Garden Lady #6 - Part One

I started making Garden Lady #6.  It was based on one of Aurika Piliponiene's paintings. She lives and works in Lithuania and I found this picture and many others on Pinterest.  I love her whimsical ideas for ladies in nature. She has a distinctive style of face and skinny arms and legs.

Here is the original inspiration.

My favorite blue print shop (used to be Rose City Blueprint) has changed names, but thankfully is still in business!  Their new name is Crisp Imaging (part of a chain) and they are in the same location near the Portland airport.  I love taking my things there - they are prompt and cheap.

I traced over the drawing to widen the shoulders and increase the legs and arms a bit.  I also sketched a different face.

Here are the face and arms cut and fused; all ready to add details.

The next component that I worked on was the bird.  I had some marbled fabric in my stash and used this to make the bird.

Then I made the legs.  For the red stripes, I started with 1" wide red hand dyed fabric.  I folded this over twice, pressed it, and applied a 1/4" double sided fusible tape.  These strips were pressed onto the brown fabric, then stitched down with invisible thread and a very narrow zig-zag (1.2 width, 1.05 length).  If you use this very narrow setting, you can still use your single hole throat plate.  I love doing that because the wide slot in the regular throat plate tends to eat things and pull the down into the machine.  

After the red stripes were sewn down, I darkened the heels and soles with Derwent Inktense sticks.  I tried out a few colors before picking the one that I wanted, and used clear aloe gel and a paintbrush to apply the color.  Here, you can see one of the legs painted, and the other one before the painting.

Testing the colors.

Derwent Inktense Blocks - the whole set

Stay tuned for more progress on this Garden Lady #6.