Doing bits and pieces

Thank you once again to all who have left some kind comments in my blog. I am extremely sorry I have not been able to visit your blogs lately. I will try if I can which is not possible sometimes here . But I promise will try.

I got some of these skirt parts done while I was doing nothing. You might remember this doll body from a previous post. I am trying to make the skirt for it and this is what I have done so far. I have again sandwiched bits of flowers and leaves inbetween two fabrics with bondaweb and then highlighted it with paint and beads.

Last weekend I went to a small hillstation called Yercaud for the weekend. It was lovely to be away from the heat and dust of the city. Here are some pictures that I took there.

Thats all I am going to be able to show as blogger is taking ages to upload. Sorry. Have a lovely day,evening or weekend wherever you are.

Finishing unfinished projects

I am sorry I have been away from blogging for a while. I was busy sorting out things before going to India. Then in India I had a severe case of the dreaded Delhi Belly! Still I am not 100% but I survived. Thank you all for your lovely and encouraging comments in the past posts. I have not been able to visit all your blogs either because of all the above reasons. I am slowly trying to catch up. Anyway I have something to show you now at least. I decided that this time for my trip away I would try and finish some of my unfinished projects which have been lying around collecting dust. So here is this lady who has been patiently waiting for me. This was a doll I started in Patti Culea's designing a doll class. So the pattern that I created is not perfect. I have tweaked this pattern quite a bit since then. However I decided that I would finish her and use all the other techniques that Patti taught in that class. So which means I still won't be able to finish her till I get home but at least I have finally giver her a face which was easy to do during my long flight. The air hostesses were very intrigued while I was doing this.LOL! I will try and bead her although I am not sure if I can find the beads that I want for her here. All my favourite beads are at home. My little guy from the previous post had to stay back home as he was not co-operating with me LOL! Hope he will be in a better frame of mind when I get back to him. I have left him to mull things over in his little head.

Arguments!

I didn't realise I was going to have so many arguments with the waist coat that he is wearing! I am no designer so when I made the pattern I completely forgot to leave seam allowances LOL! Found out when I was stitching it half way through. So now what do I do with the fabric that I cut and stitched without the seam allowances. I don't want to waste it as it is Dupioni . It is an odd shaped piece as you can see. Any ideas? I redid the waistcoat which sort of fits and I need to do some embellishing to hide the mistakes LOL!

New DIP

I am going through one of those phases where I have several dolls dancing in my head but finding no time to get them done. How frustrating that is! So I have started them all well 3 of them and I am doing bits and pieces on them whenever I am finding time. Here is this little fella. He is supposed to be an elf but not sure if he looks like an elf. I will have to wait and see how he turns out. At the moment he looks more like a monk LOL! Those are the colours I am going to use for his out fit. The printed fabric is actually one of my dresses which I was going to discard but thought better of it and I am going to cut it up and use it on him.

Back from Italy

Hello all I had a great trip to Florence, Siena and Rome. Although I missed seeing a lot of places in Florence as I was sick with something I ate that didn't agree with me

See this, I think this is what made my tummy go sick. However I loved the dish. Don't know the name but it had lots of cheese and truffles. Mmmm it was yummy. The rain followed us everywhere unfortunately, but we managed to have a good time in spite of that. So here are some pictures I am sharing with you. This sort of fresco or icon with the image of Virgin Mary and baby Jesus or a Saint seems to be quite a common thing which is lighted up with a lamp. Most of them seem to be almost forgotten as they are rather dirty and the lamp is either broken or not there. But they are so charming even in their condition of neglect. One of the many many many beautiful statues and intricate carvings and paintings found in churches and other buildings in Italy. We had a lovely view from our hotel in Florence and the place was so peaceful. We stayed in some lovely old villas turned into hotels and they had a charm of their own. This one in Sienna had a lovely garden

overlooking beautiful rolling olive groves. The room had this beautiful wooden painted ceiling

It even had a beautiful chapel of its own with these lovely paintings. Villa in Orvieto had a huge big tapestry covering the whole length of one wall in the dining room. Since the tapestry was very old and the lighting not great I could only get a part of the picture. But as you can see at the close up what delicate intricate and beautiful work of art it is. The ceiling was again decorated with many paintings like this. It had this beautiful little piano in the foyer.

This a statue of St. Paul in the Basilica of San Paolo Beautiful intricate work with marble chips on the columns of the cloisters We were in time for the blessing given by the Pope on Sunday in St Peter's sq. but too far to take a good picture The Colosseum The Trevi Fountain-Statue of Oceanus standing on a shell drawn by sea horses. Lastly I love the way the old and the new co-exist in Italy which is amazing. I did not show you the important or the more photographed monuments and paintings since everyone has seen it somewhere or the other so these are some of the pictures I thought might interest you of Italy through my eyes.