Preparing for the Trip to the Hairdresser

I have to prepare for a trip to have my hair done. For one thing, it is a long drive and I have to make an appointment at a time when I can take off work since the person I use doesn't work Saturdays any more. Then there is the endless debate--do I wash my hair right before I go or not? How much should I have cut off? And there's always a bit of anxiety. Will I like what she does to my hair?

I'm preparing for a trip to the hairdresser's for Cape Cod Dogs, too. I have picked out some threads and tentatively decided that the larger mermaid will be a bleached blonde with roots showing and long, straight hair. I plan for the smaller mermaid to have red curly hair.

So I bought some threads (since according to the eternal law No Matter How Much Stash You Have, You Will Not Have Everything You Need to Finish a Project) to achieve this look. You see the results of my shopping above--I have a blonde and a brown thread in Vineyard Silks, the classic silk that looks like wool line without the metallic mixed in, and a skein of overdyed red boucle, which is the nylon thread used in Brazilian embroidery. I also put my new Needle Bling cat magnet back in the package so you could see it. The threads and magnet are lying on the color copy of the canvas which I'll need to help me with the next step, which is not the hair but the facial features. I need to stitch them in first before I put hair around them. Besides, those blank faces are pretty creepy!

The other preparation I need to do before the hair was finishing all that skin and working on the mermail tails (progress photo above). I was curious about how the larger mermaid's tail would look if I used two plies of my blue/green Soie d'Alger mixed with one ply of Treasure Braid in sparkly dark green to stitch the lighter areas of the tail. The stitch is diagonal mosaic, slanting one way on one fin \ and the other way / on the other. I just had to turn my canvas on its side to get the / slant. Easy. So here's a photo of my progress on the mermaids. I planned to work left to right on all the figures sitting at the bar: large dog, large mermaid, sailor, small mermaid, small dog. But in the end I am finding it easier to work on the pairs of similar figures simultaneously which means the sailor will be the last figure stitched.

Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
Archived Yahoo 360 postings at http://profiles.yahoo.com/chillyhollow