About Alice
02.23.05
Introducing Alice
Yikes. This month's softie is daunting. I guess I got off too easy the first three months. I was superexcited to hear that February's theme was Alice in Wonderland.

Great. Iconic characters. I had illusions of grandeur, of making a set of pillow dolls of several characters on my Print Gocco. Plan A.

Then I read the book. Now I know why I never read the book. I don't like it so much. I get that it's all wonder and silliness and contradiction, but I still wanted there to be a bit more logic behind it, coming from mathemetician Lewis Carroll. I know its genesis was Carroll telling the Liddell children a story on a picnic. It reads too much like someone trying to explain a dream to you. It is interesting to the storyteller because they are trying to make sense of something very vivid that happened in their head. It's just nonsense for the listener.

If Alice in Wonderland is a beloved book. Good. Enjoy. It just didn't ruffle my flamingo feathers.

BUT -

I'll still give the softie challenge the old college try. I made a drawing of Alice:


Then I tried to make a Print Gocco screen of the darn thing. Two attempts, two failures. I know it's partly because the variation in small and large lines within the image, partly because I'm not accostumed to the looseness of the textile ink.

Drat.

Plan B.
I colored the image in Photoshop and then printed it on transfer paper. The transfer looks great! I'm not keen on the shiny, plasticness of it up close, but the line quailty is very good. Since Alice pretty much boils down to "it was all a dreeeam," I added the bubbles/circles floating around Alice's head to hold pieces of her dream.



As I laid out the pieces, I'm thinking of a Plan C -
Rather than a pillow doll, she's very likely to become a tiny quilt. Still soft. Still doll sized scale. I like the flatness in reference to the page and the book. And I think it'll give me a chance to frame the image of her in a way I couldn't in a doll.



Back to the Agerbeck Industries sweatshop...
posted on 2/23/2005 10:47:00 AM

Someone Framed Alice
Progress on my Alice softie. Plan C is progressing well. I put four borders around Alice: black, white, red/white stripe and solid red. Then decorated it with two ribbons: the black and white stripe tucked under the black binding, and the thinner red ribbon with the black and white slanted stripes. And here's one with half of it's adornments. I still need decided on the other half.

posted on 2/23/2005 10:50:00 PM