Hullo Gentle Readers!
I am returned. Today we will talk more about doll-making as well as a few other odds and ends. As you may know if you like my facebook page (Yes, click here, you know you want to) or if you read my previous entry, I am working on making a ball-jointed doll for myself. I started sculpting her just after Christmas, and I’m technically still working on the head >_<. To my credit it’s a lot of detailed work and a lot of sanding and the like.
Her eyes came the other day, and I have been working on making the sockets so that the eyes will sit snugly in them. That is going rather well, I think. The eyes as you may see above, are a truly lovely shade of green.
I suppose right now I shall explain the title of the previous entry. “Trapping Spirits in Dolls”. I have always loved scary stories, and really I don’t think any have been quite so scary to me as the ones involving dolls. I don’t mean like Chuckie or killer dolls from hell or whatever... I mean like that episode of the X-files called Chinga, the one that Stephen King wrote, or the haunted creepy dolls that you hear about people selling on e-bay. Or even Harold from the Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark books.
Those are the sorts of doll stories that creep me out. The ones that have some tiny grain of truth that the story’s built around like a pearl around sand. (BTW, we decided in a fit of sleepiness that sky pearls are made when you put a grain of sand in a bird). Dolls have always had something eerily mystical about them, and of course they have long been used as magical effigies to represent people in spellwork.
The poppet is used to represent a person that the spell is being cast upon, they are used to heal or to manifest (and yes, for darker purposes sometimes as well). And then of course there’s the Golem, which is a sort of doll brought to life from earth and alchemy. Dolls look like miniature people, oftentimes exaggerated in ways, with large eyes and child-like faces. It is not too hard to imagine that they could come to life or change positions in the night. And this brings me to my title.
When I make art, I like to be certain that it has life. This is quite the same of course with my dolls. I know that some of you may think I sound absolutely barmy here, but I talk to them while I’m creating them, asking them what sort of colours they like, things like that. And of course some are slightly more demanding than others. Freddie for instance decided to tell me very adamantly that she wanted bright red silk bloomers. So of course I obliged. This care, I feel, gives license for spirits to come live inside of the dolls. In fact, sometimes I will put them in one position when I go to sleep and they’ll be in quite another when I awake!
I am not actually “trapping” the spirits per-se, as giving them a home.
That being said, I shall now proceed to take the picture you see at the top of this page. Her name is Virginia, she is of course one of the good neighbors.
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