I've been getting interested in doll making lately. Random, out of left field. The more I look into it, though, the more I realize I've been making little dollies ever since I was a kid...I used to make them with hairpins wrapped in thread. Sometimes I'd even take those tiny thin hairpins(the sort for wigs?) and bend them in a fish shape, then put natural things like little cut flowers or peach skin over them as clothes and let them dry.
I feel like taking that in a more adult-level direction...cloth body, then a lot of natural objects worked into the clothing, hair, and jewelry. For the past year now, I've been collecting bits of bone and shell, storing them up. I keep finding fur bits I want too, but I have mixed feelings about those...I know that's not as kind, and that a lot of people get very upset. As a former vegetarian, it makes *me* not sit right. I can't seem to find a source for fur, feathers, and the like that is both in my price range, and a hunter or someone else I could count on to kill as ethically as possible. For the moment, that aspect of my sketches will need to wait.
In the works? A Freya doll, hopefully with a gold glass bead and amber Brisingamen, and ideally a feathered cloak. I'm ready to do my first mock-up of the body, so once the craft desk is set up in my new apartment, it will be first on the agenda. I also have sketches for a kitsune girl, and a horned god. All of them, oddly enough, I decided I wanted to leave faceless.
As human beings, we really get the most out of faces, and especially for some sort of Divine or mythical creature, that seems we key into faces most, and if it's "off" or "wrong" it spoils the whole thing.
That said, it makes me wonder whether a doll like this could also be faceless for other reasons...like a veiled, enigmatic LDS Heavenly Mother.
