The Unveiling of Falerina, the Flower Fairy

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She’s finished, or just about.  I have her label to sew in and need to spray her face with fixative and stitch her basket to her hands.  Otherwise, she’s ready to take her bow!  She will be listed in my Etsy Shop late this week.  I have to haul out the back drop and the lighting to get her good pictures done, so that won’t happen until Wednesday. 

I am so pleased with her wings, which I finished up yesterday.  I saw a picture of wings by Deb Wood on the A-for-Artistic website and just missed signing up for her class.  I will definitely take it the next time it is offered.  I muddled through creating this wings with help from the class I took at Art Fest last year. 

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She has ears, unlike most of my dolls lately, because I wanted to use yarn for her hair that I got at Hill Country Weavers last weekend.  I’ll explain the relationship in another post.

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And here is Falerina with her basket of flowers.  I went shopping for the materials in my studio!  Gotta love it when you don’t have to buy anything to complete a piece!

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She got her gladiator shoes today.  She even has toenails, which you can’t see because she’s kneeling on them.

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Here’s a back shot of her wings, without her hair to get in the way.

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And a close-up of her basket.  Happy Spring! 

Speaking of spring – a few shots from my garden.  The flowers are definitely blooming.

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My patio at 10am this morning.

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Purple salvia in my back bed.  I will post more pictures of this bed a bit later.  I’ve got three varieties of salvia mixed together with rosemary, lavender, Mexican Petunia and a couple of trees.  The salvias are going nuts!  It must be the compost I added this year, cause the Hot-Lips salvia has already grown 3 feet from where I wacked it back and the red salvias have put on the longest flower spikes I’ve ever seen.  They are going to pop open any day now and it will be a stunning display.

The new flower bed is taking off.  The mist flowers and the copper canyon daisy are thrilled with their surroundings.

Flower Fairy update: Face!

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I finished up sleeves and got the fairy’s face drawn.  I guess I need to name her instead of continuing to call her “the fairy”.  Anyway, in keeping with the soft colors of her costume, I wanted a soft, innocent face.  So, blue eyes, and she’ll likely have blond hair.  I worked with a color pallet that coordinated with the fabrics in her dress.  She looks happy.

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It took several times to get the eyes and mouth right.  The mouth is a little large, but I think that works in this case.

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She’s going to be holding something with flowers, a bouquet or a basket, maybe.  I have to dig through my stash to see what I have that will work.  Tomorrow evening, I’ll stitch on her head and start on wings.  The to do list to finish her up includes painting her fingernails, sculpting her toes and giving her shoes and hair.  Hopefully, she’ll be finished up and listed on Etsy by the end of the weekend!  Here is the full length shot, so you can see her finished costume.

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Flowers and Fairies

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We’ve been blessed with rain twice in the last week, with a chance for more in a few days.  We are back in extreme drought, which makes any bit of rain we get very precious.  The plants are soaking it up and putting on a bit of a show.

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I finished putting in the plants in the newest flower bed in my back yard.  I’ve been planning this bed for a while and I’m super thrilled to get it in this year.  It will help keep my foundation watered, if nothing else.  The rain helped the plants in this bed immensely, as well as making my garden happy!  I am not sure why, by my tomato and pepper plants in containers on my patio have already put on fruit while those in my garden are about a month behind, even though they were planted the same time.

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In addition to gardening, I’ve been working on the Flower Fairy.  She’s all dressed up and has arms now!  She has a linen petticoat lined with a ruffle and a second petticoat of embroidered netting.  This is topped with her skirt of a silky gauze.  She was at this point 3 or so weeks ago when I went to the last CTADS meeting.  I attached arms that night and the next and there she sat until this weekend.  I got her bodice and corset constructed and embellished this weekend.  Now I have her sleeves to make, after which, I’ll need to give her a face!  Her head is already sculpted but I’m waiting to draw her face until I finish her costume.

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Her skirt and corset have been hand-beaded.  The beading on the corset took me most of the afternoon.

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I designed her bodice with flowers in mind.  I wanted the impression of flower petals and leaves opening up around her.

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I really like the asymmetrical hemlines in the fashion magazines right now, which is what inspired her skirt.

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Flowers, Bees, Gardening, Fairies

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I spent the weekend working in my yard and researching costuming options for the Flower Fairy.  With the weather approaching the upper 80’s, it’s the time of year where flowers start blooming, the live oak trees drop their leaves and pollen, and the weeds start to take over my yard.

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I made a lot of progress on my back patio.  I’m really happy with how it’s turning out.  I added pots with veggies, herbs and ornamental plants, including 2 huge urns of Carolina Jasmine to grow up and over my pergola.  I got my fountain out of the garage, cleaned the pump and filled it up with water and it’s burbling happily just outside my back door.  I finally hung my birthday present to myself from last year (it’s been sitting in my house since May!).  I planted my tomatoes, cucumbers, bell peppers and beans in the garden, and got it mulched.

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I spent a bit of the evening yesterday photographing the flowers in my front yard and trying to catch a particularly fat bee on a frame in focus.  He kept hovering around one of my daisies that survived the winter, blooming the whole time, but as soon as I would get him in focus, he’d zoom off.  Finally – I managed to get one frame of him in focus!

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I’ve been struggling with the direction for the costume for the Flower Fairy.  I want a costume that suggests flowers, but isn’t terrifically intricate as I intend to sell her in my Etsy shop and don’t want to put so much work into it that she gets really expensive.  Mom suggested going to Jo’Ann fabrics and looking at pattern books, when I complained that my normal sources of inspiration were not panning out.  I thought that was a great idea, so I headed there Saturday evening (after my trek for pots and potting soil).  Boy did I have a fun hour going through the pattern books.  I bought a few, since they were on sale for $1.00.  I also picked up the latest issue of Threads, which had more eye candy in it. 

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So, this evening, after watering the plants, and noting the growth rate of one of the vines (12” in 24 hours!), I headed into my studio to play with the fabric and try to puzzle out the costume.  I ended up swapping out the brocade for one a bit less pink and then decided to pull out my journal to work out what I wanted to do.  Thirty minutes and a bit of water color later, success!  So, tomorrow evening, I’ll begin construction!  All in all, it’s been a productive weekend and Monday evening.

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Spring Fever and Imagine!

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I fully planned to write this post last weekend, but I wore myself out, then got hold of some bad shrimp which resulted in food poisoning.  On top of that, work has been a time-consuming affair since I came back from San Fran.  But that’s enough excuses.

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Last Saturday, I dug in 5 more bags of compost into the low bed in front of my sewing room.  I say dug in, but the ground was soooo hard, there wasn’t much digging.  I planted more plants in the berm and the raised bed next to the driveway, some santolina in the berm, some daylillies and verbina in the raised bed. 

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I added Oxallis and Dianthas to the low bed and then I went back in and planted thyme to start creeping along the raised bed.  I built a walk way with some of the left over stone from my patio between the raised bed and the bird bath. 

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And last, but certainly not least, I hauled 1/2 a yard of mulch over the low bed and got the other 1/2 yard out of my Dad’s pickup.  I worked from 8:30 to 4pm on Saturday and completely wore myself out.  My front beds are almost done, though!

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The cats really enjoyed working in the yard with me.

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Prior to all of the yardwork over the weekend, I did my Imagine entry in Susanne’s Word’s Journal.  I wasn’t sure were I was going initially, but I really liked how it turned out.

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The two page spread doesn’t appear to be tied together, but I used the same colors in the Imagine page (right) that I used in the Excavation page (left).  I added a bunch more colors on the Imagine page though.  I used very different techniques between the two pages.

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I started with Excavation, applying a very thick layer of gesso to the page.  I stamped into it with a gothic calligraphy stamp, then stamped off on the Imagine page.  I wiped my gesso brush off on the Image page center. 

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Once the gesso was dry, I used a wash of Bone Black fluid acrylic over the texture on the Excavation page, which I then wiped off the raised parts.  I used successive layers of fluid acrylic in Permanent Violet, Quin Gold, Bright Copper, and a bit of Quin Burnt Orange.  I used some of these same colors in washes on the Imagine page.

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As I got color down on the Imagine page, I decided I wanted to use a stencil of dragon flies and butterflies spiraling up concentric circles in the center.  I needed a way to set it off, so I used very light washes of Naples Yellow, Quin Crimson, and Permanent Violet in the opening I’d left from stamping off.  I laid the stencil down and misted Pthalo Turquoise over the stencil.

Imagine_top I went back in with white to highlight the circles.  About this time, I figured out that I was creating a sunset and added clouds in Dioxazine Purple and Anthroquinone Blue, highlight with white.  I added a sun using Bright Copper, painted over with Quin Burnt Orange and Permanent Violet.  I used a white crayon to write Imagine and then wiped paint off so it showed.

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Next up is Debbie’s Journal and “Believe”.  I didn’t realize that I knew anyone in the RR besides Naomi, the organizer, but Debbie is my friend Debbie G from St. Louis!  She comes to All Dolls Are Art and silk screened my bags last year.  Her journal is lovely.  I’m going to get it photographed and will post on that later in the weekend.