百合
The Lily (bǎi hé)
The Lily is a symbol of summer and abundance, and some believe it represents "forever in love" or one hundred years in love. The lily is used as a lucky charm and the Chinese maintain that it averts the effects of the evil eye upon them. It is said to help a person forget his troubles.
I have always loved creating the flowers for my Story Hats! These designs are of my own making and are not part of the traditional Chinese hats. It is stepping out of the box or expanding the box...push push..that I find such great pleasure and within that continued inspiration.
Close up
Lily is sculpted head in stone clay overlaid with silk crepe, body is crepe silk lined with cotton batiste. Her face has hand-painted eyes and embroidered eyebrows. Shading with pastel chalks.
For this pieces, I decided to embroider the center front of the top. The top and vest are both embroidered with a cross stitch using a variegated thread.
For color balance, the interior of both the top (warm color) and the vest (neutral color) are in a polished cotton-fairy frost (lavendar- cool color). Two little pearls are the vest closures.
Since all the fabrics were of no print, I added embroidery in a delicate manner. Here below on the sleeve, complimenting the pattern as on the top front.
The pants legs hold the traditional geometrical style of pattern. Shoes of wool lined with a deeper shade of lavendar from the cotton as the top and vest.
The Lily Hat + one more!
The Lily Hat base is of print on print woven black silk. The flowers were designed as individual petals in dupioni silk, using a heavy weight stabilizer. Then each stitched into a "standing" position and then all stitched together to create one flower. The stamens are hand-dyed silk ribbon.
The large leaves are a subtle striped dupioni with an embroidered center stem and backed with a metallic cotton. The band is a Chinese silk brocade framed with vintage metal cording.
A few years ago, I started to make just the hats for collectors, who either already owned a doll or wished just to have the hats!
One more!
This was a special order for a collector who already had one of my pieces but loved the lily hat! This hat flower was designed in bright tones of magenta that I hand-dyed the silk to give a variegated expression. Here I used vintage stamens in green tipped yellow and gold.
The leaves are all dupioni. I quilted the leaves to created the look of a leaf pattern. I love the band on this piece, it is from a wee scrap of vintage metallic kimono fabric. I enhanced the center front with small sequins (from Australia). Band framed with vintage gold cording.
Interior lined with Chinese silk flower brocade. You can see the stitches of quilting that was done on the hat base.
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To read more about flower Story Hats...
