Bobbie
The doll, “Bobbie” was the result of a workshop by elinor peace bailey. She has written numerous books and published numerous doll patterns, all without capital letters in her name. One of her best known is My Mother Plays with Dolls. Ms. bailey is a huge woman, over six feet tall and hefty. She wore bright colors, often full length, and high top hats. She said that she costumed herself as she costumed her dolls; they’re exaggerated and flamboyant, but at the same time covered up and modest. I like that. Though bailey is more oriented to caricature than I am, I’ve been “costuming myself” ever since. She is now over eighty, a lifelong Mormon, and lives in Vancouver, Washington.
At the International Quilt Show in Houston in 1990, I enrolled in a doll making workshop completely by accident. I knew about art-dolls from other quilt shows. Since I didn’t have to bring my own sewing machine, I decided simply to take the workshop and not make a fuss. I never figured out whether it was my mistake or that of the quilt show registration team, but it turned out to be providential.
This doll represents me during my fertile, productive years. This is the chick who graduated high school and college, got married and had two kids, made 60 dozen neckties in 1971, got a master’s degree and a job interesting enough to write a book about, wrote a book about it and got it published.
The persona covers my teen years and early adulthood when my parents expected “Bobby” would be a cute name. It wasn’t. I changed the spelling in college, and thought for a while that I could give the name dignity. I couldn’t.
The doll, “Bobbie” was the result of a workshop by elinor peace bailey. She has written numerous books and published numerous doll patterns, all without capital letters in her name. One of her best known is My Mother Plays with Dolls. Ms. bailey is a huge woman, over six feet tall and hefty. She wore bright colors, often full length, and high top hats. She said that she costumed herself as she costumed her dolls; they’re exaggerated and flamboyant, but at the same time covered up and modest. I like that. Though bailey is more oriented to caricature than I am, I’ve been “costuming myself” ever since. She is now over eighty, a lifelong Mormon, and lives in Vancouver, Washington.
For the workshop I used one of her patterns, tried out her system for articulating joints, and used not only different fabrics, but different kinds of fabric. Elinor drew the face on the doll and needle sculpted the features based on mine. Bobbie has wire-articulated hands and green thumbs all the way up to her elbows.
After the workshop I added a sand seat, so she would sit properly, made her a modest burgundy cover-up, and didn’t do anything else with her for over 25 years. The doll “Bobbie” was refurbished during the pandemic in 2020 and 2021. At the time I had more or less adjusted to living without most of the sight in my right eye. However, I had a “secondary cataract,” scar tissue clouding the implanted lens in my left eye. In short, I couldn’t see worth a darn!
The doll originally had short lavender hair. One of the first things I did for my Council of Selves was to replace Bobbie’s hair with yarn that was more color-coordinated with her body. The yarn is, variegated green – blue – purple and plum with a strand of sparkly plum thread twisted throughout. Above all, through that era, I was always color-coordinated.
Another task was to outline and re-color the face elinor had drawn. Since the face was fading badly, I thread-painted it. Since I used a stretchy knit for the doll’s lower legs, Bobbie had ugly feet and fat ankles. I definitely did not have fat ankles at that age. Those were the reasons for embroidering shoes in a style I’d have loved as a young woman and fishnet stockings like those I admittedly once wore. I shaped her lower legs by embroidering black net stockings with button thread and pulling each stitch tight. I spiraled her legs with masking tape to get the distance right visually. They weren’t perfect because the black thread was hard to see, but they weren’t bad. I removed the tape for the last time and looked at my handiwork. Not bad, except that one foot was pointed ninety degrees to the side! That required knee surgery, easier than removing the button thread. Her knee, never a particularly attractive feature of the pattern, became truly grotesque. The only solution was long, flowing slacks. Those were surprisingly easy to make and looked surprisingly good. At that point, Bobbie began to feel like me.
Reading this, you’ll appreciate the conflicts making and refurbishing this doll helped me resolve. I also reworked Bobbie’s nose and made elf ears like my other dolls have because they’re magic. She also has earrings, which I wore during nearly all of that period. I was conflicted about elinor’s caricature of my face and my memory of what that face looked like. I put on make-up and plucked eyebrows and bleached moustache hairs for more than four decades. At the time, I cared how my face looked. Now I want the doll face to be an artistic, somewhat caricatured representation of how I really looked. I had to get that face right.
An advantage to thread painting is that I can remove the thread if I don’t like how it looks. I painstakingly removed a great deal of it in the process of thread-painting elinor’s version of my face. I hoped that when I got my stitching right in my magnifying goggles, Bobbie’s eyes would look quite magical from a distance without the goggles. It didn’t quite work out that way; thread-painting her eyes didn’t work. It’s a good thing dolls have the ability to anesthetize themselves magically, so nothing hurts them. Finally I cut the doll’s eyeballs as full circles, marked a horizontal diameter, and glued on blue circles for the irises, and black circles for the pupils. After the three layers were glued together, I trimmed away where the eyelids fold down on them. That way I ensured that both eyes are evenly sized and dilated, both eyes are looking the same direction, and the light is reflecting evenly.
The tear in Bobbie’s eye is taken from the clasp on Aunt Ella’s necklace. The crystal was called “aurora borealis,” popular in the fifties and sixties. I had an entire set of jewelry, necklace, bracelet, and earrings of those crystals.