I was ready to encourage her to smile but she forbade me. This is the expression she chooses and it arrests me each time I see it. When she comes home from the fair tomorrow I will present her with an antique shawl to wear around her shoulders. I will add to this post later on.

Every once in a while something magical happens and I create a doll that speaks to me, like this mermaid I have named Ghislaine. I keep a doll like her for myself as proof that this magic can happen, and as a model and inspiration for future creations.

Today I am working with bags full of fleece, “three bags full” and more, and a perspiry task it is, stuffing the bulky bags back on the top shelf, after choosing a handful to wash and pull apart gently sideways to see what kind of doll wig it might make.

This morning I spent time out in the gardens, pulling out overgrown borage to make room for what I think may be pumpkin vines that need more space. In the back woods, hidden under jewelweed, large juicy blackberries are ready to eat.  I picked a bouquet of poppies, queen anne’s lace, radish blossoms, and mint.

I’m watching the tides, waiting for a high tide so that I can  photograph Fort Popham reflected in a pool. Maybe tomorrow morning around eight o-clock I will take a trip to the coast with my camera.

I wonder how the President and his family liked Acadia National Park this past weekend.  What a wonderful move my family  made, deciding to live in Maine, a short distance away from the coast.

Now I return to a bevy of mermaids who are  awaiting net veils and shells and other bits of glamour.

These are the colors I am longing to paint. My Jumeau “Eugenie” sits in her chair  surrounded with elegant fabrics. She is waiting for me to choose from the selection of yellow silks, match them with an antique silk brocade vest and an old lace fichu, and design an elegant gown for her very soon.

“Amadora” is a newly-created soft-sculpt doll who has been in-the-making since Christmas. She is especially proud of her curly, naturally-blonde hair, given to her by a colored angora buckling goat from Punkin Hill Farm. She is very happy with all the stylish bits of old lace and tatting that ornament her costume. This morning Amadora investigated the red Chinese Bell Flowers or Abutilon in bloom in the room at the top of the stairs. She was with me last night, her very first night on this earth, while I reread the first chapters of Dahlov’s book A Dark Horn Blowing.  Amadora and I have been out to sea together in the black boat with the hissing dragon. She loved the story, which is best read aloud for all the onomatopoeia and other poetic devices with which it abounds.

A week before Christmas I completed an order for twelve gnome dolls. “Gwyneth” was among them, but she spoke up saying she did not want to leave home. To accomodate her wishes I  had to complete an extra doll.  Gwyneth is a Sea Gnome, decked out in fishnet and seaweed and shells and happily resides on an antique desk we bought from a camp in Colorado.

This week I am busy creating a dozen gnome dolls for the Sunrise Corner shop in Standish. This is the first of the twelve.

     My Sleeping Beauty doll lay there ready for reconstructive surgery but the new leg was too pale and we postponed the repair for a week while the leg is repainted and fired. Sandy and I guessed hit-or-miss at the right color mix until I remembered that paint sheets did exist for this doll, instructions that we probably followed when we first made her. We found the paint sheets. Sandy’s assortment of porcelain paints did not include the color Watersilks 2 but most likely it was not available the first time either.  ”Oriental Blush” will probably give the desired tan.

     I painted lips, eyelashes. and a shadow brow on my Schmitt “Antoinette.” She is ready for a third firing.

      Two articles on the “Irresistible Bourgoin Steiner” lay on a table, waiting to be filed. I stare at the photos in astonishment. She looks to me like the unmarked French head I have been cleaning! I will paint the head as if she were the Irresistible.

     Many other things do not seem to make sense, but doll making is deeply rewarding.

Two porcelain dolls rest on my bed. They are Sleeping Beauty and Genevieve, two modern dolls I made and dressed years ago. Genevieve holds her small leather volume of Tennyson’s Poems in an edition dated 1864, opened to the poem “Guinevere.”

Today we change the page to a passage from “Elaine.” “…As when a painter, poring on a face, divinely thro’ all hindrance finds the man behind it, and so paints him that his face, the shape and color of a mind and life, lives for his children, ever at its best and fullest….”