March | 2021 | Tottie Talks Crafts Blog

Monthly Archives: March 2021

March 28, 2021 · 8:38 pm

Wooden Bunny Dolls and Crochet Hooks

As part of #the100dayproject challenge, I have been immersed in carving wooden dolls and following where that has lead me for my #100daysofcarvingwoodendolls.

I have been sharing images of wooden mermaid dolls that I have carved over the years, and also bunnies, too….

One little bunny doll, Sophia, sat on my carving desk for weeks and weeks without any arms and legs, and FINALLY, I put carving knife to wood and carved her chubby little arms and legs and I am totally delighted with her!

Sophia is VERY happy to be here in the studio and to be all done!

She then inspired me to carve her some bunny friends who were also inspired by the mermaids that I have been carving.

So, I have carved a trio of bunny mermaids from upcycled wood from a piano that fell apart and our friend the piano tuner rescued pieces of wood for us.

This is Jali and Franny with Sophia. Oops… I haven’t taken a picture with their very tiny wee sister, DebraLou, so here she is:

The nickle is there to show the scale of just how small DebraLou is. She’s a very small bunny mermaid, indeed!

And, then, because I was talking about bunnies, I got out some bunny crochet hooks that I carved quite awhile ago….

The Bunny Heart Spoon wanted to join in the fun, so she joined the rabbit crochet hooks.

AND… that inspired me to FINALLY finish carving a blank that I had made for a crochet hook 10 years ago! wow…

she has inspired me to immerse myself in carving wooden ‘art’ crochet hooks again…. which is very inspiring and exciting, but that’s another story!

Oh my goodness. while I have been so busy posting images and notes daily to Instagram LINK I haven’t been keeping up with posting to my blog, and yikes, everything has changed here in a new and baffling way! I don’t like it at all and am flumoxed with how to deal with it…. so if this post is not quite right, it’s because I honestly don’t know what I am doing with this new and unwelcome and unfriendly way of posting! Fingers crossed that I can figure this out.

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March 15, 2021 · 1:00 am

Bedelia the Mermaid and where she came from

Once upon a time, there was a very, very old wooden bed frame.

It was so old that parts of it broke, and so it was taken apart and about to be thrown in the trash, when someone thought… wait… we know someone who makes things come to life again….

They gave the broken old bed frame to my son, who offered a piece of it to me:

It was very heavy old wood, which soon revealed itself to be exceedingly HARD… and I mean H.A.R.D wood!

I cut out 2 little mermaids from the former bed frame, wiggling around to try to deal with long notches, deep channels and bored out holes that large screws had once lived in.

I sanded the varnish off one set of mermaid blanks, and then remembered to take a picture of the ‘under construction’ stage… some of those scraps of wood are not useable for carving because they have hardware embedded.

Oh my word! Carving the old hardwood was incredibly challenging, and there were a couple of nights when I was carving until the wee small hours.

I was so happy to finish carving Bedelia, but the incredible hardness and knife dulling properties of the wood made it oh so NOT fun to carve.

So, I am conducting an experiment:

Bedelia’s sister had a long lovely soak, which I hope will make the wood more carving friendly.

And now, oh, poor little mermaid!

She’s in the freezer, waiting for me to have enough time to carve her!

My fingers are crossed that I haven’t destroyed the wood with the soaking and the freezing,

and that I will be able to release the latent mermaid from her cryogenic state soon and more easily than Bedelia!

The next stage of bringing Bedelia to life was to burn and paint her Mermaid scales:

And then assemble her, making all her joints function:

Bedelia wanted to have some Mermaidly fun, so she went for a swim:

Which was a lot of fun, but very tiring, so she came back and relaxed in the studio.

Tottie Tomato went and made Bedelia a lovely cup of tea.

But she was still cold from the wild waves, so I went rummaging through the box of threads that I inherited from my Mother.

And crocheted a lace shawl for Bedelia.

She’s very happy and is looking forward to meeting all the other dolls in the studio.

She is hopeful that I will get to carving her poor icy sister, very soon!

I hope so, too… but the studio has been a busy place lately, the icy mermaid will have to fit in with the other magic that is being stirred up!

I am so pleased to now be part of a lovely blogging group: Scrap Happy, that was begun 6 years ago by Kate Chiconi and her friend, Gun, in Sweden.

The Scrap Happy bloggers all post once a month on the 15th about the wonderful things that they are creating from scraps of this and that, and none of it new….

please check out their blog posts, too. 😀

Kate , Gun, Eva, Sue, Lynn, Lynda,
Birthe, Turid, Susan, Cathy, Tracy, Jill,
Claire, Jan, Moira, Sandra, Chris, Alys,
Kerry, Claire, Jean, Jon, Hayley, Dawn,
Gwen, Bekki, Sue L, Sunny, Kjerstin,
Vera, Nanette, Ann, Nancy, Dawn 2, Noreen,
Bear and Carol