Meet Mali

Mali is the second page for The Story of the Traveling Pages group I am participating in this year (see the badge on my sidebar).  This page is for Gayle, whose theme is "All Creatures Great and Small". 

I love animals myself and the hardest part of this page was narrowing down the options! While I was choosing an animal I saw a news item about the birth of a baby elephant at the Melbourne Zoo. Suddenly I knew exactly what I wanted to do! I searched for pictures of elephants and babies and picked portions of several that I liked, then composed a design that is sort of “original.”

I used a couple of techniques that are fairly new to me. For the background – and Mama – I painted the linen with Jacquard fabric paints.

Imagine how pleased I was when Sarge recognized a half-finished elephant from upside-down! Then I pulled out every resource I have on Stumpwork. It is something I’ve wanted to try for a long time but this was the first opportunity to actually do so.

I decided to use long-and-short stitch for the baby, but my experience with it has been only simple shapes. So, once again, I needed to refer to several resources!  My goodness - I'm learning all kinds of fun stuff!

I particularly enjoyed assembling the separate pieces and adding felt padding to raise the surface.

In this shot, you can see how far the baby's forehead stands out from the surface, and that her ears and trunk are free-standing.  It's so cute that way!

For the back, I found some jungle animal fabric.  OK, these are probably African animals, and Mali is an Asian elephant.  Picky, picky!

Mali is a Thai word for jasmine. If you have not seen the cute photos  and videos of her, check out this web page: http://www.zoo.org.au/babyelephant .

I had so much fun making this page - although it took longer than I anticipated - and the baby turned out far better than I expected.  But it was really hard to ship her off to someone else!  She's too cute.  I hope Gayle thinks so, too.

Next I am working on a theme of Trees.  This one is turning out to be fun, too!