beading and bead embroidery.... then for no particular reason, I stopped beading. I maintained my membership with the Beaded Art Doll group on Facebook, and this year, I decided to participate in one of the Round Robin events - Birthstone. As there were only two Australians doing the challenge, we decided just to swap dolls, rather than send them on and have four or  five people working on the dolls in other countries ( postage is expensive!)  My swap partner, Marj, worked on my doll, Ruby Regina. As you can see the dolls are sent naked and are returned fully beaded Ruby Regina - before beading  Ruby Regina - close up  I beaded Marj's Topaz Traveller.... This was a bigger doll, and the mass of pale topaz looked rather pale and insignificant. Marj had already given her red lipstick, so I thought she needed to "out there" a little more....and so the addition of copper seemed to be appropriate...

This week, I finally put the finishing stitches to these little dolls which have been on my work table for some time. You will see that for most of them I used fabric with a horse motif. These were all meant to be ready  for the beginning of the Chinese New Year  "Year of the Horse"  ... Here is the basic process I've used for making these  .... 1. Draw a basic shape,  2. Use it as a template   3. Sew around the outside of the template with the right sides of fabric together  4. Cut from the doubled fabric, leaving a small seam.  5. Turn right side out ( turning tubes are useful)  6. Cut a small slit where the polymer clay face mask will cover. 7. Stuff polyfill through the opening to fill the shape firmly. 8. Stitch up the opening  9. Embroider a  free form design and add beads.  10. Make a small face mask from polymer clay. ( You can use a commercial mould as I did or sculpt your own.)  ...

I started the year really well with a schedule for finishing projects - this obviously didn't last very long. Here I am  just starting the third week of January  and already my timetable has collapsed- with a UFO - Unfinished Object...The photo above  is a beaded doll in progress. Hopefully by posting it in this state this week, I will be able to post a photo of the finished project next week? However, here is one doll which I did finish during the week . The doll looked so Asian that I chose a maroon oriole for her bird companion. The Maroon Oriole is a strikingly coloured bird whose usual habitat is the tropical and sub tropical forests of South East Asia. I think the main reason for being behind schedule is that I also helped our grandson make some animated movies during the week. It was a lot of fun - setting up the various scenes, but I now have a lot more respect and admiration for animators. I took over 100 photos to make a 7 second animated movie - all under...