Dollieh Sanctuary

I've been making art dolls for years now and I've really started to find my personal style. I've always loved trousseau dolls, but few of the art doll makers in my area (and I am blessed to be in an area rich with them http://www.cyndysdolls.com/Guilded_Lilies.htm ) have any understanding of them. There seems to be a divide between collectors of mass manufactured dolls (modern or antique) and collectors/ makers of art dolls. I've spent a lot of time learning how to make surface embellished, static dolls. While I needed all that work, what I really enjoy making is movable dolls with removable clothes that make people want to pick them up and play with them. But still they are not children's play dolls, they are adult play dolls. This is an odd concept in the art doll world, as far as I can see. BJD's are starting to change peoples minds though. I can see this "pick me up" aesthetic in Pat Lillich's work and Marina Bychkova's - to name the first two that spring to mind.
Pattern makers are starting to put out BJD patterns, which is good for me, for I am still just learning to make my own doll patterns. I've started making these jointed dolls as an internship on the road to making my own patterns.
Here are the three I've made in the last year:
Cordelia is a cloth ball jointed doll (BJD) made from a Patti Culea pattern.  I love the way her nose and feet came out. I'm especially proud of her sandals. Making doll shoes is a lot of fun, but exhausting. I really enjoy making them, but I don't do it a lot.





Acorn and Cora were both made in a class I took with Barbara Schoenoff. They are fully jointed with posable finger and neck, due to pipe cleaners; 12 wooden ball joints and a swiveling head attachment.

Cora was a challenge to dress. Her skin tone matched very little of my stash. I walked her head around the quilt store until I found a batik that looked great with her head. Then I pulled fabric from my stash to match the batik. I used silk charmuese, lace, batiste and embroidered cotton to compliment the batik. I even unravelled the lace to add accents to her jacket.





I love Acorns clothes! I used shot silk for his shirt, batik for his vest, embroidered and sequined crinkle cotton for his jacket, metallic brocade for his arm guards, rayon and silk velvet for his pants and hat and bamboo/linen for his boots. 







For more of a retrospective of my work, see here
http://www.flickr.com/photos/7845173@N0 ... 830811576/

I love looking at art dolls but, yeah, I also want something I can play with. I tried one of Patti Culea's patterns once but it just wasn't doing any thing for me. Your's are very nice. Solitude's chest... XD And that dragon is very cool.

Patti is big on surface embellishment. I've taken a few classes with her and I really enjoyed them, but her dolls tend to be static. I've sold or gifted those dolls. They were beautiful, but not dolls I wanted to keep. Do you have any pictures of your doll you'd like to share Llwynog? I'd love to see it.
Yeah, Solitude is from a Judy Skeel pattern; she really did a great chest. She said she modeled it on her husbands chest, as it was when they got married. When I cleaned out my patterns, I made sure to save that one, just for the chest part of the pattern!
Thanks for looking I tend to feel a disjunct in what part of my doll life I can share with what people. I'm hoping to share more of my whole collection/ body of work on this board.
Susan

Toes! I want to do toes and fingers some day.

Wow - I am just so totally disgusted . . . with myself! I couldn't even hope to have that kind of talent. I love all three of them!

DollyKim wrote:Toes! I want to do toes and fingers some day.

Yeah, toes and fingers are one of the easy things for me - I've had a lot of great, local teachers so I never even knew it was supposed to be hard. Now faces for some reason, I still struggle with them. I need to make up a bunch of heads and just sit down and do face after face for practice. Don't you sculpt DollyKim? That's a whole different skill set and I'm just a beginner with sculpting.

Kirahfaye wrote:Wow - I am just so totally disgusted . . . with myself! I couldn't even hope to have that kind of talent. I love all three of them!

Thank you This set of dolls is what I would call my upper level, intermediate doll making. Don't be hard on yourself - I've been making cloth dolls for 16 years now and I still don't work from my own patterns (though I am slowly, but surely working on that). I also have been sewing for 25 years and a lot of those skills overlap into doll making. I am also super privileged in the doll group I joined a few years after I started making dolls. I could fill pages about how wonderful and talented and sharing the other members are. It's teaching group, so people go out of their way to help others learn.
Susan

I sculpt, I just can't do tiny enough stitches to turn fingers how I'd like them yet. To sculpt well you just have to do it.

Oh wow. Those are really impressive. Really really impressive. I am so jealous right now. XD I especially like Acorn. I'm going to have to show these to one of my friends, we were talking a while back about trying to make something like this but I just never got around to it. Partly beause I haven't got any room to lay anything out. Looking at yours though I'm inspired now though to at least try to give it a shot, maybe if I tried to do a little one...

Acorn is from a Barbara Schoenoff pattern, Kiri Alyd of Autumn Oakes
http://www.dollmakersjourney.com/schoenoff.html
The pattern is for an 18" doll, but I enlarged it to 24". Another classmate reduced it by 65%
http://speediebeadie.blogspot.com/2009/ ... beads.html
This doll is time consuming, with all the little pieces, but fun.

DollyKim wrote:I sculpt, I just can't do tiny enough stitches to turn fingers how I'd like them yet. To sculpt well you just have to do it.

Do you hand sew them? I sew mine on the machine with a stitch length setting of 1 to 1.5. I know all I need to do to sculpt better is practice, but sculpting seems to be something that I have to have all my ducks in a row even to start, whereas sewing just happens.
Susan