So here we are again.

Discounts and musing on the future of the newsletter at the bottom. Art progress at the top.

Last month I set myself three artistic goals: finishing my ace of pentacles painting, doing some more marker drawings, and finishing the hair for my doll. The doll is the only one I managed to put any time into, so you get lots of process pictures today!

This is how she was looking at the start of November. I'd just made a little structure for the head with some wool, but it was pretty rough. One thing that made this project tricky was in the construction of the doll itself. You see that seam on her head, running from the top of her forehead to the mid-back of her head? I need that seam accessible and those two pieces separate in order to access and mess with her elastic tension. This is super important for making sure her limbs hold poses correctly, and for doing maintenance in the future. Now imagine where a normal hairline would sit. Tricky!

The other thing that made this tricky was that I've never done any sort of wig work before. When I've done doll hair in the past it's always been with much softer doll heads where I was able to actually punch through the scalp and thread the hair in directly. This piece needed a fresh approach.

Step one was covering that loose base in yarn. after ages of deliberation I chose this blue yarn (though that didn't last long) and carefully ran it up and down, covering the hair base. I left soft loops along the bottom, and used a bit of blue wool felted over top to keep the strands in place. Once that was done, I used the loops along the bottom and some more yarn to... effectively weave a new hairline? It was some bastard fusion of all my darning and crochet skills, trying to make this flap of fabric basically which would hug the base of the skull and give me a hairline to anchor further embellishments onto without actually attaching to the lower portion of the skull.

I'm really proud of this! It was a huge pain to do! But very satisfying to pull together.

I love doing fiber work like this. Crochet and darning and weaving. Anything where I'm starting with fiber and threads and making something, that always feels magical. Powerful.

Then it came time to start piling on curls and it all fell apart, because this yarn did not hold a curl at all.

I made all my curls for this by wrapping yarn around thin dowels, soaking them in boiling water, and letting them dry in place before pulling out the dowels. This blue yarn looked lovely and coiled until it was moved at all, and then it collapsed into vaguely wavy piles. That felt a bit crushing after I'd spent so much time trying to decide which color to go with, but at least re-deciding was easy enough. I just curled samples of all my yarns and went with the one that held its shape the best. That was this bright yellow alpaca-wool yarn.

I had to re-wrap my base so the colors would be right. I added a bit of wool in the bangs area to give it that bit of bump shape. And I tried really really hard not to pull up on the hairline that I'd spent so long crafting, but it ended up pulling away from the head under all the tension.

Ultimately I just threaded a little drawstring along the hairline so I can cinch it a bit tighter at the nape of the neck. An inelegant solution but it works. The next time I'm approaching a wig like this I expect to go about it very differently.

The curls were sewed on a row at a time, which was tedious and fiddly but pretty effective. For the curls dangling down I thread a straight strand through them and tied it off at the end, so the curls wouldn't fall too much and would stay nicely coiled.

Also I crocheted some teeny tiny flowers. I don't have photos of that process, but I got the pattern from Happy Patty Crochet, who has some absolutely gorgeous flower patterns available. Those were made with a single thread of a shiny embroidery floss I have, and were probably the single most fiddly and frustrating piece in this whole project so far.

And there we go!

Our lovely lady has a full head of hair!

I'm still not totally happy with her hairline, but everything else is good enough and I suspect that's the sort of detail that only I'm noticing anyway. And I have to say, I think the overall effect is marvelous.

I'm hoping to have her face done in a couple days, and then I get to figure out eyes, and fiddle with her joint friction, and then she'll be done. That's a bit surreal to think about. She's been in the works for so long. I'm thinking I'll make a nice youtube video at that point and show off all the details and dress her up nicely.

That's my only real art goal for December. It'd be nice, I think, to finish her in time for New Years.

~~

In personal news, I'm on the hunt for both a new job and a new therapist. How's that for personal growth? I'm hoping to land the kind of boring office job that leaves me with more creative and social energy to spare, but who knows how that will unfold or how I'll fare once I'm there. Depression looms and change is scary and my insurance has all changed since I was last in therapy so I get to figure all the paperwork out fresh.

I'm cautiously optimistic. I usually am cautiously optimistic.

In newsletter news, I've been toying with the idea of converting this more into a blog, especially since I don't see much point in keeping the big fancy website as I go into the new year. It's never quite paid for itself after all. I could keep the newsletter active, port the list over to a different provider, cross-post the blog posts? Or just do the blog? It would be nice for my older writings to be visible in one place.

I'm curious what you think. Do you like my little ramblings here? Do you like getting them directly into your inbox, or would it make more sense to just have a blog to check on once per month? For that matter, is this the sort of writing that you're interested in reading? Would you care for more or less about my life? More or less about my inspirations, my goals, my philosophy on art? Do you care more about finished pieces or works in progress?

I'd like to hear your thoughts. Sincerely.

Anyhow, the shop still exists for at least one more month, so here's an extra big discount code for you. Please do spend it all in one place.