etc.

The fruit of yesterday’s labours and my contribution to the March Month of Softies, whose theme is “Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Child”:

She stands about 13 inches high and is a bit lanky, which was completely unintended but turned out to be a happy coincidence because I was bit of a thin child (not lanky, just a bit limby). Most of the rest of it uses some artistic license, except that I distinctly remember disliking skirts and dresses, loving dungarees, and wearing my hair in two pigtails tied very tight with big red baubles (which I disliked at the time but love in retrospect — thanks, Mum!). Also, I had a lot more hair than that, but I ran out of brown floss!

Here she is right after the stitch-up (contrast seaming was not intended, I also ran out of beige thread!). As you can probably tell, I know nothing at all about doll anatomy and construction, but I fudged my way through without incident, for the most part. Her proportions turned out to be much better than I thought they would be (I thought her arms would be too short, and her legs too long), but I think I’ll narrow up the top part of the torso on the template for next time:

And finally, here she is from a “strolling” angle. Poor thing, I had to stick chopsticks down her pants for added posability:

All told, she took me about 5 hours to complete and what a lovely way to spend 5 hours on a day off. I hadn’t intended to contribute to the March Month of Softies because, for whatever reason, I thought I’d be too late, but look! It’s only the 26th, plenty of time. And now I have five days to kill before finding out what April’s theme is so, to-morrow, I begin work on some friends for Cavity.

And lastly, three things that have made me happy over the past few days: browsing getcrafty blogs for inspiration (and finding it in spades), finding out that this month is National Craft Month (albeit a bit late), and Japanese craft books like this one.