Life happened

Some of you might be wondering what happened to my promises of keeping up with blogs and do a regular post. Well like it happens to many people life happened to me too. On Easter Day my husband was called for a kidney transplant. Although it was on the cards one is never fully prepared for these sort of things and it came as a bit of a shock. We were in Malta for the Easter Weekend and had to cut short our break and return immediately.  From then on everything happened so fast and like a dream. My husband was given a new lease of life. I truely believe that this is a miracle by God. My husband's kidney has been working only 20% since the 1st transplant and life has been quite a struggle for him. They said the 1 st kidney would last only ten years but it lasted nearly 21 years which in itself was a miracle. However for the past few years we have been living on a knife's edge expecting the kidney to give up anytime. Then the week before Easter his blood results were so bad that our doctor said he will have to put my husband on the transplant list. I was very apprehensive of going abroad with all this but we went. His name went on the list on Wednesday and he was called for the transplant on Easter Day. What a wonderful Easter  gift it has been.  He was not only called so soon but the match has been great and he is doing well so far. After waiting for 7 years for the first one this really is a miracle to get one so quickly and a perfect match at that. I will be out of action for a bit until everything settles at home. My doll has gone onto the back burner for the moment. Please know that I shall come back to visit your blogs once life settles down a bit.

Until then keep creating and enjoy your time doing all the lovely things there is to do in life.

Face painted

I never do faces with acrylics but there is a first time for everything. As I said before this was not easy to paint because the background was a dark canvas. I know many people who do some lovely faces on a dark background and admire their work. So I thought I would give it a try. I used this magazine that I got sometime ago as a reference base. I got the magazine purely for this reason as I think the photographer has captured this model's face beautifully. I know a lot of it must be enhanced as they usually do with these pictures but I still think it is beautifully done and a nice picture for reference to paint dark faces.

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This is what I did not exactly wonderful and I don't know why she has got a very stubborn expression on her face I think😀. I just could not get her to smile!

 

Colour change

she changes colour yet again. I think I will use this colour. Painting her face is going to be tricky but let's see how she turns out.

Making something new out of old

Years ago when I was teaching cloth dollmaking in India I stitched up some doll bodies for my first classes so that I could initiate ladies into the world of dollmaking. I did this because I found that most of the women who came to learn did not know how to sew. So to make things easier for me and less stressful for the students I thought would first let them learn to stuff and make the body up. Later on they did progress on to learning how to sew. Anyway while clearing up some things in India I found several of these stitched doll bodies. So I decided to give them to the ladies in my doll club and asked them to make up the doll as a challenge. I am looking forward to seeing what each one comes up with.  So I too decided to make up one . I started with the face painting first. I did not like it much so decided to do something else. Now it is all painted white and I have to put my thinking cap to see what I can do. I think I will go for a dark shade of colouring and take it from there. The doll pattern is on the blog if you want to download it. Now  because either the weave of the fabric is a bit lose or I did not stitch these bodies properly the limbs have a tendency to turn a bit to one side. Painting the doll body helped the limbs to be straight a bit.  So let's see how she turns out.

The first picture is when I painted the face but that soon got covered with white paint.😀

 

 

I still have a few bodies left so if anyone of you is interested I can send it to you. Just leave a comment in the box to say you would like one set.