I always thought she looked a bit like "Eliza Doolittle" in My Fair Lady. I designed this piece around a wonderful event in my life. As a child I had a canary. In those days, too long ago to speak about dates, canaries were about the only readily available bird as pets. 

I had raised collies and many cats while the children were young. I had lost my last two cats to cat leukemia and couldn't have another cat for at least a year according to the vet. So I began to "hang out" at the bird store. I chose and hand-raised a love bird and that was the genesis of this piece.    

• Size: 18" tall figure

• Face: needle sculpted Swiss pima cotton knit, hand painted 

• Base: 8" x 8" x 2 ½" oak

• Accessories: Styrofoam, parrot feathers, peacock feathers, lovebird feathers, antique lace handkerchief, straw hat, silk ribbon

• Hair: wool  yarn

I was just beginning my investigation into developing multiple piece patterns.  It was my fantasy that the patterns which I had developed were three dimensional for the trunk of the body, but pretty much two dimensional or pancake for the arms, legs, hands, feet and heads. 

I thought a lot about this problem and began to experiment with what these types of patterns might look like. I spent a lot of time making the new patterns, checking the scale, fitting them all together. I thought the body was wonderful and then I designed the clothes and dressed it and wondered why I had worked so hard on the patterns and nothing of the work really showed.

It was a good experiment because from thinking in this way, I began to work more on developing a pose for the figure and its environments that was three dimensional. So sometimes the birth of an idea leads you in a new direction you don't expect..