Prison Dolls

As my next project cooks (slowly) in the oven, I thought it would be nice to have a touch of reminiscing going on, all up in this here joint. So please find, below, my collection of Prison Dolls. 

Each doll represents it's real life (fictional) owner and the idea being that the doll would go off and have all the adventurous fun whilst leaving the bad guys safely locked up inside to rot like the bad, bad men they are. 

I am not really sure where the idea for this came from but I think I was watching a lot of Shawshank and Green mile at the time so that may have had something to do with it.

I designed and screen printed the patterns on to very course cotton, researched the shit out of Criminals, Victorian and turn of the century prison wear. I then started the arduous task of designing and working out how the hell to make these things. It was all a case of trial and error as I had no books to tell me how to do anything and the internet, even in 2006, wasn't very forth coming with information. The whole on-line crafts movement hadn't really kicked off by then or at least it was still in it's very infancy. I don't even think Facebook was an actual "thing" at that point either. Scary how things move so fast.

I had to make very concise templates and made things in sections to be attached all at the end. All in all, it took me about 4 months to make them all, give or take a cutla weeks or so.

Alfie the gangster

Cane (tall) and Abel (small) the con men

Abacus the fraudulent Accountant

Anoushka the Russian spy

Bert the Burglar

You will have to excuse the crumpled background on these pictures. It would seem that constructing dolls from my imaginarium is easier then putting a hot plate to cloth. Tut tut.

Oldies but alrighties

Here are some things I made a while ago. The embroidery took forever but was well worth it. Your guess is as good as mine as to what's going on in there. I am with out a clue.

The orange thing was made after I woke up in the middle of the night and thought there was a Giraffe in my room but, thankfully there wasn't. That would have been weird and slightly worrying. No, as it turned out, it was a shadow of my coats and whatnot hanging on my door. The grey thing is a....... and the white, robot thing is a.......

Lino fail

So my first idea was to print the patterns with Lino cuttings. I spent about £25 getting all the bits together (did you know that an A4 piece of Lino cost's £8? £8?!), got home and cut my designs:

Wonderful! I couldn't wait to put ink to these bad boys and see what they looked like. Well, it ended up looking like this:

Awful just awful. If you squint your eyes you kind of see some sort of pattern going on. When I say squint I actually mean close your eyes.

The main problem was that I had cut the lines too thin and the ink had seeped in, making it one big smudgy mess. I didn't really want to jeopardize the look of the pattern by making it look all chunky and un-lady like, so I tried some swatches with a twig and ink.

Yeah, still got aways to go with this. Back to the drawing board, one might say. Anyway, I have to finish my group of Finger Friends so this is on the back burner for now.

Pattern ideas

Sorry for not posting for a while. I have been busy, busy, busy! Well, actually, I have just been busy, busy. The last busy was added just for effect.

I did these pattern designs partly for my own amusement but also for my Finger Friends. Some of them have Neon colour on but you can't really see because the scanner didn't pick it up. I am trying to think and find an effective way of printing the design's on to fabric without screen printing them. I am going for quite a basic, simple feel with these and I want to explore all avenues before turning in to Screen Printing Cul de Sac.

 Just chucked this last one in for shits and giggles. I think it would look really nice all printed up, proper like.