WOYWW 319

I’m feeling quite a bit better now, as the second week advances after chemo treatment #3, so I’ve been a bit more active on the creative front.

My desk today.

Annotated for your delectation and delight! You will be glad to hear that true to her cheapskate character, Shoshi has rescued some little twists of wool from the back of the settee – these obviously got down through the recliner mechanism to the floor since I completed my knitting project! Not one to throw anything away, however manky if it can still be used, these now sit in all their glory on my desk waiting to be cleaned up! You can see also that my paint water remains suspiciously clean.

Moving on, I have two lavender sachets remaining from that project, and as tomorrow I am seeing the two ladies I became friends with in hospital, I thought I would make up two more boxes to put these in. One of them will have the little chemo card inserted – she and I are neck-and-neck in our treatments, mine being every 3 weeks on Fridays and hers every three weeks the following Mondays (sad that the hospital is so badly organised that they couldn’t do us both together lol!!). The other one’s cancer was so well confined to her bowel that she didn’t need chemo (don’t I envy her!!).

You can see one of the box pieces waiting to be embellished. I am in the middle of sorting out which rubber stamps I want to use for this, and have got a selection out. The set on the right is a new Chocolate Baroque set that I haven’t used yet.

As always, there is stuff lurking around (usually carefully hidden out of shot!) waiting to be put away, and underneath the desk are a couple of Really Useful Boxes (RUBs) waiting for a home to be found for them, and the top one now contains various bits and pieces for art doll making.

Last week someone asked what I was using a screwdriver for! I was a bit mystified about this till I realised she must mean my Bosch hot glue gun which is a bit of a monster, I admit… It lives at the back of the desk on its charger.

Moving downstairs to Desk #2 (!! – my table in front of the recliner) I have got my doll making stuff out.

I downloaded a Tilda doll template from Pinterest last week, and sized it to what I thought would be suitable. It’s coming out quite small so I’ll probably redo it a bit larger, but I think it will be OK. You can see I’ve started stitching the pieces together. I know this would be a lot quicker on the machine but I am not able to sit in my studio for extended lengths of time yet and quite enjoy being in the zone with tiny back-stitching on the comfort of the recliner. On the left is a collection of cut out pieces of card comprising another angel template, this one a multi-layered felt one, inspired by an image I found on Pinterest. I’ve got a big bag of felt scraps and will cut it from these, and add some embroidery to embellish it. At the back of the table is the fabric I’m making the current Tilda doll from (the body is made from a beautiful old Egyptian cotton sheet which is so fine that I am having to use longer pins than my usual ones because they are slightly thinner, but they are still leaving marks which have to be smoothed out. I am using a fine Betweens needle to sew the pieces.

My tools and other bits and pieces are in a tray taken from one of my RUBs. Useful little compartments.

And now for those of you who haven’t visited me since the last WOYWW, I’ll put you out of your misery. Here is the “sneak peek”:

You can see the “funny stuff” as part of the embellishment. Here it is in all its glory.

It was part of some pot-pourri we had years ago and I saved it for art stuff. You can read all about it here. Nothing to do with angels!!

Finally, I thought you might like to see how the brainless knitting is coming along.

Progress is slow, but at least I’ve made some! It’s good to work on while having the chemo (till I start to feel too poorly to do it) and also if I feel up to doing something, but nothing too involved. In addition to this, this week I have revived Inkscape (free, open-source, very powerful vector drawing software) and have been designing some things to cut once I eventually get my Cougar cutting machine up and running again. (Long overdue…) I can do this on the computer with very little effort and it’s highly creative.

I am hoping to have the rest of this week, and all next week, feeling a lot better and managing to work on projects again. My angel project is moving ahead extremely slowly but I am still not putting pressure on myself to complete it by any given date. I’ll keep you posted.

Happy WOYWW everybody. I’m joining pretty late in the day so I hope you are all still there!

Edit – I have just signed up for WOYWW, only to read of the devastating news of the sudden death of Eliza, one of our regular members. It makes my last sentence take on a whole new meaning. I shall miss her posts, and the regular news of her beautiful cat Yoda who always made me smile week by week.

Practising Doll Faces and Completing Doll Body

Doing a bit more work on my angels project. Today I practised drawing doll faces according to the instructions of Patti Medaris Culea (links provided by Judy). Not as difficult as I thought, and working from right to left, I think I am gradually improving!

I used some coloured crayons and some pens. I worked on a strip of unbleached calico ironed onto a piece of freezer paper to give it a bit more stability.

I also completed the body of the large cloth angel.

I had awful trouble stuffing this – the polyester stuffing which I have had for many years is really not very good quality and it came out all lumpy, so I had to pull most of the stuffing out of the body and tease it out again and restart the process. This filling seems to do better with narrower pieces like arms and legs than it does with larger volumes, which work better if I don’t attempt to put too much stuffing in. I’m on the look out for something of better quality but so far my online researches haven’t come up with anything definite – if there’s anybody out there (UK) who can recommend a decent polyester filling I’d be grateful.

I also spent a bit of time in my ARTHaven this morning, tidying up, and putting all my Dylusions sprays, paints and Ranger mini-blending tools together into one box, after painting a dab of paint on the top of each handle so they are readily identifiable.

The effects of my third chemo treatment are definitely not as severe as those of the second. The reduced dose has definitely helped.

Third Chemo Treatment

Yesterday I had my third chemo treatment, and on the previous day (Thursday), I had my vampire and oncology appointments. Full details on my Cancer Diary page.

Unfortunately they experienced some problems getting blood from the port this time, but on the third attempt, with me lying flat, they were successful.

Then I had my oncology appointment and saw the registrar, and I told her what a bad time I had had following my second treatment three weeks previously. She said in view of this, they would reduce the dose by 10 percent. She also doubled the dose of anti-nausea medication.

I discovered that the total number of treatments would be only eight, as opposed to the nine or ten I’d been anticipating. I have worked out that the last one should be on 16th October, and not going on into November as I had feared. This means that after the next treatment, I will be half way through the course! This makes me feel a lot better about everything.

The treatment proceeded as before, and again, despite the lower dose, I started to feel the effects during the last hour of infusion, and by the time they had finished with the final flush, I was feeling quite poorly. It wasn’t as bad as last time in that I didn’t have to take to my bed on our return home, and I managed to eat a small supper.

The effects are quite severe but not as bad as last time. This morning I rested half the morning in bed, and when I got up I felt so much better that I was able to spend an hour or two in my studio and finish the card I’d been making from part of the masterboard I made a few days ago. Photos will follow once the recipient has her card.

Towards lunch time I suddenly caved in with exhaustion and feeling shaky and nauseous, so I came down and took an anti-sickness pill. After a very light lunch I felt a lot better. I have been resting on the recliner all afternoon watching TV and DVDs.

Generally speaking, I have already started feeling a lot better than immediately after the second treatment, so hopefully I shall have a much more productive three weeks this time, which makes me feel more upbeat!

I hardly made any progress on my angel project during the last period, and I am now hoping to be able to crack on with that. I ordered a DVD on cloth art doll making and that arrived today, and I am very excited – the dolls, and especially their faces, look extremely complicated to do, but the instructions on the video are so clear and taken step by step, that I see no difficulty in managing to do it! Here’s a link to her DVD introductory video on Youtube, and I am very grateful to my blogging buddy Judy in Australia for sending me various doll-making links, including introducing me to this wonderful lady who is such an artist and such an excellent teacher too.

Another Needle Felted Angel

I have made another angel body from needle felting over an armature, this time made from my mammoth new pipe cleaners.

These pipe cleaners are enormous – very long and extra thick and fluffy! Almost large enough to sweep the chimney with. The colours are somewhat lurid but as they will mostly be needle felted or wrapped, I’m not too bothered about that.

Here is the armature for the angel that I made – this one is quite a bit larger than the previous one.

This armature was made from two giant pipe cleaners, one for the head and arms, and the other for the body and legs. I looped the ends of the legs a couple of times to form the feet, and the arms are double thickness with a loop at the ends to form the hands.

I began the needle felting by loosely felting a ball to form the inner part of the head.

Here it is, stuffed into the head loop of the armature.

It was then a simple matter to begin wrapping the whole head with wool roving, needle felting as I went.

Here is the head, almost complete.

As it was quite a bit larger than the first one, I decided to attempt to sculpt a face on this head. I began by adding more roving to the front of the face to build it up.

This is the head in profile so far.

I sculpted the face by building up the nose, forehead and chin, and pushing in the eye sockets and mouth, and the area under the nose, with more aggressive needle felting. Not too bad for a first attempt!

Here is the finished head in profile, showing the ear – I made the ears from two small fragments of wool roving, shaping them as I needle felted them to the sides of the head. The face is a little flat – a bit like an Easter Island statue!

The next step was to needle felt the body. I made it a little bit too long so the proportions aren’t quite right, but once the angel is clothed, this won’t matter. I built up the chest and stomach/bottom areas with extra wool roving.

The final step was to cover the limbs with needle felting. I covered the hands and feet well with roving before beginning to wrap the arms and legs.

Not too bad, I think! With his rather long body and short, slightly bandy legs, he looks a bit like a drunken sailor. At least there was no angel abuse this time, unless you count being stabbed all over repeatedly with a barbed needle!

I’ve been pooped all week. At least the worst of the side effects of the chemo have worn off now, but my energy levels remain extremely low and I’ve done little else but flop about on the recliner since my last treatment. The next one is a week today and I really need to start feeling better so I can actually achieve something before the next one is upon me and I’m back to square one again!

WOYWW 316–Brainless Knitting and Angel Abuse

Not a lot going on chez-Shosh this week because my second round of chemo has completely flattened me – I started to feel poorly while the stuff was still going in, and although a lot of the side effects are now better than they were, I am still feeling profoundly exhausted and have hardly stirred off the recliner for the past week and a half. I was warned by my oncologist that round 2 would be worse, but I am hoping that my body will have acclimatised to the chemo by round 3 and that that treatment won’t affect me so badly.

While undergoing the second treatment, I started knitting a scarf, but unravelled it because my circular needle was too long, and to fill it, the scarf would have been far too wide, with too many stitches, and using too much yarn, so I ordered a nice little short one off Ebay and restarted the project. This is what I call brainless knitting – it can be done without a pattern and with very little concentration. I had a rummage in my wools scrap boxes and selected some nice bright-ish colours and have been working in random stripes, each separated by two rows of black, which give some coherence to the design. This is how much I’ve done so far:

Depending on how many of these scarves I can make in the next five or six months, they will also be added to my box of goodies to hand out to my fellow chemo-ites. I am planning on making some nice brownish ones for the men, and each one will have different types of fringing and tassels on the ends. Working in the round means there’s no making up to do except sewing across the open ends.

After my gifts of small lavender sachets in boxes, I have been thinking a lot about making a collection of mixed media angel art dolls to give away next time. I certainly wasn’t planning on putting pressure on myself to complete them in 3 weeks and as it happened, I have barely started because of feeling so poorly.

While resting on the recliner, I’ve been spending a lot of time trawling Pinterest and making a nice collection of art doll pictures. I decided to use the few rather short pipe cleaners I had, and made an armature (sorry, I didn’t photograph this) and used it as a base for needle felting in white, producing what looks like a little white stick figure, about 5 1/2 inches tall, who although devoid of all features, seems to have a character all his own! He was all a bit fluffy looking when I’d finished, so I wet-felted him as well, and the final step was to throw him violently into the sink to accelerate the felting process, which reduced the poor little figure into a screwed up heap that looked as if he had been mugged!

Angel Abuse.

Here he is, hanging on for dear life, onto my bathroom heated towel rail, being dried. I defined his neck by wrapping a narrow elastic band tightly around it. More Angel Abuse. Not only mugged, but strangled as well.

He lends himself to being bent into many different positions. He doesn’t look too much the worse for his traumatic experiences.

He has no face, no hair, no clothes, and no wings. Yet. Hopefully these deficiencies will soon be remedied and he will take on his full persona as an angel.

I have got on order a nice big pack of thicker, longer pipe cleaners which should enable me to make larger figures. The needle felting was pretty time-consuming, and the friction of the wet-felting has drawn the felt back a bit from his extremities. Not a huge success but practice makes perfect! I’ve also got a few more bits and pieces on order, and I’ve been doing a lot of research into different polymer clays and how to use them – not something with which I have had any experience to speak of, and I hope to make a nice collection of eclectic angels, most of whom should hopefully not end up suffering the indignity of Angel Abuse.