Sunday, February 08, 2015

Worry Dolls

For a long time, I have wanted to create worry dolls based on the ancient Guatemalan myths and artifacts. 
A therapist I work with, who conducts workshops for parents and kids at Children at Risk centers, stumbled upon these dolls, and asked me if we can conduct a workshop based upon this myth. 
I was trying to figure out a way for young kids to create these dolls in a short timeframe (we only had 90 minutes for each workshop), so I created some beforehand. 
All the dolls have a tiny wire construction inside. They started out with only the wire (the smaller ones), but then I added a button for the heads, which worked better. 
The wire construction was covered with tight bands of fabric, similar to the method I use in my wrapping technique. The last steps were embroidering the facial features and sewing the tiny clothes. 
I had great fun making those, since I have always liked challenges that make me think and create different stuff than I usually do.  



For the kids, the process proved to be quite challenging as well. I had two meetings with each group, so during the first one we created simple dolls using the wrapping technique, which was good exercise. Still, creating those dolls required a lot of help, and I assume it is the miniature size that makes it much more complicated. 
Even though, by the end of 90 minutes, they came up with these charming little figures, some of the stories they told about them were quite sad – which I assume is evident. 





 




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