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.

May Showers, Fading Flowers,and Some More Photos

  I hope all the mom's out there had a nice day Sunday. I spent the day with my girls. When Ken got home from work we all went out to eat. We spent the rest of the night at Emma's,since we had to take her to the airport at 4AM.
  We have had a lot of rainy weather lately. My beautiful dogwood tree,(I think that's what it is.), bloomed,and lost all it's petals. 

My lilacs,which I love to smell,bloomed,and are now almost all finished. 
 

All the pink stuff on the ground is dogwood petals.

The bushes with the tiny white flowers,which I used for my Mother's Day post,have bloomed.

It had been raining,so I couldn't mow, and in the meantime my neatly trimmed grass started getting out of hand.

Here are some outtakes from the Mother' Day shoot.

 I have one bloomed iris and one bloomed amaryllis. All this has happened without my getting to enjoy it very much,because it has been raining so much I haven't been out in my yard very often. I haven't been able to hang laundry,work in the yard, mow, or sit out on the patio while Ken grills,(I don't grill, because 1,vegetarian meat doesn't grill well, since it doesn't make it's own grease like real meat, so it sticks. I'm sure there's a way to do it,and you can grill vegetables, but 2,I don't like smokey tasting food anyway. ),or sit in the yard on my bench. So while I have been in here the flowers have all started to go away. The dogwood tree is naked again,and the lilacs are almost gone. Luckily I brought some inside so I could enjoy them in the house. Even more lucky, they aren't toxic, because the first thing our cat Mow wanted to do when I brought them in was start eating them.
  When we get some nice weather I can get outside and take some photographs. Tomorrow is my thyroid nodule biopsy. I'm not looking forward to the big needle in my throat!