Guess I Can Start Here ...

OK, the shock of having created this blog on a total whim has sunk in just a bit now and so I thought I would tell you a little bit about what I do!

I love to make primitive cloth dolls! However, the demand for primitive cloth dolls seems to be dwindling in the last year or so, and thus I am gingerly exploring some other avenues. For my last show of 2007 (Bird in Hand in Los Altos, CA), I made a few "early-look" things.

One of these was a six-pointed star (inspired by my friend Margo White).

I also made some pinkeepers (sometimes called needlekeepers) in a heart shape. Each one comes with an assortment of vintage and rusty pins and needles.

But my favorite new "early-look" creation was a flock of little birdies! Most of my birdies have paper wings (the paper is actual pages from an antique book!) and vintage mother-of-pearl buttons for eyes.

I had a lot of fun coming up with these things! My dolls tend to be in the $60 and up range and, with a lot of buzz going around about a looming recession, I wanted to offer my customers some little treasures at a more affordable price. I also enjoyed working with the tiny print fabrics for a change! For many years, I worked exclusively with homespun plaids; then I started using star print fabrics and of course I needed some stripes to go along with the stars! And then my fancy was caught by polkadots ... oh my! And now it appears that I may have come full circle, back to the little print fabrics I used when I first started making dolls (gasp!) 30-some years ago.