Catharthsis

Meet Avril, the music box ballerina I've been working on for half the month of April.  (I was going to name her April, but my wife thought French would be fitting since it's ballet.)

This custom request was a frustrating and difficult challenge, but ultimately I'm really happy to have a project that pushed me this hard.  This is not a wire-frame doll, or pose-able. . . it is a very densely needle-felted sculpture.  Her tutu was cut from a piece of fabric I wet-felted.

Though there is no wire, to mount the piece I embedded a felting needle in the wooden base, and it goes up through the point toe and part way inside the left leg.

AND NOW IT'S TIME FOR EVIL CLOWNS!

I don't have anything against creating cute or beautiful things, but I have a special spot in my heart for the slightly (to extremely) bizarre, and spending so much time working on the ballerina, I sat down to doodle and without even trying out popped this evil clown.


 A kind woman whom I met at fiber club (at Urban Fauna), after seeing one of my Wool n Spool dolls,  gave me a number of vintage spools of thread that had belonged to her mom. 

This clown is in stitches!

I have promised to make her a beautiful "Wool n Spool" doll which honors the history behind the spools, but she requested rather than fabric which I normally glue around the spool, that I leave the original thread on the spool for the piece I make for her. 

  I did a practice run at doing something "dressed" in the original thread and this clown is what came to me.

I am still going to make her something beautiful to express my gratitude (this clown is SO wrong considering the context) but I must thank her for the inspiration, because the thread is beautiful, and additionally I was able to work it into the head itself.

When I started stabbing around at a head for this spool of bright red thread, there was a retrospective about Charlie Sheen's career on TV, from his childhood to the recent poetry filled outbursts in the press. There is no conscious correlation between this clown and Sheen, it just happened to be on. . . but it undoubtedly imbued some kind of essence. 

So, I present to you, "Winner the Clown."  All clowns (evil or otherwise) love hookers, cocaine and beckoning to children from storm drains with the raspy promise that "We all win down here."

WINNING!

Avril, music box ballerina

Winner the Clown