Pearl and Millie

A few months ago, my friend Maria and I spent a day in Sidney poking around in stores. We came across this wonderful display of greeting cards by Pondering Pool, designer Susan Mrosek. We instantly knew this could be a changing moment and decided to challenge ourselves to create dolls based on the card we chose. Isn’t she just the most adorable little character.

The decision was made, I would do a clay version, Maria would do cloth. We had our “reveal” yesterday… What a hoot. It’s quite amazing what you can do when you really do challenge yourself. So from the start I decided to use the techniques I learned from Dawn Schiller’s class, Steampunk Oddfae. This is where she began. I first wrapped the armature in warm and natural batting, then cotton. She’s very tiny, barely 10” and I wanted to keep that mature slim lady look for her.

From there I just pressed on designing her outfit. I used Habotai silk for the undergarment which consists of a bodice with sleeves and her bloomers and trimmed up with lace. The silk I purchased from Joggles. Cute huh… Pearl was mortified that I took these pictures. First unclothed, then bottom’s up. The last part of her outfit, the overdress, was made from a piece of very lightweight curtain material that had just the most simple pattern in it, just right for the proportions.

She’s done and decked out in her lounger now, a bottle of Champagne bubbles at her side. Her tiara firmly in place, her pearls (naturally) her fuzzy slippers with a touch of bling, and lastly, her lovely manicured nails. Ready for a party somewhere, anywhere.

Here are the girls, Pensive Pearl and Melancholy Millie.

They were pretty happy to finally meet each other, then proceeded to chatter away to each other through the whole visit. Didn’t Maria do a great job with Millie. If you would like to see more pictures of Millie and how she got to be her pretty self, pop over to Maria’s blog here, and more specifically the post for Greeting Card Challenge here.

Thanks for the challenge Maria, I’m sure we’ll come up with another one sometime this year. No better way to stretch those creative minds.