How To Choose Good Stuffing Wool

Here is a photo of two types of wool strands. The top one is felting wool and the lower one is stuffing wool. The difference is that the felting wool is much finer and more silky. The lower one is courser and has more space between the fibres. If you stuff dolls with finer, felting type wool, you will end up with more of a lumpy look, you will use a lot more, and it will be much harder work. Also, it is vital that the wool used for stuffing is completely dry of any Lanolin. Even a small amount of "grease" will eventually seep through the doll's tricot skin and create a "greasy" look!

New looks for dolls

I now have these great new onesies in really beaut colours. So if you order a Dreamtime baby doll, you can have them dressed in one of these if you like... or stick with the old style.

And the Child Dolls with streaks in their hair, pants and tops and more interesting colours. The boy dolls remain traditional knights and Frodos, which are the most popular, and you can still order traditional girl dolls.

The Pearl At The Centre of the Spiral

Our local Waldorf school celebrated mid winter with the interactive story of Yentz who goes off in search of the lost pearl, that is his inheritance. The children follow behind Yentz with their colourful handmade lanterns, as he stops to pass various character tests along the way around the school grounds, which is made up of bushland. Finally, he finds his way to the cavern where his lost pearl is at the centre of a beautiful spiral of fresh bouganvillia flowers. I was one of the spiral singers, so the only photos I could get were these taken during the warm ups.

The "Sewn" Farmyard!

What do you do if you drool over The Knitted Farmyard pics, yet you can't knit very well? Easy: just create a farmyard out of leftover fabrics and old sweaters, and sew them together like a quilt. This is as far as I got, since I had to work this week; there are still houses to make, but we're having fun with it already.

Da Vinci's Last Supper Waldorf Style

Jesus and the 12 disciples were made using the wood and wire dolls, with both felt and silk clothes and wool tops for hair (click on the pic for a clearer version).
Something interesting about this famous Da Vinci painting from my Foundations in Anthroposophy course a few years ago; our lecturer showed us the "wave" pattern created by the hands. Check out the pink line I've drawn on the painting below. I tried very hard to bend the little dolls hands (above) into the same "wave" pattern!

The Rule of Six

I got this little list from this blog. It's short, powerful and easy to remember.

Six Things to Include in Your Child's Day:

• meaningful work
• imaginative play
• good books
• beauty (art, music, nature)
• ideas to ponder and discuss
• prayer

Sculpture By The Sea

Every year Cottestloe Beach has a Sculpture By The Sea event. I liked this one:










My son and dh liked the "Lifesavers";















The setting sun and a swim ended off the evening:

St Patrick

Here is St Patrick ready for St Patrick's day in 2 weeks. He is made with those incredibly versatile wood and wire dolls you can get at most Waldorf craft outlets. He is holding the famous "shamrock". Saints make great role models in extraordinary and "superhuman" courage and virtue. Kids love the story of St Patrick, especially the part where he bangs his staff on the ground and all the snakes go into the sea!

A Possum is not an Opossum

Possums in Australia are CUTE! This caused some confusion to my American customers because they thought I was making an Opossum, which is apparently not a cuddly cutsie like the possum.










To clear that up, here is a pic of a REAL possum, from Australia. How cute is that?









I made this possum from the Hedgehog pattern in the book; "Trudy's Tiere"which is in German or Dutch, not English, and can be purchased from Witte Engel. It doesn't matter if you don't speak German or Dutch as the patterns are fairly straight forward. Just one thing - the patterns are without hems added, so be sure to add your hems all the way around the pattern.

New Dolls on Etsy

This is Lucy; a 16" Radiance Child doll. You can adopt her from my ETSY store.

This child doll stands at 16 inches, and is made with pure and natural products. She is stuffed with clean and dry New Zealand wool, and her skin is made from Witte Engel's famous tricot. Her hair includes over 50gms of mohair, carefully looped into a crocheted cap. She is wearing a pure cotton outfit and pure wool felt shoes. She also comes with bloomers underneath and the dress is in two parts with pinafore.

Just Landing Again ....

Been really busy with Christmas then school holidays. Also working a few days per week on an anorexia ward with teen girls (I'm also a nurse in my spare time). I taught some of them to crochet while I sat and crocheted wigs next to them. So I've finally been able to make a few more dolls and have uploaded some to ETSY.

To All My Customers - Merry Christmas!

Do you remember when you were a child? And it was Christmas? And there was magic. And the absolute certainty that anything was possible.

~~~

May you rediscover the child inside you this Christmas!

~~~

Memories Feed The Imagination

"Memory feeds the imagination," says author Amy Tan. "The best thing we can give our children, next to good habits, are good memories," says author Sydney Harris. We gave our son a good memory over the weekend. He had the chance to sail on the Leeuwin Sail Training Ship for the weekend. These pics were taken after the voyage, when he returned today.He even steered the boat out of the harbour and in again, hauled sails and furled them again. He loved it and can't wait to go back on again.

He he is with his watchleader.One more quote; "The memories we collect, and give, brighten our lives as long as we live," (author unknown).

Crochet Christmas Pudding

I didn't use any sort of pattern for this; I simply crocheted a cap, like a doll's wig, starting off with the cream color wool "brandy sauce", then adding the brown speckled wool until I had almost a sphere. I added wool stuffing and a stone at the bottom, then sealed it by completing the crochet stitch. As for the holly, I just crocheted and knotted the wool until it resembled holly.

Thy Light Is Glowing: Santa Lucia

Santa Lucia,

thy light is glowing

Through darkest winter night,

comfort bestowing.

Dreams float on dreams tonight,

Comes then the morning light,

Santa Lucia,

Santa Lucia.

Today is Santa Lucia Day. St Lucia was a girl who was killed by the Romans for being a Christian. Legend has it that her ghost used to lead Christians fleeing persecution through the catacombs under Rome with her eyes on a tray, and a wreath of candles, leading the way to safety. Read more here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_LucyAnd here are some St Lucia dolls I made with silk dresses and silk-tops for hair.

Happy St Nicholas Day

The best children's party in Perth, if you have any Dutch heritage, is the annual Dutch Club's "St Nicholas Party". My husband's parents are Dutch, so I restarted this tradition in their family, and it's so much fun. St Nick is accompanied by "Black Peter", but at this party he has at least 4 of them. First St Nick goes around and greets everyone and asks if you've been good, while the Black Peters give out lollies and ginger bread biscuits to all the kids. Then he gets out this huge red book with a gold cross on it to check to see if any naughty children's names are written in there, and he then announces: "No children have been written in my book, so you will all get a present." The kids are called one by one to receive their present. Some kids have to have a further test to see if they've been good; Black Peter puts a sack over their heads and my husband thinks that the tradition with that is to see if a piece of black coal falls out. If it doesn't then the child gets a present. I had to have a quick word in Black Peter's ear not to put the sack over my son's head, or he would have probably freaked out! They usually have a magician but this one seemed to have vanished before we even saw him. But we had a good time anyway.

Nativity Scene - Waldorf Style

Here is the Nativity Scene I made using 15cm wood and wire dolls:

Mary is wearing a red silk dress with a blue cloak and Joseph has a felt tunic and blue felt cloak. Baby Jesus is lying on a manger made from cinnamon sticks. The donkey and ox are made from felt. I put the LED lights inside the stable and around the scene. My son keeps switching it to flashing effects so itlooks like a disco! The "hay" is made from some silver-gold stuff I got from a Christmas shop that is supposed to go on the Christmas tree, but I thought it looked pretty cosmic in the stable (especially with disco lights!):

Here are my three Magi: Baltazar, Kaspar and Melchior. They are dressed in silk, and the camel is made from wool felt:

The shepherds' clothes are made from wool felt and I have knitted small waistcoats for two of them, and a crocheted cap for two of them.

The angel has a dress made from silk and her hair is made from silk tops. She has wings also made from silk:

A Gnome

I got the idea for this little fella from the book: Gnomes .
He is made from the 15cm wood and wire doll and dressed in felt clothing. The ears are made from tiny pieces of tricot cut out and stuck to the side of his head.

Waldorf Story Books and Autism

Social impairments are universal with autism. This study looks at why some people's brains are more altruistic, or socially cooperative, than others. "Cooperation does not just mean going with the flow: It involves actively helping others and participating in the reciprocal relationships that make human society possible. People can and will go out of their way to help others, even those not related to them - which seems unremarkable until one realizes that most other animals do not." Researchers then applied the theory to the study of autism: "Maybe autism represents a deficiency in the social parts of the brain that allow altruism and cooperation".
The Little Troll tells the story of a troll, stuck in his biology, where he is doomed to a tribe of trolls that are uncooperative and mean to each other. But this little troll wants something more than this wretched life. He sees the humans and longs to be like them, but doesn't know how. One day, he overhears a man telling a boy that if he doesn't help others and put others before himself, he is nothing better than a troll. The little troll has found the key that will unlock his prison - altruism. He spends the next few years helping humans and animals at every chance. The narrator says: "The more he helped others, the better he became at helping". Slowly he begins to lose his troll-like features and grow more like a human. The ending has him walking into a church where the people all say: "welcome to the world of humans". This is my all time favorite children's book.
Will the practice of altruism and cooperation remediate autism? I believe it will! Since my son was five, we have kept a Book of Good Deeds, recording every good deed he has done. Plus we encourage "random acts of kindness" as a fun thing to do, if only to pull out a weed from a neighbour's lawn. I truly think this has challenged him out of his own little world.

The Shire Spring Fair

The Shire council puts on a couple of really good parties each year for its rate-payer hobbits, like us. One is the Christmas party, and the other is the Spring Fair. This year, the helicopter ride was the highlight:

I love the colour of the ocean around Perth! Alex was more interested in the control panel.

Back on the ground again, and these flowers are created from used plastic drink bottles:Alex holding a snake - something I couldn't do!