Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

It was a wintry week and perfect for working with wool. Amazingly, I finished a little jumper for my granddaughter before Winter is over. Robyn Alexander from Colour Streams has a beautiful series of needle felted handbags "Printemps" and while their name may suggest Spring, I have really enjoyed working on   "Ebony Rose " from this collection this week I keep checking the calendar and yes it is July already - EOFYS celebrations (End of Financial year parties), Rotary clubs' changeovers, end of school term, school reports, and  grandchildren's dance concerts! Everyone seems happy this week for one reason or another. It was a busy week for me, but we fitted in an offbeat  movie about Empress Wu's court. The movie was "Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame". I am not sure if there is a name for a genre which is a mixture of Hecule Poirot and Kung Fu films, but it gets a good review . Quite a week of Chinese history - we als...

This last weekend was the annual exhibition of one of my dollmakers' groups, Hello Dollies. While I was "minding" the exhibition, I finished the doll pictured above. She is another version of my WOW (Woman of Wisdom) pattern. The body of the doll is embellished crazy patchwork and her costume includes hand dyed laces,brocade and silk. This doll has been named AGB because the type of embellishment is very much in the Anne's Glory Box embellishment class style. AGB is a stump doll  - a cloth doll with a "stump" as a body.   The Challenge for the exhibition was another stump doll - Oriental Dance by a fellow Hunter Valley dollmaker, Ann Maullin. I made mine as a Chinese Court concubine of earlier times. Her head was sewn from cloth, needle sculpted and then painted with gesso ( I think I did about 15 coats). After each coat of gesso, I sanded it with a fine sand paper. The last few coats were painted with gesso coloured with skintone acrylic paint and a flow me...