I love vintage hankies and decided to use them to make dresses for some of the wooden dolls that I carve.
I needed to take a break last week, and my Story Door Dolls were beckoning me.
So, I used some of the vintage hankies that I have collected over the years to make them new dresses.
Lucky Pauline ended up with the most beautifully embroidered hanky.
I can’t bear to cut the hankies, so I do some crazy folding to make the hanky work as the skirt.
This is Tennie in her new hanky dress…. even though it’s not as glamorous as Pauline’s, she’s still very happy with it.
By folding and hand stitching the delicate old linen, cotton and silk hankies, the hankies remain intact.
This is a kind of archival use of the hankies, which preserves them, but uses them, instead of them languishing in a box.
I hand carve the dolls, which I call my ‘Story Door Dolls’.
They are all around 6 inches tall, and I use local woods for most of them.
They were inspired by Hitty dolls.
This little charmer was carved from Arbutus wood that was trimmed many years ago from the tree in my sisters in laws house in Victoria. I won’t be carving anymore Arbutus dolls as that wood is like iron! wow…. and ow….
And, yes, I do sell them…..
But not Pauline
