Dolls and Death

I don't think of myself as a morbid person, but I have to admit to being attracted to things with a whiff of Goth. When I create  I don't use new equipment, tools, or materials if I can help it.  Even when fresh out of the studio, my dolls look shopworn. Perhaps I'm channeling the zeitgeist:  that fin de siecle sort of feeling that's prevalent during "tough economic times"--a phrase I'm getting awfully tired of hearing, and am a bit ashamed to use.  On the other hand, my dolls are also channeling that "use up, make do, recycle" mentality that's not Goth but Green.

So many of my dolls are made of parts of old hats or lace hankies that I've gleaned from junk stores.  I think sometimes of the  ladies who wore those hats and tucked those hankerchiefs into their sleeves, like my grandmother did.  Those hats and laces all rotten now, untouched and falling apart.  Would those bygone ladies be scandalized to see their accessories incorporated into a doll?  I hope they'd laugh and be happy that something they'd worn, that was a projection of their sense of style and self,  has undergone a metamorphosis.  As they have done, dear dead ladies.  In life they collected pretty things, and now that they're gone, and their pretty things scattered to the winds,  they're  providers of my workshop. 

I've included a picture of a doll made of an old grammar book.  She's wearing a bow from a hat I found in a store in Walnut Cove.  When I bought the hat the store owner said it once belonged to an elderly lady who wore a different hat every day, even into her 90's.