Ponette as Mary Poppins

Posted February 10, 2016

Today was the big reveal, Ponette as Mary Poppins! I’ve been working on this for almost 3 weeks now and I’m so excited to share it with the world.

I didn’t have time to blog the last step of my progress so I’ll start with that. So Mary Poppins’ umbrella parrot head handle was the biggest challenge of the project. I ended up making it with sculpey premo clay and baking it… and the last step was painting it. I used regular old acrylic paint.

It was an unseasonably nice day so I set up a table outside and we all went outside to paint (Ponette, Harley, Penny, and I). It took a long time to paint… I haven’t painted anything in years and blending/mixing acrylic paint is not that easy. I was having some issues because it dries so fast and I needed to paint faster to blend the colors… I ended up doing it many thin layers.

At this point it got dark out so I had to move my operation inside to my very dark dining room.. I’m glad I got the bulk of it done in the natural light!

After I added the catch light in the eye… after this I added a medium gloss varnish et voila it was done, yay!

The last piece of the puzzle was Ponette’s white shirt and red bowtie. Yes, Mary Poppins’ actual shirt had yellow ribbons on it but since you couldn’t really see it with her coat buttoned up, I decided to forego the ribbons and focus on the collar. I managed to find some white edging at the fabric store that I ended up cutting in half and then gathering to create the wavy collar top.

I had the photoshoot the following day (after having had 4 photoshoots, what a busy weekend!). I got the set ready and dressed Ponette… she was ready!

Here’s the final shot!

And a few shots of the props…

I knitted the scarf about 4 times… the perfect color yarn was nearly impossible to find, I ordered about 8 skeins of yarn and finally the very last one that arrived was the perfect color (for the stripes). Agh what a pain!

Here’s the completed umbrella. The umbrella itself is an 18″ doll umbrella that I spray painted black. I tried using fabric dye but it doesn’t seem to be actual nylon or polyester, so the dye didn’t stick at all, lol. It was crunch time so I had to do spray paint!