3 years ago one of my friends’ granddaughters saw something on her shelf and said, “Nana, can i have that?” It was a cloth doll made by hand in Mexico…from a long time ago. My friend hesitated and then told her granddaughter that this doll was very special to her because it was given to her by her parents who are in heaven now and she’d had it for such a long time. She suggested that they work together to make her a new cloth doll. So she got the materials and would add to it any time her granddaughter came to stay the weekend and in this way they began the project of making a handmade cloth doll for my friend’s granddaughter. It got me thinking. A long time ago all childrens’ toys were made by hand. There were no factories, no plastics, no toy stores…there was only wood and cloth. Children were gifted wooden animals whittled with a knife, cloth dolls sewn from the scraps of fabric left over from clothes making, and toy swords and guns made out of tree branches. I had a very dear friend who lived very near me once and she and i went through our infertility journeys during the same years. She continued on through the heartbreak of loss and God gifted her two beautiful daughters. I understood that this was a road i had to leave, a path that was over for me. To receive beautiful gifts from God nowadays you have to be willing to sit with the pain of loss along the way and it is often a long and arduous journey, not a straight shot. You have to be of strong constitution to weather all the anguish, turmoil, and vulnerability without losing your understanding of who you are. Finished with my own journey to motherhood i had always intended to pour into hers with love and support and auntie energy but she moved up north to be near her extended family so the girls could grow up near their cousins and have daily familial childcare rather than expensive and impersonal daycare. I completely understood the reasoning and wanted that kind of communal family upbringing for them where they are surrounded by uncles, aunties, cousins, and grandparents. She still sends pictures and I look forward to my christmas card from them yearly. Each time it arrives i hang it on the side of my refrigerator with magnets. All the sonograms and photographs of them are in rows organized by year on the side of the fridge. They go from infants to toddlers, toddlers to children…. I told my friend i wanted to make her daughters cloth dolls for christmas that year. She was delighted by the idea and i began the task. One of my directors at work heard of my new project and wanted to donate fabric. She donated the scraps of her wedding dress fabric that her late mother had used to hand-make her dress before she died. I planned to use this white velvet wedding dress fabric for the dolls’ bodies. However, it wouldnt bend gracefully into a sphere so i used a white t-shirt of mine for the heads and the wedding dress scraps for the torsos and arms. My best friend and neighbor also wanted to help. She donated a huge box of fabric scraps to the project and i used some of them to make the dolls’ shirts and skirts. The aprons came from my director who also gave me some embroidery scraps she had been working on when her children were little. Her youngest is now in college. She said she wasnt going to finish them and if i could use them for the dolls she would be delighted they could be included in some way. So i used the embroidered dress of a little girl with her arm at her side to make an apron and decided the arm would serve as the doll’s baby doll. I then reverse engineered the embroidery stitch to finish the nearly done embroidery and then copy it onto a second apron for the other doll. And then i got busy for 3 years. Her oldest daughter is a little girl at this point. Her youngest is a toddler. It has weighed heavily on my mind since january of this year that if i dont get these dolls finished soon the girls are not going to have a good many years to enjoy them by the time i gift them to them. At some point children stop playing with dolls. So i needed to hurry up and make this project come to fruition. The problem got solved when it rained for three days straight, the Guadalupe River flooded catastrophically and we were without power and trapped due to flood waters closing the roads in and out of town for an extended period of time. It meant all i had for entertainment was a weather radio that brought in baseball on the AM setting and the weather station on the weather radio setting. It meant a lot of the dolls were sewn by candlelight or lantern. It meant that i could not work on any projects involving the internet or images saved on my phone because the battery had to be conserved so that at a certain time of day i could turn the phone on to wait for the alsrm that would tell me it was time to take my pills. Because i didnt have any battery powered clocks, this was the main problem i had during the flooding. I could not tell time unless i turned on the car or the phone, whose battery was running dangerously low. Three of the pills were urgent to keep up with and had to be taken at exactly the same time every day. So i was committed to keeping the phone off as much as possible. Each time i turned it on the act alone drained 1 more percent. The only project i had which could be done without any technology requiring power was the dolls. So i worked on them for 3 days straight. I did not take pictures of the steps completed by candlelight when there was no power. I would not turn on the phone battery for frivolous things such as photographing projects during such a time period so a great deal of the process went undocumented but i began photographing the progress again once the power came back on. For three days i sat on a stool at my tv-dinner table in the one room tiny house with one kitten and two dogs, the windows in the bathroom and kitchen open for a cross breeze because there was no a/c, listening in turn to the weather radio and the baseball station on the AM setting. I did not like or know anything about baseball but when you are trapped by yourself with animals in a one room house with no way to visit others or watch tv/listen to podcasts…you dont care what they’re saying…its just nice to hear a human voice and it gives you the idea that humans are still out there and you might see them again when it stops raining. I dont generally love human interaction, im an introvert, but i was surprised how accustomed i had become to having a podcast or peoples court or a documentary of some sort playing in the background while i was at home. I had trained myself that this was the norm, and when the power poles went down the river, all that droning “talky talky” went away. So i listened to baseball described on the radio while i worked a needle in and out of fabric, pulling stitches and tying knots until my arthritic fingers were so sore i could barely open them from a fist. I was a woman on a mission. Nature had taken everything else on my plate off the table and put these dolls in my lap and i knew God intended them to be gifted for Christmas this year. I didnt make a blueprint for the dolls or take any sewing classes to learn better stitching. I just made them. That is the thing. Back then, no one took a class to learn how to make the best most uniform and quality toy for their kids. They were busy farming and they made what they could with what they had during any spare free minutes they had to work on it. Once upon a time children didnt have an abundance of toys. They had a precious few, made from scratch with love by their extended family members. The rest of the time they swam or played hide and go seek or climbed trees. So i made them up. Because thats what would have been done in the old days. A mother, auntie, or grandmother would have taken sack cloth and fabric scraps and made something up for a little girl to play with. They’re not the most detailed or beautiful dolls but they’re dreamt straight from my brain and they utilize fabric from 3 different families that wished them well and cared about them. I am glad some older projects that never got finished could be included and receive a new purpose and i am glad they have my director’s wedding dress fabric in them because she married a wonderful man and has seven grown kids and her mother was a wonderful lady who began hand sewing a beautiful dress. i think there is a lot of love from good people and good juju in this fabric. Of course im glad my best friend’s fabric was used because she, like me, has no children and instead pours into those children who take her art classes year after year and her husband pours into the lives of his tennis students. It takes a village to raise a child. You need all sorts of stable, kind, and well rounded adults for children to learn from and be cared for by. I enjoy the fact that even though i cant raise my own children i can make a difference in the lives of others and i think my two closest friends feel the same way. I hope the girls like the dolls. I will pack them up and ship them closer to christmas but ive shown them to my friend and she said she cant wait to hold them in person. She said the girls are reading little house on the prairie as a family and they’ve just now gotten to the part where laura gets a cloth doll and names her charlotte.
