Finally finished, just in time!

For the Cloth and Clay group's Story Book Challenge I chose Sara Crewe from A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The story is about a the daughter of a diamond mine owner who sends Sara to a seminary for young girls in England. Things change suddenly when the diamond mines stop producing and believing he has lost everything Sara's Father falls ill and dies. Sara is left orphaned and must live as a servant in the seminary where she is mistreated and neglected. Things seem to be at their very worst when a mysterious stranger brings a little magic into Sara's life.

I quickly realized that as a little girl I loved the whole story. All the characters had a place in my heart, each chapter was a story in itself- a little gem in just those few pages.

This little monkey that Sara is holding brings the story to its lovely conclusion. It belongs to the neighbor, who, is in fact searching for Sara. He is the business partner of Sara's father. When his partner discovered the mines were indeed not failed he spared no expense looking for Sara, including moving to England in hopes of finding her.

When the news came that Sara's father had died and the mines were in ruins the mean Miss Minchin made Sara put on her oldest black dress and made her move into the attic. Sara was wise beyond her years and I tried to create a sense of this in her big grey/green eyes.

When Sara came to the girls seminary she had trunks and trunks of clothes and wanted for nothing. Later, in the attic, she made friends with the birds on the roof when she would open the skylight to see the stars.

Emily is Sara's only possession after her father died. Emily was a gift from her father, meant to be a companion while she was in boarding school.

Mysteriously, one day packages arrived addressed to the little girl in the right hand attic. They were new clothes and warm coats for Sara to wear. This was part of the "magic" that had recently begun to happen, right under Miss Minchin's own roof.

This is the back side of the sculpture. It tells the story on every side. Because, for me reading the book was so enjoyable it felt necessary to include a representation of a hard cover. I used a photograph of my Sara for the cover and wrote a summary of the story for the back cover. The book is open to my favorite story from the book. Overworked and practically starving Sara finds a fourpence in the gutter while she is running errands for Miss Minchin. She enters a bakery to buy herself some buns and finds a starving homeless girl shivering on the steps of the bakery. She ends up giving all but one of her buns away to the beggar girl. The baker, seeing this through the window invites the beggar girl in and feeds her.

This creature reading my favorite part of the story is Melchisdec. He lives in the walls of the attic and, like the sparrows on the roof, Sara makes friends with him.

So this is my entry for the challenge.  All done with the exception on one lonely bakery bun to go in the basket by Sara's feet.  Hope you like her!  (And her hair -its the first time I have ever worked with a real wig or weft as its called.  It wasn't easy!)