More Family Dolls

I finally finished up a set of family dolls that I have had half finished and sitting in my room for months. This time I made dolls of myself, Darren & Ava for....Ava. She loved them. The clothes are different this time and the "Darren" doll has clothes made out of my old shorts (for his shorts) and an old shirt of Darren's.
Eventually, I will get around to making the extended family for Ava b/c I think it would be cool to have a bunch of little dolls of everyone in our family for her to play with. Don't you think?

Custom Storybook

So this was the year of the custom/personalized Christmas gift for me. For some reason, I decided to make 3 different handmade (and rather time consuming) projects as gifts and 2 of those went to my little 8 month old niece Griffin who lives in NYC (the last one was not technically a Xmas gift but rather a bday gift for my hubby - see previous post).

I say for some reason because I decided to start these projects a month and half before Christmas (so I would have time to do them) and then, because I felt like I had so much time (read the sarcasm here), I took on all sorts of other projects from some friends. A few dresses here, a few baby sets there, a last minute hanukkah shirt etc. None of which took that long but with Ava fighting naps daily and her little 8 hrs of school dwindling, I started to feel the time slipping away. And got stressed. But let's move on...

Anyways, what came out of that long drawn out story was that I made this custom storybook for my little niece since she lives so far away and since we probably won't see her but maybe 2x a year if that. It's a storybook I made about all her family in Texas to help her learn our names/faces. I made a similar book last year about daughter and my husband called "Ava loves her Daddy" using the same concept as this one. (Of course that book was so that Ava would think about her Daddy while he is at work). This one is better though as I had a month to work on it, typed up the words and used colored pencils to do the drawing. My previous one I did in 2 days and used markers and although it's cute, it simply does not compare to this one.

So here it is (photos don't really do it justice) - "Griffin's Trip to Texas" and btw, my sister did cry when she opened this gift. Sign of a good gift in my family. :)

Silhouette

I've been wanting to try this one out for a long time...a silhouette of Ava. I made this using fabric and paint and a canvas I already had. It ended up being pretty cute but it's not exactly how I wanted it to turn out.

I think next time, I am going to use a less busy fabric pattern and a fabric that I can do a black silhouette on. The white silhouette just doesn't pop as much as I would like it to. But all in all it's still adorable! For now it will hang in Ava's room until I do another one. Next time I am going to use one of my rectangular canvases too as I think that might be more pleasing to me. We'll see!

Yeah! New Family Dolls!

So way back when Ava was little, I came up with the idea to do custom dolls of family members who did not live in Austin so that Ava would know who they were and could play with them at any time. The first 2 attempts were not great so I went back to the drawing board.

Many many months later, I finally figured out how I wanted to do them and so I enlisted the help of my AMAZING graphic designer friend, Brooke, to help me accomplish my goal. (She is also the one who painted this super awesome portrait of Ava--she's talented!)

She was able to create the blank doll bodies, attach the heads and provide them to me in a jpg so that I could print them, sew clothes on and sew backs on them too. I love the results and can't wait to give these 3 little dolls to a very special someone (can't tell you who!...yet).

Best part is that the clothing/backs are made from fabric scraps (and Darren's clothes are made from a tshirt and pair of shorts we were giving to Goodwill...good way to go green & recycle if you ask me!)

Front:

Back:
Thanks again Brooke for the help! Now I want to make Ava a set of all of our family and make these for other people....although not all at once and not that soon. Bit tired from all my projects :)

PS. Need to get better photos of these but it's been wet outside and the lighting was not quite right.

Cake Toppers

Since I'm starting this blog to chronicle the projects I'm working on, I thought I'd start off by posting the cake toppers that I made for my best friend's wedding exactly one year ago today.

Here is the final product. Keep in mind I have never sculpted figurines before so for my first shot, they turned out great! Not an exact likeness but they were a hit at the wedding.
They wanted themselves (with the groom in an Astros hat of course!) plus their dog on the top of the cake.

Thanks Rosemary for letting me do these for you! Love you!