Creating & Making
Why make dolls?
Many moons ago I was thoroughly immersed in theatre. I wrote plays, directed, designed and generally spent most of my time in the dark, liminal space that is the theatre. Wonderful. I can't think of a more magical place to be creative. I also ran a costume hire company and collected heaps of fabric, trim etc - all the glitzy, interesting and colourful things you absolutely need to make costumes.
That was when I lived in a house that had rooms! Space for all things theatre. These days my tiny living space is mostly full of small amounts of all the things I had a lot of before. So, I make tiny costumes for tiny people.
Dolls and puppets have always held a lot of magic for me - they are part of the slightly spooky in-between places that I explored in theatre. So it made sense to me to start creating them.
Note: 'Offbeat' was the name of my theatre company & I seem to be attached to it.
What materials are used?
I have loads of fabric, trim, lace and beads left over from my theatre days. I use all these things and a lot more. Buttons, old jewellery, wool (lots of wool), glitter, false eyelashes, twigs from the hedge and anything else that looks like it might be decorative and useful. All held together with thread and glue before being finished off with paint, chalks, coloured pens and varnish (to give boots a good shine).
The cloth and needle-felted dolls usually have synthetic wool hair. The needle-felted dolls are primarily merino wool, with additional types of wool in the wet-felted clothes. The lovely lady pictured here is needle-felted with wet-felted clothes. She lives in Ireland these days.
I don't name my dolls. I imagine they reveal their names when they wish to.
Where does doll inspiration come from?
I have no idea...
I don't plan my dolls very much - they take shape as I work. Very often they surprise me with unexpected features! Come to think of it, characters in my plays used to take on their own life and behave in a most unpredictable way. The needle-felted dolls in particular tend to emerge however they like (needle-felting is like a long meditation with occasional moments of finger-stabbing pain - for me anyway).
The doll here is work in progress (at present) and it was her hair that really surprised me. I rather like it though - particularly the rich purple colour.
I suppose I'm just generally inspired to create dolls because I find dolls so fascinating (I'll link a blog post on that when I get round to writing one).