A Girl and her Hen

I've been experimenting a bit just lately with cloth-covered paperclay birds. This is the same technique I use to make many of my dolls' heads and in this case, for the hen, I used a woven cotton fabric that was fairly open, to give an almost canvas-like texture. This is a lovely surface to paint onto.......and as you know, I love to paint! This little hen needed a human companion, so I gave her an egg-loving little girl. The girl is a 12" (30 cm) jointed cloth doll with a cloth over clay head painted with acrylics. Her wig is hand-knotted Lincoln wool and she wears a cotton dress and pinny. I knitted her cardigan using 4-ply cotton yarn and her sun-hat is crocheted from cream and blue cotton. Her sandals (which were very fiddly to make!) are leather and I had to make the buckles, because I haven't been able to source tiny metal buckles for quite a while. And she has a little basket for the eggs. Brown ones, of course!