The Final Dale Leroy

  Dale Leroy is finally finished...sort of. Some of you may remember seeing the beginning of the little felt fellow I have been working on.  Some of you may have been following his progress. Some of you may have no idea what I'm talking about. So here are some reminders.
'Dale Leroy',as he has become known,(named after the hypothetical little boy my mom always wanted and never had ), has a wire armature,covered with felt. He looked like this the first time you saw him.

His head is felt stuffed with Polyfil. He even has felt lips.

The neck situation looked ok when he was naked...

Then I made some clothes for him.

,,,but he looked a little stubby once he got a shirt.

Then I gave him some,as my mom called them,'big yella work boots'.

  All he needed after that was hair and a face. So here he is now,with both of those.

The fuzzy felt makes the eye lid paint look like eye lashes!

I'm not really satisfied. Other than the fact that his torso is too long and one arm is too short,I was hoping his hair would end up thick enough to reshape his head a bit. No such luck. I might try adding some more hair later.

He could use more of a nose too.

 I  don't know if I like his mouth either. Should I remove the felt lips and just try painting lips on? That's a rhetorical question, so don't bother to answer. I won't listen to anything anybody says,even though I've asked, as my family well knows. I'll probably be afraid to remove them for fear of ruining the whole doll, and just leave the felt lips on and complain.

I swear that nose used to be more visible.

"The Great Profile"  he's not.

So there is Dale Leroy. He looks a bit tall and lean to be a child,but hey,even hypothetical children need to grow up sometime.

   I am also working on the goofy faced little guy I showed you during the progress on Dale Leroy. We'll see him again soon.

An Update on 'Dale Leroy", and Other Things

 It's been a terrible week. Hasn't it? But we all have to remember that things have been terrible for a long time. If what's happened lately makes a difference,it might be worth it. I just fear that things will be just the same when this all calms down. I never cease to be stunned at how people can think that people aren't all just people,that they can treat anybody differently for any reason. my dad taught me that "You treat everybody the same." It's a shame not everybody teaches their children that.
  I usually try to keep the blog light,but I felt I couldn't post without mentioning what's been going on, because it's too important to ignore. To return to 'my happy place',I thought I'd show you the progress on some of the dolls I'm making. Some of you may remember my attempt at a felt face doll.  Well he still needs shoes,hair, and his face painted, but he now has clothes!

I had been working on him, but I stopped to work on Emma's birthday present. I'll show you that in an upcoming post. But this guy got a shirt and some bibbed overalls.

That stitching is terrible.

  Ivy scolded me for gluing the clothes on these guys. I tried to tell her how hard it is to sew these tiny things, especially when I don't sew very well. But now that she's a professional seamstress,(She gets paid for sewing costumes,so that makes her a professional.),she thinks I should sew everything. I appeased her by sewing this guy's clothes. I sewed everything except his pants cuffs...

...which are rolled up and glued,his shoulder straps, which were too tiny to sew,and his shirt collar...
 

...which was so narrow that sewing it was just causing the fabric to unravel on the edges.

  I sewed most of his clothes one night while Ivy and I watched a Betty Hutton movie called "Spring Reunion". Even for an old movie that one overdid the old movie thing about casting people too old for roles. The people were supposed to be at their 15th high school reunion, and they all looked closer to 45 than 33. And considering they were only supposed to be 33,people kept asking Betty Hutton,"Why did you never get married?" She was only 33!
   I think I'm going to call him Dale Leroy. My mom always wanted a little boy. She wanted him to have red hair,wear overalls and 'big yellow work boots',like my dad always wore...

Kind of like these, only taller.

...and she wanted to name him 'Dale Leroy'. (Leroy was my dad's name.) I always appreciated I wasn't a boy, so I didn't have to have that name. Not long ago somebody pointed out to me that she could have named a girl Dale. I'm glad my mom didn't think of that. (Apologies to anybody named Dale,but that name is just not for me.)
  The other thing I've been working on, besides Emma's present, was putting some wire bodies on a couple of the heads I had made and painted. I showed you the heads in a previous post. Well here is the first one to get a body.

Like Dale Leroy,this one is about 4 inches tall.

As you can see,I also got as far as the arms the other night.

Yes, he has a goofy face. A lot of my people come out that way.

  So that's it for this post. Until next time,remember to be good to others. We are all only humans.

I Did It Again! Another New Project!

  Okay. I've done it again. I started another thing before finishing the ones I already have started. But I'm going to see this one through to the finish right now,even if I don't like how it's turning out. The reason I started something new is, I came across my peachy felt the other day, which is perfect for a skin tone, and I got inspired to make a doll.

He's about 4 or 5 inches tall.

  It's not everybody's skin tone, but it reminds me of an old Tiny Town doll,or the limbs of a Baps doll. If you aren't familiar with Tiny Town dolls you can go to my post on mine HERE. If you aren't familiar with Baps dolls, you can see my Baps doll HERE, and the beautiful ones I saw at a doll show HERE.  Now that I found this felt, the other thing I can do is repair my Baps girl's arms. Then maybe I'll take a whack at her face. (That sounds mean, doesn't it?)
  As for this new guy, I started with a wire armature. Actually, to be honest, I started like I usually do, about 4 steps into the process. I started by making his head.
 

I should have started with the wire armature. I made his head by bunching part of the felt  into a head shape,and stuffing it with polyfil. I tied thread tightly around the neck so it would stay a head shape. It felt pretty creepy strangling this guy with thread,especially after I had made and felted the body, and had to re-tie the neck! I felt like there was somebody somewhere who looked like this guy,being inexplicably strangled by an invisible force. 

Ad you can see,I made him a nose,ears,and, much to Ivy's dismay, lips. I might remove the lips when I try painting the face. They might look weird painted. Ivy thinks I just need to remove them. PERIOD.

Voo Doo dolls aside, I spent some time twisting wire to make him a one piece body and limb contraption. I then started the process of covering his torso with felt. With a torso there was something to attach his head to. I trimmed the excess felt that had been gathered around his neck to form the head. It was thickly bunched, so I  had to cut a lot of it out. Next I moved on to his arms,and shaped his hands. I glued the felt with Fabri-Tac,which stays pretty soft and rubbery for a while. That allowed me to use scissors to snip at the glued felt,which by then had merged with the glue and become a somewhat moldable single entity, to shape and reshape the body,including snipping shoulders and shaping the torso and arms..

 That's also how I made his hands. With the hands I glued the felt, and then snipped in fingers with scissors. After the fingers were cut in, I squeezed and shaped them with my fingers,adding more Fabri-tac as needed to make them moldable.

  

    This is how I always make the hands on the miniature felt covered dolls I make. Like THIS ONE,THIS ONE, and THIS ONE, and especially THIS ONE. Hmm. Maybe I shouldn't tell you this. If anybody can make one for themselves, they will never buy one from me,and I might want to do that again some day.
  Then I covered his legs.
 

I know his stomach area looks awful. But don't worry. That will be under his clothes and not be noticeable. The only thing that matters is how he looks in his clothes.

    One thing to keep in mind is that it has to be done as you go. The glued felt eventually gets tougher. By the next day the felt was too hard to snip very easily,or squeeze into shape.

  He's now in the process of having his clothes made. Ivy chastised me for gluing the clothes I was making for one of my almost finished dolls just last week. So this time I'm actually attempting to sew the tiny clothes wherever possible. When I get the clothes finished I'll show you. Then we'll see what he looks like with a face in another  post. But I promise we'll get there!
  As you can see, when I took these pictures, my lilacs were still blooming. I have been trying to get this post up for days, but I was having trouble with the memory card from my camera. I couldn't get the pictures onto my computer. I finally got it to work, but I think I'm going to need a new memory card. Luckily Ken already has some ordered,because we have that wedding to photograph in a few weeks.
  By now my lilacs are just about gone. The dogwood tree's blooms have all dropped. 

The walk at the side of our house,(Actually it's the back. It's hard to explain.), is covered with lilacs that have dropped already. We've had some really hard rains, so some of them were beaten off, I think.

The iris's are fading.
 

I have since pulled those tings in the back on the left. The other stuff is my daffodils. The flowers finish and wither, but the greenery lingers on. (It just gets flabby!) My white fencing has seen better days. It needs replacing or at least reshaping. I have some plastic fencing I'll probably replace it with. It has been either cold or rainy or both all Spring,so I haven't done much yard work. You know, I have a roll of the full sized vintage fencing made in a similar style to this one,(I found it ion the ceiling of our garage when we moved here almost 25 years ago.),  and it's still in great shape! They don't make 'em like they used to!  

  When I took these pictures my yard was full of flowers: lilacs,iris',and whatever these are:

The stuff in the front is red clover. It started years ago and I left it to grow for our rabbit,Jerome,who enjoyed it. Now I leave it for the bees. They need it.

  They might be weeds, but if so,they're nice ones. Does anybody know what they are? I also have a lot of this stuff this year.

Does it look familiar to anybody? Ken says he found in online and it's dark nettle. I found it as something else. It's a weed, I think, but it grows purple flowers and has nice leaves with a purple tint.
  These bushes have started to flower.

The grass is badly trimmed, but the little plant on front of the bushes on the left are wild violets. They grow where they want and refuse to grow where they are moved,so,I left them. they have medium purple flowers.

I like them for doll photo shoots because the flowers are small. You'll have seen them before,for example,in the MOTHER'S DAY POST featuring Dolly World and her daughters...

  ...or THIS POST, featuring Dolly and a few of her kids...

...or THIS POST on the Dolly Darlings doll,Honey. Nice bush...but does anybody know what it is?

  My peonies are getting there. They have a while to go though.

  They are surrounded by those yellow flowers,and to the right is that Asian lily that I finally identified a couple of years ago.
  So, until that guy gets his clothes on,this is it from here. See you soon.