Monday, July 31, 2006

FINALLY! The latest sculpture is finished.



I am quite pleased with this. It's my most ambitious sculpture to date. I wish I could list all the yarns that went into it, but I'm honestly not sure what everything is.



The hair (which was worked as part of the head, sort of intarsia) is a mohair yarn I bought years ago; I think it's something from Paton's, but don't quote me on it. The curls were fairly simple corkscrews (done by working multiple DCs into each chain); the difficult thing there was that I used an E hook to keep it from getting too big. (The main part of the head was done with a 4mm hook.) The body is my beloved Caron's Simply Soft, as is the yarn I used to embroider the face (which I am also quite proud of).

The arms & legs were both made with bends in them. The legs were the most difficult because of crocheted-in bends at both knee & heel. I used a technique described in the book Simple Crochet for Cherished Babies; it's how the author makes the heels on the baby slippers in the book. Well, an adaptation thereof.


The shoes are "leaves" crocheted out of a nice tangerine colored TLC Cotton Plus yarn. I used I think a J hook. That same yarn appears in the shawl, along with some scrap Simply Soft (you may remember it from the girls' Easter skirts, LOL). I just held the two together and used, if memory serves, a 9mm hook.

The skirt is some ribbon yarn I bought at the same time I bought the yarn I used for the hair. I haven't been able to successfully use it for anything else. It was kind of expensive, but better it should be used for this than continue to sit in the closet unused!


This is the flower. One of the rare times I've used Fun Fur. The stem is a pipe cleaner wrapped with sport weight yarn from my stash, attached using a bead, then doubled and wrapped again. I was originally going to do a whole armful of flowers, but I've decided it looks better with just one.

I'm going to throw this up on eBay, with a modest reserve, & see what happens, if anything. I'll make sure there's a link here once I'm done listing it.

Here are a few more photos, and a link to a large collage of the sculpture as a work in progress:

Note, if you can see them, the individual fingers & thumb on the hand. They were made as I closed the hand, by slip stitching through two of the previous round's stitches, chaining a little, and then single crocheting down the chains. I thought I'd taken pictures of the arm itself before I attached it to the main body of the sculpture, but I can't find them if I did.

This is the leg. You can see the two bends in this picture pretty well. It was a bit of a challenge getting it to line up properly.

Here's another view of the completed project. I have no further plans to use fringe on any garments, even a shawl. These photos, by the way, were taken outside in the back yard. Yes, we need to take the Weed Eater to it, but it makes for a better picture a little unmanicured.

Work in Progess Ladder. This is just too big to put here. If you follow the progress, you can see that it was kinda frog-like for a while there. I sewed the ankles and then the hands together to get the appropriate posture, another first for me.

And now, the experiment. I have the sculpture listed on eBay. Will it sell? I have truly no idea. I have a fairly high starting bid, and I do have a reserve because I don't want to wind up with it selling for five bucks. I don't really have expectations at this point in time, but it's worth the shot.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I LOVE it. Very unique. Very artistic.

Pam said...

AWESOME! One-of-a-kind work of art!

Rebecca said...

amazing! i LOVE her! you did an awesome job!!!

Anonymous said...

Wow, she's really lovely!