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Why would you want to make one? Well, I'm just shocked that I am making anything like this. I was NOT a doll-loving kid. I wanted stuffed animals (and only because I couldn't talk my parents into real ones!), but there's something different about MAKING the likeness of a human being. Suddenly, you're looking at a personification of some little part of you. Once I make a head, I don't have to worry about how to make the rest, it just tells me what it needs (not literally, of course).
I started out making some patterns because that was really the only way I had to learn and then I took a week-long workshop with Akira Blount in North Carolina. Wow, my whole way of thinking was changed. I started thinking for myself and trusting my OWN creativity and that's when my figures started "telling" me what they wanted to wear, etc. So, I could read and learn from patterns, but the process of trying to make work what someone else thought of didn't work for me as well as thinking through my own original ideas. I just didn't know how to do any of it.
I couldn't sew for one thing. I got a little Pfaff sewing machine for Christmas about three years ago and it sat for a year because I was terrified of it. I don't know what I thought it was going to do to me--jump up and embroider my head?--but I vowed I would open it up someday and run the needle over some cloth. A year later I did and started doing what I bought it for--making little figures. The first one was the most frustrating experience of my life. I had the bobbin in backwards, I sewed the arms on at different levels, I cut at the sewing lines and sewed at the cutting lines...I cussed and sweated the whole time and finally I finished it. I loved it and I was in love.
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