The next doll?

Digitally created pattern for the back of a possible doll. For the complete pattern see doll 3 in Creative Cloth Doll Making by Patti Medaris Cuela. (My first doll, that I posted about on Saturday, also came from this book)

I was working on this design for the next doll's back and had got to the point where I was experimenting with adding some fish when the doorbell went and when I opened it the chap there said he was "Steve the fish man"... As my ex-husband was called Steve I don't really want to make a doll called Steve! And I had already mentally been calling her Coral...

I'd also picked a couple of passages from Jane Austen's Persuasion to use as text on the body... one of them was:

"She stopt to blush and laugh at her own relapse, and then resumed a more serious, more dispiriting cogitation upon what had been, and might be, and must be."

And the other a much longer passage that starts:

"It was now his object to marry. He was rich, and being turned on shore, fully intended to settle as soon as he could be properly tempted; actually looking round, ready to fall in love with all the speed which a clear head and a quick taste could allow...."

I had it all ready to print out to see how well it worked as material when I discovered that I'd bought the wrong type of cotton sheet to go through the printer - I'd got one that was meant to be ironed onto something else. So my experiment will have to wait until I've got hold of the right sort. Maybe by the time that comes I'll have decided on a different design altogether... I do feel that Jane Austen was influencing my design a lot here.