Clam the mermaid

I have sold Merle and had to make a replacement mermaid for selling. I am not very happy with the pics of Clam - but still listed her. I will have to see if I can take some better ones later. Hopefully tomorrow will be sunny and light outside - it does seem to help tremendously with taking a good photograph.

Hope she is also going to sell as quick as Merle!!

Francesco and the fool

This doll is my first fully air dry clay sculpted doll. I am very happy with the way he turned out. His costuming took forever to do and while a normal cloth doll takes me about 30 hours to complete, he took almost more than double the time. A lot of time had been waiting time for the clay to dry as well as sanding in between layers which was a cumbersome task.

I only did the face in clay and was contemplating doing the hands as well but I decided against that since I used gold foil on the arms and would not have anything to hide the seam between the cloth and clay. I am eager to see how this clay will stand up to the time and wether it is going to crack and become brittle with time. This has been only an experiment but I am absolutely thrilled by the way it turned out. I am definitely going to make more clay sculpts now. I still like the manageability of the cloth for posing of the figure and will have to make some kind of transition to full clay sculpting. But thats for later, now I am just enjoying my newly found love for sculpting. I have considered selling him but am going to charge a whopping price (perhaps he won't sell and I get to keep him!!!). Am I fooling myself???

Merle the Mermaid

Recently I had a request for a mermaid doll from South Africa and decided to do another one for the etsy store. The one that I sent to SA I forgot to take pictures of since I was in such a hurry to get her on her way! Silly me.

The one I made for my shop uses the same materials and embellishments but with a different face. I have to say that I like the first one better but because I don't use patterns they tend not to come out the same twice.

La Nouba

We recently went to Orlando FL with the main purpose of taking Marelie to Disney world for her birthday. We all had a wonderful time and I was inspired to make more dolls by the exquisite displays all through Disney world. One of the highlights of our trip was taking in a performance of Cirque du Soleil. The performance was called La Nouba. Oh what a wonderful experience. The costumes and acts were superb and the whole show a trip into fantasy land. I made one of the characters to commemomrate our very wonderful trip. I picked "Birdy" since she was so color ful and the main stay of the performance. She came out just as colorful as the real time character. Oh what good memories we made on this trip!!!! For this doll I highly adapted parts of a PMC pattern.