Rehab in action - down on the farm...

Another week has raced by! And I've been rehabbing away, creating bit by bit. There have been a lot of thoughts on my mind about the process I'm undertaking. Strangely, though, I haven't felt moved to write about them... yet. I will. But this last week was characterised by physical craftiness & creativity.

I had the luxury of a big chunk of time last week and finally got a long term project finished! FINISHED!!! Wahoo!!

Tuesday (day 26) - Finished Matryoshka dolls!!

Ooohh this felt so good! Finally, FINALLY, the matryoshka dolls are done. :D They were polka dotted and had their little faces drawn in on the same day. They look great - just the way I'd drawn them in designs. ;) All that's needed now is a few coats of spray lacquer, but I won't be doing it as I don't want to breathe the stuff in while I"m pregnant. Then... on to the second set (for Z's birthday). I anticipate that it will be much quicker this time because 1) I'll know what I"m doing and 2) I won't have hangups about tackling certain parts because I know they're all pretty easy now. ;)

I"m planning (when I have time) to write a "how to" post on painting your own matryoshkas. One day... ;)

Look at these gorgeous ladies!

Wednesday (day 27) - model felt farmhouse

Many, many moons ago I had a project in mind. After seeing some beautiful felt cottages made by En Gry Sif (and seeing the prices!) I decided to make one for Z. I went and brought all of the materials, carted them to Rottnest, brought them back without having made anything and stuffed them all in the cupboard. This week I decided to drag them out and see what could be done with them. My first step was to make a little model farmhouse to see if the stiff felt that I'd brought was up to the job. I made it all in brown because I had more of that colour. My main aim was to test the stitching and the flip top roof. I've left this model without one of it's sides because it's going to be a dog house.

Had to put her in there cos she's so cute that she deserves a cameo!

Thursday (day 28) - felt farmhouse

Finished off the model, pretty happy to start the real thing!

Friday (day 29) - felt farmhouse - design and cutting

I did a few design sketches of the farm house to get an idea of size and styles of stitching. I also cut out the first shapes to stitch on.

Saturday (day 30) - felt farmhouse

Started stitching features onto the farmhouse. Slowly, slowly...

Sunday (day 31) - felt farmhouse

More stitching...

Pretty vanilla at this stage... will be funkified shortly

Monday (day 32) - felt farmhouse

And yet more stitching....

Tuesday (day 33) - felt farmhouse stitch sampling

I found a few different flower stitching techniques and played with those. I really like a couple of them, particularly the brazilian style leaf stitch (for leafs!) and bullion stitch for creating flowers that have a great 3-d effect. I haven't yet decided whether to go the whole hog and do all of the decoration with embroidery or whether to mix it up a bit and sew on other bits and bobs. I like the idea of pure embroidery and I also enjoy it, but... I know that it's crazy time consuming! And I wonder if little sewn on bits and pieces will create more texture and interest? Will think on it...

Rehab in action

Another week of Creativity Rehabilitation! Here's an overview of the last week's rehab....

Monday (day 18) - Writing

I was moved to write a bit about why I'm in need of creativity rehabilitation. This blog post - Opening the Treasure Chest - was a chance to examine why my creative juices stopped flowing.

Tuesday (day 19) - Z's heart mobile (finished!)

Ahhhh.... finally! A finished project! Everything was ready to go, I just needed to assemble it. A bit of fiddling around with some fishing line, and voila! It's now living in its new home, hanging from Z's crazy circus bed.

Wednesday (day 20) - Crappy Craft - egg carton animals

This was a result of a "get Z involved" moment. We painted the chopped up egg cartons together (I held them, she slathered and dabbed them with paint - very thoroughly, I might add!). I crafted the little heads and legs from pipe cleaners. After a failed attempt to glue them in place, I resorted to sticky tape. She held the bodies while I stuck in assorted legs and heads. (I later saw someone using tiny bulldog clips to hold pipecleaners while waiting for glue to dry - will do that next time!). In the end we wound up with a dinosaur, a dragon, a turtle and a snail. They're now all living together in harmony on top of her pink toy microwave. Of course.

Here's old red-o-saurus

Thursday (day 21) - Felt board stuff

I sat down and drew a sketch for the felt board farm. A house, little pond, trees, animals... you know, farmy stuff! ;) I now have a good idea of how many elements I need, what size, and how much work each one will take.

Friday (day 22) - Writing

I've been getting a bit frustrated when struggling to get some time to myself to create. I wrote a post on Friday to exorcise my frustrated demons and create something at the same time. (It's often easier to write while Z is around than it is to create anything using materials.) It's here: Mornings and Personal Brinkmanship .

Saturday (day 23) - Felt board shapes

More shapes, more animals. Slowly, slowly, the farm is emerging! This has turned out to be a good project to work on when I've only got 20 mins or so to spare. it doesn't take long to sketch a shape, cut the pattern and cut the felt.

Sunday (day 24) - Sailboat picture

Mmmm... yet another project started! (I'm noticing a pattern emerging here - heavy on the starting, light on the finishing - so far!). I felt like doing some embroidery so started sketching a simple sailboat design to embroider on felt. I did a few test samples of various stitches and have a pretty good idea of how to proceed.

Monday (day 25) - Felt board shapes

This was an end of the day effort, sketching and cutting shapes in the ad breaks while watching my fave crap TV show. Just managed to squeak in there!

Here's where the feltboard is at... fair bit to go yet.

* * *

Errrggghhhh!!! I must finish this post by venting a bit about supposed "font choice" on the blog. I always choose Arial, but somehow it only appears sporadically. Times New Roman keeps muscling its way in. Feck off, TNR!!

Oh and now another vent - can't get rid of the centre formatting for one piece of text above. I can see I'll have to make friends with HTML if I"m going to get this formattting stuff under control.

Rehab in action

This week has really been about getting the first set of dolls done. So little chunks have been accomplished here and there...

Thursday (day 14) - Painting Matryoshkas

Little chunk here - hoods got painted, which took ages! Mostly because borders take a long time and there are heaps of borders in the hoods.

Friday (day 15) - Painting Matryoshkas

Scarves got painted. Which doesn't sound like much but sheesh it took a while! First a practice run with the brushes on each of the different size scales... which was well worth while because the smaller ones needed a different technique than the larger ones. Then the nerve wracking painting itself.

Saturday (day 16) - design development - Matryoshkas & doodling

Had a bit of a weird day here. I was anticipating a block of free time in the arvo to do some creating. I got the free time but was also struck by a pulled ligament. This left me pretty much immobile. So the sketchpad was pulled out and I got started on designs for the next dolls. Plus I co-drew a fair few ballerina worms with Z.

Sunday (day 17) - Painting Matryoshkas

Noice! A good 1.5 hours spent on painting, thanks to Z being off on a day trip with her grandma. Got the hair done (neatly!) and did lots of tests on different techniques for getting regular, neat polkadots. Harder, far harder, than it sounds. :/ I also managed to push past a barrier to get the first section of pinhead dots done. Part of me has been dreading doing that part... So I was pretty happy to make progress on it. Amazing how something so simple can be so scary!

* * *

From here on in I"m planning to do a weekly update on rehab in action. This will record every day's creative acts in one post, rather than splitting them across several posts. That way other posts can have more focus on the process instead of the product. Cos there's a lot of interesting stuff coming up that I"d like to talk through.