Ongoing Dotee Craftalong-2010

[alwaysinmyroom]

Are you addicted to making and receiving dotees?  Do you want to learn new techniques or share your tips?  Do you have tons of little bits of fabric, yarn, clay, metal, or other interesting things that need to be used up?

Then this craftalong is for you!! Hone your skills or try out new things--get inspiration and confidence to join the wonderful dotee swaps!

We will have monthly themes and challenges that you can join in if you want...

It looks like for the month of May, we are going to learn and practice making sculpted faces from pantyhose!

We hope to have plenty of progress pics, instructions, and of course, dotees!!!

[SunflowerSmiles]

oh yay!!!  I'm working on my face today!

[AlternaWidget]

I'm starting a face tomorrow. Thanks for organizing, Always!

[mamarose22]

I'm not sure if I'll be participating in this, but I certain;ly will be following it to see how creative everyone is.

[alwaysinmyroom]

alternawidget--can you post your face sculpting here? I won't count it as double-posting!

oh--one question--I wonder if you have any tips for darker stockings...do you also embroider to make the features stand out?

[AlternaWidget]

Hi! I'll just post this one old one (and replace it with a better shot later), and then on to my new work. This one shows eyebrows stitched on the surface with white floss.
Yes, I do embroider the surface of all my sculpted faces, regardless of the flesh tone.  To achieve a certain shade of skin, build up 2, 3, or more layers of nylon as needed to overcome the whiteness of the fibrefill.
I also use watercolors for additional color because they sit on the surface until I "pop" them in with a cotton swab.


Someone once described this process as making a "cara de pasa", or "raisin face".

[alwaysinmyroom]

It turned out great--I can see the details and can't wait to get started on one!

[mamarose22]

You can also use different shades of hose.  There are shades from nude to beige, tan and so on.  I once made a "chalah" (Jewish bread like the soft twist rolls) out of knee-highs.  I bought the nude color without realizing that the stuffing would make it whiter looking.  I knotted the ends of 3 knee-highs together and stuffed each one.  Then I braided them and used a rubber band at the end to secure them and tucked them in somehow.  It was such a pale looking chalah so I took out my craft paints and a sponge brush and started painting away.  The stuffing started soaking up the paint so I kept applying more paint.  When it dried up it almost looked like a real chalah.

I don't know how this works with a sculpted face like Alterna makes, but I imagine that you could start out with a tan shade as opposed to nude and experiment with your faces that way also. 

[SunflowerSmiles]

ok..I made my first sculpted pantyhose dotee! That's really fun!  I used watercolor like AlternaWidget..took awhile to get that down but I'm pretty pleased. I love the embroidery with it and I made her have long eyelashes
 
I'm putting a body on her so I'll post Lady Nylonness is just a bit.

I've a lot to learn but it's really fun and pretty forgiving. Alterna's looks way cuter though

[SunflowerSmiles]

ok so here is my first attempt  meet Lady Nylonness
needle sculpted face before embroidery

embroidered

here she is done...sorry for the over exposure really cruddy lighting today.

this was really fun! I think I'll not needle sculpt and then embroider I think I'll sculpt with embroidery thread like AlternaWidget did next time.