Posted off the Momiji Doll!

I cannot believe the mammoth task I have just performed!  I managed to make the doll in just a week and got it sent off special delivery on Monday hoping to beat the postal strike and then i learn that the deadline has been extended!!! Typical!  At least I have done it and i am on with the next thing now.

Momiji Contest

I am an avid textile hoarder (carrier bags and boxes oozing out of everything possible cupboard), and love reading sewing/quilting mags and look forward to sitting in bed with a brew and a fave mag. In one of these mags was a comp for making a momiji doll. It was open to all but particularly textile artists. Momiji are little friendship dolls that are all the rage recently. The idea of the comp was to get one off dolls into a haute couture catwalk in LA. The finalists would end up with a mag slot and some contacts in the business. BIG PROB for me was I had only read it last week and the closing date in Fri 30th Oct 2009 at 5pm! So I have had just over a week to design and create it. Days are out cos of my son so I get a couple of hours in the evening these days to do work. Although I am not particularly happy with it I am glad to be entering it because it had pushed me into action again. Check out the dolls and the comp www.lovemomiji.com/couturecontest


Recently I have had a spurt of ideas and had been experimenting with some fabrics and paper but this is confined to the evenings. I don't have the studio space either which is frustrating as it means tidying away everything each time. Considering making under the stairs into a little cubby hole for stuff. The Summer House was a great space but the light was poor and it was too damp for paintings. I wonder if I could justifiy an extension just for a studio?

How I am going to get started again?

Wowee! At Last I am seriously thinking about what work I am going to do after having a baby! I don't mean the boring mundane stuff I have had to do for years alongside the 'loves' of my life. The Arts are a lifelong passion. Particularly the theatre, fine art and textiles.

However, the geography of where I live is not particularly arts cosmopolitan so unless your work is main stream you have to have a job to 'fall back on'!! Mine has usually been a youth project worker and barmaid! Nothing wrong with either of these but I am not always cut out to be these things!

My great great aunt back in the early 20th C was a barmaid and her sister, my great grandmother always maligned her as 'a jumped' up barmaid'! Meaning she had ideas above her station, believing herself better than she was. I can identify with this great great aunt and in fact it has become a family joke between my mother and I.

I am a jumped' up barmaid but I am lots of things. I have worked in many areas and I call it 'life experience', it informs my work!! Hee hee!

Over the past couple of years all of my projects have been stunted through lack of motivation and now a baby. I now want to make more of an effort to get interested, to make something and consider how to market it. I think this is something I really need to do to keep myself sane!

At the moment I am finishing a few sewing projects, a quilt for my son, bridesmaids dress and some alterations for friends. Once I have got them out of the way I am going to get cracking! I need to go small scale first of all so that I be in the home and it is has to be fairly easy to pack away. So ideas are now brewing!