paris

elsa wolinski

tilde

...is almost done. sleep won out. she might be finished before noon if the stars are in alignment. (she's clearly a californian, don't you think? 'tho her felt glasses are from a little store in dinkelsbühl, the bandana's from rei- leftover from another project- and her curls, straight out of the needlework store in menlo park. you probably can't see it, but there's a little lovely slub in the fabric that made her apparent in the first place: a tiny mouth. since i imagined she had something to say, i tried to gently stitch lips around it. we all need to have a voice.) 

make

on the constraint of finishing a project a day. and: dolls?

a few years ago (like: 2), i found myself immersed in classes and seminars and such. a part of me (directly related to the part of me that helped people with design challenges for two decades) thought that the answer to much of what we do and want and think we need was to plumb the depths of the mind- that whatever satisfied our spirit would be somewhere in a psychology text or so. i'm not very sure of that anymore, just as i'm not sure the perfect sofa will ever make a real difference (although a perfect sofa can be nice).

i found, while working in design, that people are always looking for solutions. perhaps we are often not looking so much for the solution to an actual issue but for a handy solution that would make us feel better (yet the feeling better only lasts a short while, and then it is off to another solution; the snake that eats it's own tail). something about infinite solutions in a finite world with limited time (and resources) can be profoundly unsatisfying. i always wanted my client to book the trip they talked about every time i visited them or maybe let go of the idea that a new sofa (while perfectly nice) was going to make life more worthwhile. what makes life worthwhile, anyway? (i vote for family, seeing the world, making stuff and so on. and love. always love. but that is just my vote and not yours. we all get to vote. we all get to decide which boxes to check.)

the jungian concept of going back to what filled you with happiness as a child: that stayed after all the psychology and compassion and god-knows-what classes. honestly, i kept thinking of bunny rabbit on captain kangaroo. and mr. moose. they- or was it the captain or mr. green jeans?- made things. out of shoeboxes and glue. paper, string, cardboard, scissors, stray pieces of material. tape, lots of tape. they made things a child could make, things that i could make. this made me profoundly happy- 

to make things. often out of bits and pieces that others might regard as junk, almost nothing. jung built the bollingen tower after he found solace doing something he loved to do as a child. jung piled up rocks. rocks aren't a far cry from paper, string, and scissors. simple stuff.

as a child, i spent a lot of time thinking (reading, talking, and creating strange little dioramas, probably) about settlers, people who up and moved to new lands. hour upon hour went toward trying to figure out how they got things done, what they took with them. was everything homemade? how did they know out how to make it? what was worth keeping? (what do you carry with you when there's so little room? theirs was not a world stuffed with infinite solutions.) resourcefulness was plentiful, resources were not. what would the children have? what did they make? how would they make a toy with no instructions, no wrong way to do it, and only the materials at hand? as i write this, i realize: i was a child in a military family. we moved often, as military families do. we moved to strange lands. resourcefulness was a necessity. deciding what was worthwhile was also a necessity. 

deciding what is worthwhile is actually always the thing, isn't it? 

some late day this december, having chosen not to make one single new year's resolution, i thought simply this: start making things. finish one a day. make a collage, stitch something, form a piece of clay, cleverly wrap a matchbox. just MAKE something. another of the lessons from the years of seminars and classes came forward: accountability. tell someone you're going to do it.

finishing the project in the same day isn't usually easy. i'll probably miss days. there are moments i want to stop- sometimes i find i liked the project better unfinished than finished. ribbon frays, stitches slip. things shift. 

still- i'm aiming for consistency here. start something, finish it, post it. start again.

je suis charlie

one never knows, do one?

life does tend to intervene, doesn't it?

due to time constraints today, i veered a tiny bit off course (from the "only using materials at hand" part) and went with something found on Monday at daiso (the place for felting wool that becomes unruly hair which isn't often letting itself be stitched down quite the way i intend it to be but we'll keep working on that, thank you)- anyway- went with something at daiso which they refer to as an "arm cover." 

thusly a rather quick puppet was born: the tiny (thumb) sleeve & a small snip on the right side allow the puppeteer to magically produce two arms and (by tucking their ring finger gently back) two legs. the face is a scrap from the nifty dishtowel which inspired the red head two days ago. i love sewing these, which sort of surprises me, yet it's kind of obvious that the royal school of needlework wasn't part of my career path. working on it, working on it. 

down the rabbit hole

"...curtseying as you're falling through the air! 

Do you think you could manage it?"

rouge

striped stockings were the original plan, but time and tide wait for no doll. her dress is a vintage dishtowel; the embroidery was too lovely to actually use it. you can't quite see it, but there's a frost of glass glitter on the velvet petals that hold (not an easy task) back her hair; those petals graced a snow-covered table in a long-ago christmas window. the heavenly felt leaves are from bell'occhio in the city (if you haven't been there you have to go, it's like the eighth wonder of the world).

beauty on the inside is perhaps more important than beauty on the outside, yes?

glass slippers and all that

cinderella here was finished a bit before midnight, and the perfectionist part of me wants to go back, take another snapshot, snip loose strings and delete the errant piece (or two) of thread- but it doesn't seem in keeping with the "finish one project a day" ethos of the challenge.