Doll Lecture

I am teaching at spring academy this year. This time around, I’m doing a lecture about the methods materials and sources that I use for creating replica fashion dolls. So I go into the methods of the various different kinds that I have tried and compare them side-by-side. 

Then I talk about the sources which I include a lengthy amount of images in my handout to show the various different portrait paintings that I use as inspiration. They occupy about 75% of the handout that I have available, but they are by no means the total amount of visual resources that I have in total. 

 In this lecture, I also discuss the materials that dolls can be made out of the reasons I’ve chosen certain kinds of materials. What would’ve been available during the time period. And the most common kinds of fashion dolls that were available, which tended to be fabric and stuffing over a wire body or wooden. Clay dolls did also exist during this time frame as well, and I discussed the various different kinds of Ceramic materials that was used. 

In total, my handout ends up being 44 pages because of the share amount of images that I am including and discussing along with images of dolls that I have created. And I was choosy on the images of the doll that I included. I have not included every single image of every doll that I have made. It would’ve made the hand out unnecessarily long if I had. 

I include additional information that goes into the 17th century. Even though in the SCA, we really don’t research wise try to go beyond the death at Queen Elizabeth in 1603. There are folks who do research rapier and other kinds of weaponry that go up to about 1620 or so. So I wanted to include at least dolls that fall in that timeframe. And a little bit after to show how fashion dolls evolved. 

When I do a handout, I actually like to provide a detailed research document and in this case, I was not going to get away with only having one or two pages with tiny little pictures. I wanted people to really enjoy the visual details of these portrait, paintings of dolls, along with the replicas that I created. 

Even though I’m bringing along with me that in the document I wanted people to be able to have those images as a resource afterwards. So in this case I did spend quite a bit of money creating binders of the information.

With slip sheet holders so I did invest quite a bit of money in this case per binder. I mean if somebody wanted to reimburse me back the total amount that I had put into it they owe about $28. I don’t want that to someone, I really will just take whatever they happen to have available because then they’re receiving a quality bit of information that they can use for their own notes add their own information into it as a basis of being able to research fashion dolls on their own. A true jumping off point for someone else’s own research. 

So here is to hoping I have a good turn out

Mairin