Doll making adventures!

Doll Street is presenting a new designer this month: June Crawford. I found this talented designer on Etsy. June is bring this fabulous class to us, which uses polymer clay and old books to create this imaginative doll.

Register by clicking this link to the class.

Here's a little about June, in her own words:
"I am a mostly self taught artist, unless you count the art classes in high school….where my teacher often looked at what I had created and, scratching his beard, would say... "Interesting". A unique classification he used when he just couldn't label it anything else.

But coming from a creative family, it was just something natural to do. My father's Mother was a quilter who created the most amazing works of art, as had her own Mother. I have knit lace that my Great-Grandmother made just after the turn of the last century and I have a needlework set she had begun, but never finished due to her untimely passing. Her daughter, my Grandmother, stitched and she passed that knowledge to me. My grandfather drew and painted in water color. He also was a musician, as were all of his brothers, something I wish I had learned more about. My own Mother never learned to knit or make lace, but she took up sewing and ceramics. My sister and I have somehow become a conglomeration of all of that past. From an early age I was making pots and statues from mud…as I've grown my tools have changed, now I use polymer clay so those things will be far more durable and much less dusty. Anything is game ….I see magic in almost everything and I am passing that on to my own son and daughter who are artists in their own right. 

People often ask me how I am inspired. I wish I understood myself. Shadows of the leaves playing over a rock, on a sunny day. The sound of the birds chirping waking me before dawn on a spring morning, the new green of spring grass, wild violets, the giggle of a child….light, color, texture...everything is inspiring. Somehow, somewhere in the ether of my mind, those things mix together and eventually end up a new project. Often I begin with no more than a desire to create. Sometimes I have a very vague idea of what I want the end product to be, other times I see the finished piece clearly before I begin. And sometimes, what I end up with isn't at all what I had in mind when I began. I think, for me, it isn't so much about what is created as it is the process of creating. It's almost like you bring a tiny piece of your soul to the physical world when you do that. And the greatest reward of all is seeing how that can touch another person. "