Tops and tails

I'm in the process of taking the tails off the teasels. The tops and tails will create two different pieces of work. I'm making up bags of 500 teasels heads which will be used for an installation (using several thousand teasels) as part of Quartz Festival at Queens College. This piece of work that will be created with help from the Junior School pupils.
The teasel tails are being wired together to make 'clothing'.
These teasels are very hard and I often prick my fingers and bleed everywhere.....memories of last year?

Mannequin, manakin, manikin, or mannikin ?

Well I now have one of the above......whatever the spelling......courtesy of Ebay. At the moment,  I perceive her as a sort of Lara Croft type individual, and I purchased her outfit from a charity shop.
She needs to be feisty, as my son is using her for target practice!

I have also started to slice up the teasels and experiment with ways of turning them into clothing. I've got hold of some coffee sacks (the cultivated teasels were sewn into sacks before been transported to the mills), so I was keen to try it as a possible backing material. But, I may just wire the teasels together.

Today, being a dry day with a good breeze blowing,  I've managed to dye a small amount of teasels using the remainder of the Indian ink. These teasels don't take up the stain as well as the wild teasels but I think the results are still interesting.