Healing Doll & Walker

A friend of ours is suffering from cancer in her back and was in need of a "Walker". I found one at a garage sale. I cleaned it up then painted it bright yellow. Then I wrapped much of tubes in hand dyed stips of fabric. Each wrap I did is in a different color. This helped create a bright "circus fun" look to the whole walker. I wanted to add a doll, so looked over my collection of favorites. I needed one that could lay on the front of the walker. I found a perfect one. It was a doll I made some 10 years ago from a Barbara Owen pattern. She was just perfect, so I mounted her on the front of the walker.

I did a little story for the Walker and the Doll. Here it is:

THE HEAL MOBILE

"Let me introduce myself. My name is, Helen The Heal Mobile. I’m here to steady your steps. My partner is WILLAWALK, a Fabulous Fairy Guide Doll and Floor Watcher. With her magic powers she will make sure this set of wheels gives you a smooth glide all along the way. We are here to help you put a new hop & skip into your steps.
We however look forward to you NOT needing us any more. Honest we don’t take that personally, for not being needed is WHAT WE DO. Once our “Walking Assistant” days are over we are very useful as a Plant Stand. A big ole plant sitting on that walker seat looks way cool." Signed: Helen & WillaWalk.

Decorating this walker for my friend was an AWESOME experience for me. Don't know when a creative project has meant as much to me.

Barb Keeling

Ball of Knitting Yarn has new look

I love to knit, however getting the yarn ready to do it can be the hardest part. I hate rolling the yarn into a ball.

Well here is something new. NO BALL OF YARN. The yarn is knitted first into a flat piece. Then it is custom dyed with a wonderful one of a kind color combo. You unravel it to knit it. Just unravel little at a time and knit it. No more tangles. This is the most wonderful WRINKLED YARN.

The example here show what color pattern the piece was before I began to unravel it to knit it. See how great it looks knitted. NOW HOW COOL IS THAT. Do read on.

Just Knitting

I have been having a great time with my new wrinkled yarn. I love to knit it is so restful. Put I like to not think about it much as I go along. I designed a couple of KNIT ONLY scarves using the wrinkled yarn and interchangeable knitting needles. All you need to know is how to cast on, knit and cast off. I used needles from a size 7 to a size 15. Much of the time I had different size needles at each end of the round cord. Love working on round needles anyway. On the orange pinkish scarf I decided to knit from the side of the scarf, so cast on 500 stitches and only knit twelve rows. The finished scarf was about 5 yards long, which worked great for the gathering I did on the scarf. It is so cute on. The olive scarf, I started at the bottom with size 7 needles and then most of the way knit with a size 10-1/2 needle on one end of the round cord and a size 15 on the other end of the cord. The wrinkled yarn is sort of stretchy and wavy wrinkled so these larger size needles are way cool. Normally knitting with this yarn you would use a size 3. This yarn is odd. It is already a knitted piece, then it is custom dyed to give this one of a kind color combo, then you the knitter, just pull the yarn and unravel the yarn. You knit your project with the yarn you unravel. I know, I know it sounds a little weird, but it is so great. There is no tangled yarn to try and roll up into a ball, no yarn unravels in your tote bag, there are no knots. You just unravel the hand dyed knitted piece and knit it into what you want. Go to the knitting yarn part of my website. I have two great color combo waiting for you. Try this yarn you will love it. It comes in 400 yard pieces which is more than enough to make a pair of socks or my orange/pink scarf. Or it comes in 200 yard piece which will be enough for a nice size scarf like the olive color one.

Contemporary Doll Collector Feature

We are thrilled to be part of the feature story on Cloth Doll Artists in the July 2008 issue of Contemporary Doll Collector Magazine. The story is called SAVVY SOFT DOLL ARTISTS and features, Barbara Willis, Patti Culea and Doug and Barb Keeling. We are delighted to be a part of the article. We all are so different in our approach & style of cloth doll making. Great article. Check your newsstand.

Page from Doll Collector Magazine

Here is a page from the artcle from Doll Collector Magazine

Dolls for Kids

When our Great Granddaughter was born, we wanted to be the ones to give her, her first floppy handmade doll. Well we looked at all our funny ART Dolls and decided we need to go to the drawing board and do some kid dolls.

So we create a doll for the drag around and squeeze enjoyment of a child. Actually we did three dolls, each one adorable, fun and floppy. One is called Mrs. GilleyWilley, then there is Olivia Ann named after our Great Granddaughter and a doll called MOM. I then wrote a story about these 3 doll people and Doug did the illustrations for our mini book. We made a Mrs. GilleyWilley doll for our Great Gran and bound the little book for her. We had a great time doing this special project.

We also put these doll patterns on our website and take the doll samples off to shows we do. Everyone just adores this group of fiber folks and the patterns are very popular. There are lots of Moms, Gran-ma and Great Grans who want to make dolls for their "kids". These are sweet, little different and not hard to make.

This floppy doll idea was so fun for us we decided to do some other kids stories about the dolls. So this summer Doug and I are doing The Adventures of Mrs. GilleyWilley, who is a Magical Nanny. Doug is doing the illustrations for my fairy tales. The illustration above is of Olivia Ann and Mrs. GilleyWilley from the book. Dougs drawings are darling. Can't wait to put this little story book together this summer.

More Family Dolls

We have done dolls for my sister and her husband too. We did look a like dolls which made it fun and special. The doll we did for my brother-in-law was for one of his special birthdays. He grew up on a farm in Oklahoma so the birthday theme was a Farm Guy. So we did his doll like that. We had a blast collecting little farm tools for accessories for the doll.