Is there anything more rewarding than watching the glow and excitement on a new doll maker’s face as she binds the cloth body to the doll’s legs and begins to see it come together as a real doll? Not for me, there isn’t. I love it!
This happened again yesterday in doll class. Bessie has tried really hard to get everything right as she worked at cleaning her very first doll, and all along the way she harbored the fear that she really couldn’t do it after all. A slight disaster during firing, and she had to re-do a leg. You know the type of disaster I mean – my kiln, which resides in my kitchen for want of a better space in this funny old farm house, got joggled somehow and a one doll part fell against another and … well you know what happened! But Bessie labored on with the cleaning process without a single grumble.
Finally all the parts were fired and buffed, and she was ready to try her hand at painting. At this point her insecurities were even more apparent. Fortunately, the other students were all at a point on their dolls where they could fly on their own for a few minutes and I got a chance to sit down next to Bessie and show her how to oil a piece of her doll, then how to shade the appropriate areas, and kept an eye on her as she tried it herself. Like all of us, she worked too much paint off, leaving the piece looking nude again, and I found myself reminding her that some of the color would fire off and that she needed to go darker then she wanted the fired color to end up.
I try to remember to have them start on the legs so I’ll be sure to have them ready to attach to the body and start the stuffing process when she runs out of pieces to paint during the next class. She was finally satisfied with her work and placed the painted legs on the Transport Board (see instructions in “Freebies”) to keep them from getting smudged when I took them home to be fired. Now the head!
The basic shading went fine, since she had just done the same thing to the legs. Hard to remember that it was okay to put her fingers in the opening in the top of the head to hold it and keep from smearing her paint though, especially since I had finally broken her of that when handling the soft fired pieces, but she finally got the hang of it.
Then came the class that she had dreaded … the one where the eyebrows and bottom lashes needed painting. Oh, boy. Naturally everyone who had already completed their first doll had to start with their stories of how many times I told them, “Yeah, you’re getting it”, or, “see that eyelash right there? See the way you got it to taper? That’s a good one”, then suggested that they wipe it all off and try again! Humph! True, she did spend most of a three hour class on those lashes and brows, BUT SHE FINALLY GOT SOME DECENT ONES DONE! From the look on her face when I told her so, you’d think she’d just performed brain surgery. I know that feeling.
And then yesterday she got lips and cheeks done and ready for the final firing, and was ready to tackle hooking up the legs. I showed her how to be sure she got the right leg on the right side of the inverted body, and how to know they’d end up facing the front instead of the back when she was done, and I put my finger on the knot as she snugged up the threads in the leg groves to secure the fabric. Then we moved on to stuffing the legs around the armature, and finally she was able pull the fabric body up over the legs, turning it right side out. I thought she’d want to rush on to the part where the fiber fill starts going in, but instead, emotionally drained, she grabbed a cup of coffee and set gazing in awe at the odd spectacle presented by black electrician’s tape binding yellow “X” shaped Romex armature together as it sprouted out of the tops of those legs while the cloth body sagged down around the ankles. And she beamed like a new mother who only sees perfection as she gets that first glimpse of her red and wrinkled newborn. Her rapt gaze traveled between the outlandish body and the upside down face with the topless head and empty eye sockets, and she finally recognized her creation! How can you beat that?
