Long Tall Sally is now Eveline

This costume was inspired by scraps of silk that a fellow artist was kind enough to give me.  She had planned to make a silk quilt and her mother took pleasure in finding used silk blouses and dresses at thrift stores and disassembling them for her daughter to use in her quilt.  The quilt project never quite got off the ground and after several years, she got rid of the silk pieces in a de-cluttering effort.  I was the lucky recipient of some of them.  This was the design I came up with to use several of the different colors and textures together.

I outlined each petal shape for the skirt with tiny marcasite Charlotte beads and added beaded dangles with a quartz faceted drop at the points.

I especially like the sleeves which are puffed at the shoulders but slim at the wrists.

The shoes are polymer clay dusted with green interference mica powders for the shine.  The hair is Cotswold wool curls.  Her earrings are amethyst beads, and she's holding a colored marble.

The lesson I learned from making her is that I should make the armature and body first, pose it like I want it, then make the head, hands, and feet in positions that work with the pose.  It wasn't till I was nearly finished with Eveline that I decided I wanted her sitting.  If I had known that from the beginning, I wouldn't have made her feet so flexed.  The flexed feet would be approriate for standing, but for a sitting Eveline they would bend slightly downwards at the ankles.

 

By the way, "Eveline" is the name of the heroine in Sir Walter Scott's novel "The Betrothed."