Polymer Clay Doll Workshop

This weekend I will be teaching a polymer clay dollhouse doll workshop in Nova Scotia, and as I hadn't made dolls for quite a while, I decided to do a few body parts. By just after lunch, I had four ladies ready to put together; they will all go into the Tudor market hall, eventually. A man has been sculpted, but not yet bakes; tomorrow, I hope to give him 3 friends to share the oven with (hehe!)

My old clay is giving me a bit of a problem; it has tiny air pockets in it that pop up when it is baked, despite a lot of "working" the clay. Hopefully I can sand these tiny imperfections out, or hide them with paint. Legs don't worry me, as the ladies will get stockings and shoes to cover any imperfections, but problems on hands and faces are more worrisome. These ladies all have inserted eyeballs, that's why they are staring like that.

It's a funny thing about making individually sculpted dolls; old and middle-aged dolls are no problem whatsoever, but I have a very hard time making young faces! These ladies are mostly of the older variety; once they are painted there might be other faces jumping out. Oh yes, that is another weird thing with dolls; I can't really decide what I am making, they decide for themselves.....

As well as making the dolls, I am also working again on last year's Camp MiniHaHa project. The raw edges of the pink foam have been covered with stained or painted wood, and the next step will be to repair some of the chips in the "stucco" that happened when one of the pieces of framing decided to

 go on crooked, and had to be redone. My goal is to have it finished to display at camp in September. As it requires lots of stock in the shop, I will work my way through a fair bit of polymer clay in the next few month as the shop will sell soaps and scents of various sorts made with lavender and other plant essences. Waiting to be worked on are Lite Brite pegs to be turned into bottles, and then I have to find appropriate, tiny labels and boxes for these items. Although I bought some very nice furniture for this shop in Victoria, BC in March, I am still inclined to try and make my own shop furniture, sort of shabby chic.

It is my hope that I will be able to post more regularly, now that my life is more or less back to normal. However, I won't do an iris tutorial, as Joanne Swanson has recently done that on her blog site, and my design for irises is based on hers; the only thing I do differently is to build the petals up on a tiny 1/8" circle platform (see tutorial on poinsettia plants).