I can (and often do) market the stuffing out of my friends’ creative endeavors. I’m the person with a nice word, the pat on the back, and the confidence building admonitions. But when it’s something I do, something I made, something I’m invested in I lack any kind of confidence.

Oh sure, I act like I’m confident, and sometimes that’s enough to allow me to bulldoze my way through. In reality what’s going on inside my head is that I equate the fruits of my labor to my self worth, and since my self worth is usually in the toilet I tend to think just as poorly of the things I produce. So promoting my own skill is a major leap– and I crumple hard sometimes.

And this is where I cringe. Because I don’t always feel brave enough to say “Hey look guys, this is what I made!” Let alone try to say “Hey look guys, this is what I made and want you to exchange money for it!”

Besides I hate shop blogs in general, because sooner or later they turn into “Oooh we just got in a case of three toed glass pickle sharpeners and wouldn’t you know it? Everyone has to have one.”

So fine. Flannel curio bags on eBay and flannel curio bags on Etsy. I made them, the price is good if you need them. There. Happy now?

I’m going to go work on finishing my In the Style of Queen Anne doll and hope no one is judging me too harshly.

Sooki is the main character in The Saggy Baggy Elephant, he’s happy with himself and life in general until a parrot starts making fun of him.

Parrots can be such dicks.

Sooki then tries ways to make his skin fit better, mostly by asking predators for advice and putting himself in harms way. Each time he tries and fails the parrot is there to make sure that Sooki feels the sting of public humiliation.

Really depressed, Sooki hides in a cave (an obvious metaphor for eating a gallon of Cherry Garcia and wearing dirty sweatpants) and a hungry lion finds him there. Sooki cries out as loud as he can when the lion goes after him and his terror is rewarded– he is saved by a herd of elephants that not only chase off the lion but affirm that there’s nothing wrong with Sooki, he’s a fine looking little elephant sags and wrinkles and all. Then they go stampede through the jungle in a rage (okay, the book says they all dance through the jungle, but I’ve watched a lot of National Geographic specials on elephants and dancing was not even mentioned in passing.)

It’s probably too sad to recount that the elephants’  joy stampede destroyed several small villages and took many innocent lives so it ends with them “dancing” in the jungle. Not to mention that graphic depictions of death and destruction could have been problematic for the illustrator of a children’s book. I can respect editorial discretion and I still love this story even though the intended moral of the story is “You’re okay as you.” and I’m pretty sure the real moral of the story is “Yell loud enough and an angry mob of adults will eventually come and save you.”

Also: “Parrots are dicks.”

The truth is no angry mob is going to save anyone from deeply seated self loathing caused by the taunting of parrots with borderline personality disorder or lions that may or may not be suffering from a serious eating disorder.

Still, it’s a lovely story and I couldn’t pass by the little handmade elephant in Keeper’s Corner without thinking of the book, so I bought the elephant and Matt gave me the book.

My re-organizing of the craft room is going well. I took a little time out to deal with a pressing case of yarn vomit. Yarn vomit is when a skein of yarn expels the loose inner core of yarn in a one or several large clumps which will then tangle if left to their own devices. Yarn vomit is the bane of knitters and a single skein of yarn suffering from yarn vomit is capable of infecting the whole herd.

Somehow winding new neat and tidy balls of yarn just isn’t giving me my crafty fix for the day. I think I’m going to make a push to finish painting my Queen Anne doll later and start working on hearts for Valentine’s day.

During my convalescence I revamped Cutemojo with a completely new look, new theme and re-installed the shopping cart that I took offline when I moved last year. I have to build another light box and start taking photos of my inventory now but the shop is otherwise ready for business.

Last night I started painting my Queen Anne doll. It was really difficult to make myself cut the joints and get started on her, because painting is where I will inevitably screw things up. Obviously I know gesso exists and if I really mess things up, it’s here for me to apply over and start again. Worst case scenerio: I have to cut, sew and stuff a new part. I would just rather get things right the first time.

I also know that this is a tendency that hangs me up on a lot of things, since I would much rather not try than risk failure. I’m excellent at not trying. I don’t usually think about it, but being sick tends to punctuate certain habits of mine that I don’t like very much. I cringe when I think of wasting supplies and materials and it takes some mental flexibility for me to see that my making mistakes and redoing bits is not really a waste.

After cutting the joints and setting the loose beads aside, I applied a thin layer of gesso directly to the linen where I planned on painting. Once the gesso dried I used antique white as the base coat.

Next I mixed a little instant coffee into clear sealer, not a smooth blend– only mixing enough to wet the granules without incorporating them into the varnish. If I’d been thinking I would have taken an in progress picture, because as the coffee/sealer is applied with the brush the granules do dissolve leaving sharp grains behind.

Then I followed with crackle finish and the same antique white that I started with. Since it’s a little paler and more uniform than I would like I’m going to do one more very light coat with the coffee/sealer blend, diluting it with a little more sealer to grunge up the finish a little before applying clear varnish and painting her features.

This is my progress so far. I deviated by embiggening the nose, leaving the hair bun off (for now at least, I’m still contemplating hair) and needle sculpting the face. I couldn’t find the right sized wooden beads in my craft stash but I happened to have the right sized glass pearls on hand.

I think the glass pearls work well for the joints. There’s something very compelling about the way they peek out from the muslin.

Tomorrow there will be (in theory at least) gesso and paint and the making of clothes, but tonight I’m just going to revel a little in my progress.

That’s right, relax and revel.

I’m going to assume that breeding conditions are less than ideal in the craft room because it stopped reproducing.

The timing was great though, because I usually don’t think that much about stuffing, and there are tons of people that know far more about what to use and how to use it that were willing to point me in the right direction. And as it turns out there are a lot of stuffings available at Christmas time sold as snow decoration that really aren’t readily available during the rest of the year.

I was also pointed to an awesome video for learning how to properly stuff a doll using hemostats.

The bunnies above were filled with Silky Soft, produced by Fairfield (the very same makers of regular poly-fil) it’s super bouncy and feels baby fine in comparison to the normal stuff. It doesn’t pack tightly, so when I overstuffed a tiny head and left it on the table, I’d return to find white polyester brain matter oozing out the neck hole. I bought this stuff before I had the the sense to ask the experts, but fortunately it’s perfectly appropriate for my squishy little toys.

Then there’s poly-fil, it looks loftier but packs densely. Using the hemostat technique I attempted Mikey from Beautiful Animal Dolls by Miriam Gourley. My Mikey’s skin is just cotton flannel, since JoAnn’s is all I really have for a fabric store there’s no proper wool felt to be had offline, but the thinner skin made a great test for the stuffing and technique. The hemostats really did make all the difference in the world and he’s not nearly as lumpy I feared he would be.

And he stands!

I also picked up a 50/50 rayon (from extruded bamboo) and polyester fiber (Nature-fil by Fairfield) and I guess I’ll be grabbing some of the Eco(-fil? I can’t remember) made from Ingeo (extruded corn) fibers when it goes on sale after Christmas but I have yet to try those out.

Mod Podge is miracle stuff. Especially since I’m convinced that somewhere encoded in my dna is an imperative to never throw away a wooden box. I’m pretty sure that since this box had an ugly fish (now obscured by gesso) design on the top that it bore dried and horribly out of date smoked salmon from my mom (sometimes she gives Christmas gifts a little late, not good from a culinary point of view but makes for awesome funny food poisoning stories.) Before doing anything to it I removed the hinges and set them aside so they won’t get gummed up with my creative impulses.

Sanding only improves soft woods so far, so I took off the rough edges with a medium grit sanding sponge and primed with a few coats of gesso but I wasn’t especially concerned with perfection.

Decoupage isn’t necessarily a speedy process, especially when using tissue paper and especially when going for a deeper varigated finish. The first layer consists mostly of the light blue tissue paper and a few bits of the violet, the second and third layers are almost all violet paper cut into slightly smaller diamondish shapes.

Now I’m going to tattle on myself.

Here’s one of my first boxes from a few years back, although I still like the general idea of the box, I really keep it because I made so many mistakes with it. My first mistake was not putting down a base coat, so in some of the thinner spots the wood shows right through the tissue (which could be cool if done intentionally, but very uncool in this context. Also, dust was a serious issue, so while I started with a nice clear clean pink, you can see what went wrong on first glance right around the edges where the lid and box meet.

On the inside things went a little (but not much) better. That bit of gold haze is from the judicious application of Perfect Pearls dust when the final coat was slightly tacky. I did wise up and apply more layers of paper, but did not have enough wisdom to let the layers dry out between applications, so it looks okay, but not great and doesn’t reflect the effort I put into it.

Everything has a learning curve.

Happy Birthday Deb!

I get a little kick out of watching my flock increase.

Yeah, that’s it.

28 Days Later starts with an infected monkey. 28 Weeks later heterochromia iridum figures heavily. Got it.

Now add this:

Suddenly the equation becomes way more interesting. I was just working in my little dungeon craft room, maybe for a little too long and inspiration struck like a rage virus infected sock monkey. (The title of this post was a dead give away wasn’t it?)

I guess the gene responsible for  heterochromia iridum is not always paired with the one that might offer some rage virus immunity. At least not in sock monkeys.

My son declared this “Most awesome sock monkey ever!” when he came home from school yesterday. I take that as the highest of compliments.

I’m not going to argue that messing with forbidden fruit didn’t have a certain appeal. The real appeal though was what all that stuff had potential, not the sort of stuff I would have picked at the Ben Franklin’s in Oregon City, Mom’s stuff was the kind of kitschy craft materials found in the back of old Workbasket magazines. More to the point, it presented a challenge I longed to take on– taking unfamiliar and (to me) exotic materials and making whatever out of them.

Now I get that same sense of challenge and excitement from finding caches of craftiness at garage sales. Except this time around I don’t have the threat of a bread-board or a belt swinging at my posterior to keep my creative instincts at bay. I turn into that little kid that just wants to make stuff again.

This is basically what I started with, some wooden beads and weird little puffy angel wings. I could see me buying the beads (maybe, if I were particularly inspired to do something folksy or a little drunk or both) but the angel wings wouldn’t even be on my radar.

I started by priming the beads with a basic acrylic paint sealer; since runny faces are sad faces.

The rest sort of happened bit by bit.

The doll on the left is my first attempt, she looks slightly more pregnant than her friend. I penned her features on over the primer, which I didn’t like so I switched to paint with the 2nd doll.

At 2.75 inches tall, they are hefty little gals. Whoever said angels can’t be fat? Maybe they are the guardian angels of roast beef and lots of gravy and extra helpings of potatoes. Who am I to judge?

I suppose I have plenty of time to contemplate these questions while working on the rest of their little heavenly host.

All those little heads laying there, if you really think about it– the dowels would be equivalent of spines.

I will consider this to be my Predator homage moment. I suppose working on little calico alien face huggers would be a little overboard, even for me so I’ll keep up with the doll thing for a while.