Well I'm back with a bit of an overdue and underwhelming update on my project that I seem to have made very little progress on within the past couple of weeks.
So, initially things were going nice and smoothly and I'd begun the felting out of the body for this guy. It's a bit of a tedious process but I was battling on, then I went to visit family for the weekend and had a problem with my car so ended up getting stuck there for a little longer than expected which completely threw me off the routine I was so proudly steaming ahead in. Classic move, life, thanks.
Anyway, despite feeling in a bit of a mental funk this weekend, I picked this guy up yesterday with the intention of getting him finished and ready for costuming only to notice that his left arm was loosely flailing around. It didn't take much investigation to realise that the wire armature, which consisted of two intertwined wires had completely just snapped in two. Naturally, I want to blame this on the fact that life is intent on cursing me and have a little kick and scream about how nothing ever goes right when I have good intentions.... but if I'm being honest with myself, and you guys... this was most likely due to a careless mistake on my part. I had used some pliers to twist the wires together and probably caught them in the wire cutting part while doing this and severely weakened the wire, so it hasn't taken a lot to completely break off. What a clown.
I reluctantly began fixing this before remembering I could blog about the inconvenience, so I cut away all the felted wool, opened up the twisted wire on both sides and re-twisted a fresh piece of wire in to connect the two halves and wrapped with pipe cleaners for extra reinforcement.
Honestly, I'm now starting to have a lot of doubts about this doll. I'm considering repainting him because I found some fabric and other random bits I liked the look of, to make him a costume out of and I'm now I'm seriously reconsidering the orange in favour of grey or red, but I will work this out as I go. If you wanna chip in in the comments with your thoughts then please do so!
I think at this point - I need to take a step back from getting bogged down with all the problems I see with this doll and remember what his purpose is. His purpose is to help me tell a story. The final outcome of this project will be photographs, which can be edited and enhanced with illustration - his patched up armature won't effect the outcome of this, so I'm just gonna allow myself to accept that error and push forward to the next step.
Still gonna have a sulk about it first... we aren't Miserable Beasts for nothing.
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1 comment
He is fantastic, I have found there is never a time when ‘done is better than perfect’ helps me create more freely.
With colour schemes I love the pink of his nose with the orangy red, so I would throw pink into the mix for his costuming!