Things to do on a Spring day

1. Smell the wisteria. Mmmmm.

2. Celebrate a little friend's first birthday.

3. Pick up the dolls, who are looking slightly bewildered. All have ribbons, two blue and three red (that means two very good, three quite good). Who cares, I love them! I won't do this to them again. It felt a bit like sending Little Miss Sunshine to the Porcelein Pageant with all the other girls wearing make-up and pouts, and mine looking like, well, cloth dolls.

Of hens in books

I'm still here, but I'm so inspired by Pip over at Meet me at Mikes' post about Golden Books, I just had to show some of mine. She wrote about JP Miller's illustrations, and 'The Little Red Hen' just happens to be my all-time favourite Golden Book, so here's the cover and a couple of pages from it. It's so colourful and detailed, and I fell in love with the fonts on the cover (yes, it's true...).

I'm a pretty recent convert to Golden Books; didn't grow up with them in South Africa, but I've amassed a pretty good collection in the last year or so. Here's another great one, illustrated by Richard Scarry and written by Patsy Scarry (his wife?). I love his early work. Doesn't Madame Hen look a bit like the Little Red Hen?

An award and a doll show

Haha, no award has been won at any doll show (yet!), but I did get an award from Candeelady at GoGoGluegunFun. Thanks, and what a surprise!! I'd like to thank my mum and dad...

No, seriously, I understand it to be a bit of a celebration of the blogging community, and what a great chance to pay homage to your favourite bloggers. I'm going to have to quote Candeelady's blog, otherwise more might get lost in translation :)
To translate the gift from Portuguese to English, it means:"This blog invests and believes, the proximity" [meaning, that blogging makes us 'close' -being close through proxy]". They all are charmed with the blogs, where in the majority of its aims are to show the marvels and to do friendship; there are persons who are not interested when we give them a prize, and then they help to cut these bows; do we want that they are cut, or that they propagate? Then
let's try to give more attention to them!

So with this prize I must deliver it to 8 bloggers that in turn must do the same thing and put this text in their blog.

I'm going to deviate from their instructions a bit, and choose my favourite five (quality rather than quantity, I say):

Anemone

lily's makebelieve

Just a girl

Tiny Happy

Danita Art

About the doll show: I dropped my girls off yesterday, and I have to say, I feared for them last night as they stayed in the hall with all the reborn dolls. Hope they didn't have any nightmares...

Here they are...

I've been so keen to tell you more about these, but it will have to wait. Let's just say it's commercially sensitive at this stage... Anyway, here they are (only 4 made the grade this time, and one had THREE extreme hair-makeovers!): Amelia, Alice, Amy and Anna.

Gotta go, still getting ready for drop-off at the Doll Show tomorrow. If you're in town, it's the Auckland Dollmakers and Collectors' Annual Doll Show, at the Freeman's Bay Community Centre in Hepburn St, Sat and Sun. I expect there'll be heaps of porcelein dolls, but mine will be with other cloth, polymer clay and paper mache dolls. Craig made the stands and the dolls look so professional standing on their recycled Kauri platforms (will post a photo this weekend).

Ooh, I sound like such a nerd!! But my life has really just been dollsdollsdolls and sick kids for the last few weeks. Time to get out a bit :)

Latest projects

I've been busy making some new dolls for a project I'll hopefully be able to blog about soon. It's a range of 5 one-off dolls, and they're about halfway finished. I've never made so many at once; it feels a bit overwhelming to make twenty little arms and legs in one go! And 5 pairs of undies (made from vintage table- and bedlinen):

I'm also showing some of my dolls at the Auckland Doll Fair next weekend, so need to design and make some stands for that (with the help of my handiman-man, Craig). It will be interesting to see other dollmakers' work; I've never been to anything like that. I'm entirely self-taught from library books and trial and error :)

I dropped off this donkey at Endemic last week; I'm very happy with how he turned out. He's made out of an old blanket, 100% pure NZ wool. Should be available for sale soon. Go on, I know you want him!

And we have a winner...

Congratulations to Sue!! Congratulations to you! We hope you like badges, 'cause this one's for you!

I see Endemic's blog posted a link to this giveaway today, so if there's enough interest, I'll do another draw next Wednesday. Obviously it will be another design, you can have a look at my flickr page to see what my stuff looks like :)

Lace

It was Father's Day yesterday, and we went for a walk in a local arboretum, which ended up being a slightly disappointing, overgrown bit of bush (we really like our arboretums full of nice, big trees :). But I picked up some very pretty leaf skeletons, which in turn reminded me of the most amazing papercuts ever, by a London-based artist called Rob Ryan. You really must look at this image close-up, it's so detailled.

Thanks Jaz for introducing me to Frankie, thanks to you I'm now in love with a magazine. That's where I first saw those beautiful papercuts, and lots of other amazing things and curious little articles. A crafty mag for the cool kids, I suppose.

Naughty lemon

Here's something I discovered yesterday: a guy who creates the coolest little characters by adding wire arms and legs to household objects and food, mostly. His blog's called Bent Objects, and this is my favourite pic; it really appeals to my slightly twisted sense of humour.

It's SPRING!

It's spring and I feel so happy! We have cherry blossoms in the back yard, and my boys and I have been enjoying watching all the bumble bees, monarch butterflies and wax eyes flitting about. I feel like doing something nice, so here's a nice badge for somebody. If you'd like it, just leave a comment (if you're not on blogspot, remember to also leave an email address), and I'll announce the winner next Wednesday evening (so let's say you can enter until 7pm our time next Wednesday). Good luck!