On Ellowyne Wilde and dolly surgery

Of course I am a doll surgeon of long and vast experience. Virtually all my hideous Soviet-made dolls had 'surgery scars' with little dot scars from the stitches (just like the scar I got from my hernia operation at age 6). For a while (up to age 5 so no need to pity me for my mental feebleness quite yet) I did believe they cut out a little door and expected circular scars. There was the doll with the brain surgery, and the one with the liver surgery and the one with the kidney surgery. The only doll spared this fate was my only Barbie doll (and Ibiza Barbie my sister brought for me from Germany), and deeply treasured doll. The reason was that my wonderful playmates decided that the way to reward me for having a toy they didn't (this was 1992 and Barbies were generally unavailable in Moldova at the time, they would be in a year or two at absolutely exorbitant prices) was to mangle her just a little. All I had to do was pay attention to something else while my doll was in someone else's hand for a split second and her neck was cracked and her rubber leg sported a giant scar/gash on the thigh (she had those rubber bendable legs) so I spent many years (about 5) performing various procedures to hide the leg scar and tape the neck so that the head wouldn't pop off. Of course when the damage was done and I asked what had happened the answer I got was the proverbial "I don't know" which, in retrospect could easily have translated to "oh my, aren't you one stupid cow". After all these years I still can't help but feel a bit mad at myself for being the paragon of gullible.

Oh and there was also the time when one of the neighbor's girls, who was older than me (and, obviously, infinitely wiser, as you shall see promptly), told me that if I gave her the dress I made for my doll (sporting my dad's black velvet bow-tie along the neckline), she will resew it for me much nicer. Of course it did not occur to me, at age 6 or 7, that people, and especially children, almost never offer to do things for you out of the sheer kindness of their hearts (well there are the rare ones who do and they are precious indeed), and that Ella's offer was nothing but a covert coveting of the velvet bow tie. I gave her the dress which consisted of little more than a piece of black stocking with the aforementioned bow-tie. Some time later, when I asked her if the dress was ready and to give it back to me if it wasn't she told me she lost it. I asked where, she pointed to a patch of silver firs enclosed by a low wooden green-painted fence. So I spent many an hour combing the needles and snow and underbrush, that scent of fir, juniper berries and stray cat urine destined to forever remind me of my stupidity and humiliation, evil Ella sniggering behind my back and her freckles.

I did treasure the broken Barbie doll for years to come and built her an awesome house on some closet shelves (my mom was not pleased with the space arrangement). There were half-burnt matches as pencils and my dad's binocular case as a bar/breakfast counter and three matching deodorant cans as stools, and furry painting rolls as a sectional couch, a hinged perfume box as an office arm chair, a shoe brush rack as a clothes rack, an empty powder compact as a vanity mirror, a fancy rouge container as a jewelry box. There were even two rooms: a boudoir and a patio/dining room hanging from the clothes rod of the closet. All was intricate and quite cool but hard to play with since the whole arrangement was far too fragile. So it was that necessity was the mother of invention. Had I lived in the land of Toys 'R Us and the blindingly pick isles of Barbie at Target, I probably would never had built that. As it were, I treasured a scanty Barbie brochure a friend gave me, I watched a silly children's game show called Star Hour on Russian TV where they got Barbie stuff as prizes (a Barbie house and a Barbie yacht, and cars and horses, and Barbies in puffy dresses with toothy smiles and blond curls). I treasured the memories of the first Cindy doll commercials I saw during the first Disney cartoons broadcast on Russian TV post Berlin wall collapse, that came on right before Duck Tales and Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers and featured a rollerblading jointed Cindy zooming across the screen. And I was overwhelmed by the coveting of pink plastic and pink spandex and frilly skirts and pink pumps, all so foreign to the drab wire mesh baskets full of dolls that weren't deemed good enough for glossy boxes, dolls without names and with dresses plainer than the plain Soviet school uniforms, made from scraps from Clothing Factory Number 4, at Number 1, Textile Street, scraps from clothes as ugly as the dolls themselves...

At some point my mother got a couple of French magazines, I can't recall what they were called, but by size and format they looked more like reader's digest than actual magazines. They were glossy and had colors of pigments even the names of which were wishful thinking in Soviet factories. In one of them there was an ad for a doll for which you could even buy outfits! Outfits hanging on doll sized coat hangers! Bonnets and tights and shoes and layered outfits with coats and vests and pleated skirts, all matched and coordinated. I would dream of what magic needed to happen for me to have such a doll. It never really did happen, the magic, that is.

Then, in 1995 my sister left home to go to grad school in the US. In her first letter home she wrote about how the US was nothing like Beverly Hills 90210, which combined with Saved by the Bell was one of the few things that allowed us to form an impression of what America was. One of the first things she sent me was a Barbie Bazaar Magazine. I was enthralled. There were ads for Scarlett O'Hara Barbies in the fancy Southern Belle dresses, there was a Bloomingdale's Barbie (I didn't know what Bloomingdale's was, and even now I would not give them my hard-earned dollars) with a non-blond bobcut, a closed-mouth smile (the paragon of the stylish Barbie back then - I used trial sized lipsticks brought by some American my sister had interpreted for, gosh what these Eastern Europeans could get excited over, to paint over my Barbie's teeth), a trim coat and a Medium Brown Bag... I wanted those Scarlett Barbies so badly... I tried to make the Twelve Oaks Barbecue dress from an old dress of my sister's with lace from a retired night-gown and some bits of yet another dress... I managed to sew darts to accomodate the crazy sick waist the Barbies in the 90s had, I used one of those desk flag stands my dad brought from some conferences as a doll stand... I curled whatever remained of my doll's hair into pathetic ringlets that desperately tried to be banana curls. I made her a parasol and a mock straw hat from a plastic soap box covered with some yellow cotton... It was the most I could do... And it was a beautiful outfit indeed.

There was something else in the Barbie Bazaar: an ad for the first of Mel Odom's Gene Marshall dolls: Red Venus, Blue Goddess, Pin-up and the Usherette outfit (which looked hideous on Gene's funny looking legs). I thought the doll was ugly enough, not having been indoctrinated with images of Golden Era Hollywood from a tender age. But the air, the allure, the dress and the boa of that Red Venus stayed with me... I tried to make the dress, I made a little pleated red silk Barbie top, but the skirt eluded me... And I forgot about Gene Marshall until the fall of 2007... when, on the day of our annual lab Christmas pot-luck, I looked her up on ebay, and there she was, only $23.99, NRFB... I bought her, and then a nude Hello, Hollywood, Hello, and then a nude Midnight Rumba... And then I saw that people who bought Genes also bought Tonner dolls, so I looked those up. I thought Tyler Wentworth was not very pretty, but I loved Brenda Starr, and I had to have a Tyler just because...

to be continued...

Finishing Projects Part 3: Chair... and To Be Continued

This one is a little less exciting... It's a chair. It will be part of something grander, eventually, I won't give it away just yet. The photos aren't awesome since velvet is so good at absorbing light. I will eventually take others, but for now these will have to do. Also, for illustrative and scale purposes, here's a photo of a Tarnished Ellowyne Wilde doll (who no longer lives with me) with inset acrylic eyes courtesy of yours truly. I will post about my modified Ellowynes at some point in the future. I also knitted the dress she's wearing.

I also finished a doll I call "A Mondern Take on Snow White". I took some preliminary pictures of her and she doesn't seem very photogenic. I'll have to work on getting some decent photos of her.

Finishing Projects Part 2: Self-portrait with Blouse and Apples

Now for #2, which actually has a title: Self-portrait with Blouse and Apples (all puns very much intended). I just couldn't bear to part with this shirt... It was never very pretty, the whole lumberjack-lass meets peasant girl, theme, and when the holes that wore through where my arm rubbed against the underwire of my bras (gosh, I wish they made kelvar breastplates) after being sewn back more than once, I decided to retire the shirt to nobler purposes. And since breasts are, after all a defining feature of mine, I couldn't let the blouse be all sad and, ahem, deflated, so I recruited the help of a no-longer serviceable bra (it's an E-cup), the proverbial balled-up socks, some batting, some more magic, and voila! And then I made the apples. The whole thing is 24x18 inches. Haven't measured depth

Finishing Projects Part 1 - Eve

So here I am, hiding out in the science library, pretending to read about bacteriophage and their genomes and life cycles (will I ever, ever graduate?) and it is time to post some pictures of my newest artistic endeavors, since I have given up on posting stuff in chronological order...

Since we decided to not go anywhere over the winter holidays (I calculated that visiting both sets of parents would set us back about $2,500), I had one of my many "I really really don't feel like going to lab today" which extended into a week of full-time artwork. It was quite a revelation. I worked almost full-time and managed to finish four projects I have been dawdling with for years (literally, the years, not the dawdling, after all I do have a sort of full-time job, underpaid, and not called a job as it is... oh grad school har-dee-har-har).

So here they are: #1, my dad calls it 'Eve', for reasons quite obvious, I guess. I started the doll in the summer of 2004... By 2006 it was attached to the board... and then the tree drove me crazy for quite some time, quite the example of upcycling it is: wire coat hangers, my sister's old sweater, tissue paper, it's all in there held together by, you guessed it, magic. So finally, armed with a drill and some epoxy glue, the tree was attached, the berries were in place, the last paint touch-ups were done, and I washed my hands of this one.