These are two more dwarves from Tolkien's fantastic Middle Earth. They are based on the characters as seen in "The Hobbit" film trilogy, and one of these is heading down to the State Fair this weekend! Here they are . . . Bofur (just finished last night) is on the left, and Dwalin is on the right.
Elizabeth made the leather accessories for both dolls, which includes belts, Bofur's boots, Dwalin's boot wrappings, Bofur's hat, and Dwalin's harness and matching hand armour pieces. She also drew Dwalin's tattoos on his head. To see more photos and specs for these dolls, just click here to see the photo gallery on this blog. I still need to get webpages on our site for both of these, but that link has a nice amount of photos already!
Tolkien's dwarves are divided into two or three-member family groups. Bofur makes a whole trio complete of a family --- Bifur, Bofur and Bombur. So, in honor of their happy reunion, the three gents posed for this picture:
Each doll is totally needle-felted out of solid 100% wool. The only non-wool on them is used for any of the decorative accessories. Each doll body is usually felted out of Romney wool, because I think it makes a nice solid base --- which really makes the dolls stand up by themselves very well. I needle-felt all of their clothes out of various types of wool, sometimes throwing in some alpaca, mohair or llama fiber for texture or color variance. If you check out the link in the paragraph above, you'll see some fiber charts made for several of the dolls. That kind of gives an idea of the variety used in each character.
It takes a long time to felt one of these dolls. Dwalin has 57 hours of work in him, and Bofur has 61 hours. That usually translates to about two or three months of my "free time". They all stand between 8-1/2 to 9-1/4" and weigh between two to four ounces. Bofur and Bombur will be in the Needle-Felting division of the Ohio State Fair, so if you're in Columbus over the last few days of July or first week of August, you can stop by and say "hi" to them! More later.