I have now moved the content of the posts to two pages, which will make the material a little better to understand. There are a few new pictures, and some additional commentary.
I will leave these posts as is for now, but you have to start ‘way at the bottom if you are going to read them in sequence!
This is the doll we are talking about.
Leave the whole thing to dry. Leave it alone for at least three days.
When you take it out, you will have a pressed cloth head, front and back, that you now get to sew together.
Oh, joy!
As I worked my way through this doll, trying to do everything just as Izannah would have done them, I was struck by how sophisticated this simple little doll really is.
The antique dolls have a “pate” as the UFDC called it, which is really a representation of the hair being gathered up into a bun, which is what would have to happen do achieve that hairstyle, with the little curls and such.
You can see it on the antiques, so I put it on mine.
The antique heads, especially the early ones, had to be sewn onto the body. One of the shoulderplates I saw had a seam going down the back of it.
The ears…and I have not made a complete study of the ears….some of them are in two pieces, sewn together, and then attached to the head. So I did that, too.
The UFDC study disc says that there is only one seam on the arms. I accomplished that by putting the pattern on the bias, and then sewing darts on the opposite side.
Sew the piece first, then finish cutting it out.
I think what really blew me out of the water was when I got to the legs, nearing the completion of the body.
Izannah’s doll body is not like anything I have ever seen. The upper legs are actually part of the torso, so the whole thing has to be sewn differently. The seam on the torso and thighs is on the side, but the seam for the lower legs is down the back.
Izannah put the feet on separately, also…I did not!
When I was trying to attach the lower leg to the upper leg, and get both legs to be the same length, I had a real breakthrough.
The lower legs are to be sewn on, and then the leg covering, the second skin, is brought up over the hips and stitched down. You can see that on the antiques.
I finally accomplished the attaching of the legs and having both legs be the same lengh, by marking the thigh, and rolling the extra cloth up, sewing that, and then fitting the cloth from the lower leg over that.
“Just like a sailor putting on a peg leg!”
Izannah grew up in Somerset, MA, across the street from a shipyard. Her uncle, who raised her, was a sea captain. Izannah must have seen many sailors, about town, with peg legs, because that’s all the state of the medical arts at that time.
Putting the legs on….just like a peg leg is attached.
I will leave this for now. I hope those of you that wanted/needed this information are helped. If you have questions, you can e mail me at blufrogg (use the and symbol) at garlic dot com.
Are we there yet?
The white glue has dried. You have cut the gathering strings on the back of the wax model, the big half. You will now gently put the whole unit back into the Pammed mold, and secure the edges with either a little masking tape, or a judicious use of spray adhesive. You want the selvage of the piece to lie flat against the mold, so you can access the very edge of the mold, and the fabric that lies there.
Do not use any glue at this point. Using spray adhesive, fill in the nose, especially, and the lips and chin with tiny bits of batting. I used “warm and natural.” Get the cheap stuff, because it tears better than the more expensive batting.
Using layers of spray adhesive alternating with layers of batting, completely cover the inside of the mold. Be sure to bring the material all the way up to the edge of the mold, but not over.
When you have a good two layers of batting covering the inside of the mold, switch to burlap.
It is beter to work in strips, and make cuts into the burlap, so you can accommodate the curves.
The last layer of burlap is adhered with a layer of yellow glue. White glue is OK, but the yellow is stronger.
The last thing: Remember that plaster you poured inside the clay, in preparation for revising a sculpt? Did you save it?
This plaster shape will have the same shape as the head, less the 1/3 of an inch or so that was the clay. I use these to press into the fabric inside the mold. I use the followers, and the big clamps, and I tighten down as hard as I dare. (This is where I broke the mold.)
This shows the cloth mask with its final lining of burlap. You can see the batting in between.
Looks a bit like Izannah's, doesn't it?
You will see that there is a wooden “follower” between the clamp head and the wax. There is a similar piece of wood under the mold half, too.
This helps to distribute the pressure from the clamp. I have broken the wax pieces and I actually broke a plaster mold from too much pressure, before we started using the mold followers.
Incidentally, some one suggested that Izannah’s first molds were not of iron, as is depected in her patent.
Iron would have been costly, although the Walkers and the extended family owned iron foundries.
Izannah was using completed doll heads, maybe wax or papier mache, and bald. These were coming into the country from France and mostly Germany, and would have been readily available.
Since the early dolls have so many different faces, it was suggested that the first molds may have been of plaster, and that they would frequently break. Interesting idea.
But I digress.
So you now have cotton knit adhered to a wax model, back into a duplicate mold, being pressed by a clamp.
You can use the same clamps you used with the wax. I just used these big black ones because they look like the kind Izannah was using.
Leave the whole contraption in a warm place where the “messy mix” can dry. Don’t go too warm, as the wax will melt, and maybe fall on something like a pilot light…which could be disasterous!
So the next day, assume the messy mix has dried. Release the clamps, and lighly pry the model out, with the fabric still attached. Maybe pry from the bottom, if you have to. It should come out very easily.
Any kind of moisture will cause the features to spread and deteriorate. Resist the impulse to put any water soluble material on the face.
Instead, give the face a coating of some clear plastic spray, like one of the Krylon products. It will raise the nap on the knit, but then it lays back down.
Once the piece is dry, from the acrylic spray, you can now gently pry the cloth off the short wax form.
NOW, take the full sized wax half, and put the face mask over it. Carefully.
You are going to trim the corners of the fabric
and sew the mask onto itself, across the back of the half.
You can do this by gathering, and then bringing the needle across to the other side, working back and forth.
The objective here is to smoothe out any wrinkles that might want to form at the very edge of the piece.
By going back and forth, you will find that you can force the knit to lie flat on the wax model.
Got it? Good.
Now….just on that half inch or so that was not involved with the Messy Mix on the short half, dab a little white glue. Leave not even a 1/32th of an inch right at the very edge.
The white glue can be sewn through, but it is a pain.
Let the glue dry, and you are ready for the next step. You are almost there!
I see there is a limit to how long each post can be. The caption of that last photo got knocked off.
Now, leave the molds which have had wax in them where they are, and go to the molds that have not yet been touched.
We will now proceed to destroy those molds also!
Spray the insides of each half of the mold with PAM. Pam, the lowly kitchen spray is the doll maker’s friend.
Use a soft brush, now forever dedicated to Pam, to brush the Pam around in the mold. The dry plaster will absorb the Pam. Spray and spray again.
The Pam will keep most substances from sticking to the inside of the mold.
It will not prevent Tightbond Yellow Wood glue from sticking….which is how I destroyed that first mold from the first doll back in 2008.
While you are waiting for the Pam to absorb, mix up a small batch of Helen Pringle’s Messy Mix. I first read about this in the Cloth Doll magazine, and I’ve seen it used more recently.
H.P. Messy Mix is equal parts of Liquitex modeling paste and matte gel. So far, it is the only thing that gets the fabric to adhere to the wax model, which is what happens next.
I am applying this “messy mix” to the wax model itself (the “short half”} because I want to fabric to stick to all of the model. If I apply the “messy mix” to the fabric, I might miss going all the way out to the edges.
I use 100% cotton tee shirt material. A man’s tee shirt is OK, but the ones put out by Danskin are thinner and stretchier. Silk stockinette gets brittle, later on.
Once you have gently smoothed the knit onto the wax model, lay it carefully into the Pammed mold.
The craft stick does not make the wax stronger.
You will need multiple molds of one sculpt.
Once you have made your sculpt, you need at least two duplicates, plus your master.
Some people like to sculpt in plastalina, but we use low fire white clay, without grog.
I don’t know what what effect any residue from the plastalina will have on the wax part of this process, but I am getting ahead of myself.
Be sure to label the molds and the master that made them. In the negative all the faces look alike, but if you get different faces confused, it will have a bad effect on the doll.
Izannah Walker used a press mold in making her dolls. The cloth was pressed into a mold, then taken out and covered with batting and another layer of cloth, and then pressed again. This information comes from the text of her U.S. patent, taken out in 1873.
I found out very very quickly that I couldn’t take the clay head, which we already had, cover it with a layer of cloth, and then put it back into the mold. I won’t fit!
An article in Cloth Doll Magazine suggest making the positive and negative parts of the mold from different materials, one of which would shrink more, and thus allow room for the head and the cloth.
That is one possibility, but this is what I did:
I had a total of seven molds, all alike. I put one away, for the master, and left two in reserve.
I took two complete molds to the kitchen of the big house, and the other two went to the kitchen of the little house.
In the big house, the Victorian, I melted household wax in a double boiler. Be careful! Wax is not only really hot, but it is flamable.
I put the molds in the kitchen sink, and filled the sink with water.
I know that sounds terrible, but soak in water is what the molds must do. They are ready when they stop releasing air bubbles.
Meanwhile, assemble some clamps (hardware store) and some kind of dam that you can fit across the bottom of the mold.
You are pouring each half of the mold separately. For this pouring, you are going to stop the wax about one half inch from the edge of the mold.
Pour the wax on the neck of the mold. The clamps are holding the piece of wood, to keep the wax from running out.
Wait for the wax to harden. It takes several hours. Take these out of the mold, and set them aside. I call these the “short halves.”
Resoak the molds. It will not take as long this time.
Meanwhile take enough aluminum foil to fold in half, and fit across the face of the mold.
Melt some more wax. Household wax is available at a large supermarket. Get several boxes.
This time, you will be putting the mold halves together, with the foil in between, right down the middle.
You must be absolutely certain that the two halves match exactly. This is another reason you labeled your molds carefully, so you do not mix them.
Take some more aluminum foil and make a little tray under the mold, incase you have not aligned the mold adequately.
Use the clamps to hold the mold halves together. Clamp firmly. You should have two clamps for each mold.
Now, pour the mold with hot wax. Go slowly at first, and watch to see that you do not have any leaks.
When you are finished with this process, you should have eight pieces of wax, four for each mold.
Two of them, for each mold, with be “short halves” and the other two, having been divided only by the sheet of foil, will be the whole size of the head, only cut in half.
OK, I think I can make this work.
So for years we played around with Izannah, even making some kind of goofy ones.
I know...I was playing, OK?
So years passed, grandkids and furkids get born, tomatoes get raised, husbands have major surgery, and then one day, earlier this year (2010), I was cleaning (!!) and I found this doll. The head is pressed cloth, and it is dated and signed by Ralph, 2008.
I couldn’t remember how we had done it. And why did we make only one? I dug around some more, and found the mold….making that first head had destroyed that mold! So we searched some more, and found the masters.
This was our first serious attempt at an Izannah. The clay head is from the mold, but the doll has a pressed cloth face, and the two halves are stitched together. This doll has molded ears, and a bun on the top of her head.
So now the game is on. This time, I resolved to make a diary as I worked. The first date is around September 1, 2010.
We first collected all the pictures and information we could about the Walker dolls. Fascinating!
We sent for the old magazines, we dug out the entire collection of old doll books, we acquired the UFDC study disk for Izannah, sent for more books, and stumbled on to a most excellant website, The Izannah Walker Chronicles, run by Dixie Redmond.
Together, Ralph and I studied all the Izannah faces we could find, and then he modified our first mold to reflect those changes.
He made new molds, and multiples of those molds. I could hardly wait until they were dry!
By pouring plaster into the clay that has set up in the mold, you create a stable surface on which you can resculpt and make changes.
Finally, I had molds to work from, and this is what happened next.
I hope I can do this – I’ts been a long time since I used this webpage.
Our Izannah Journey started in about 1995. A new copy of a doll magazine had arrived, and it had an article about the Walker dolls, with some really good pictures.
I took the magazine into Ralph, who was sculpting in his studio, and asked, “Can you make something like this?
And so he did!
Our first dolls were clay, with cloth bodies. People liked them, and they were simple and fun to make.
These are painted clay heads, circa 1995
I’m still learning this new web page.
Some pictures of Santa Gourds that I have sold on ebay are listed, in the pages. These are hard shell gourds that we have grown on the farm, and that I decorate, using a wood burner and oil paints, and a lot of imagination.
I will be doing a “how to” process of a really huge, magnificent gourd I found yesterday. It is to be “The Queen of Hearts.” I will post the raw gourd, the steps I take to decorate her, and then indicate when she is available on ebay/ More later!
A family farm is traditionally diversified.
One never puts all one’s eggs in one basket.
Nothing on this list is new, or hasn’t been done recently. In fact, reading it over, there are a few things I’ve left off, but I won’t go back and change the list just yet.
Education has always been our primary goal, so as I work through these pages, I will be listing articles that show how we do what we do.
Bio-Intesive gardening, rabbit cages and nest boxes, chicken tractors and mini houses, woodburning of gourds, a solar water pump, cooking on a wood burning stove…the list goes on.
As folks react to our current economy and culture, more and more people are going to wish they were back on the land. We saw this in the late 70’s, and we are seeing it again.
This time, we are in a position to teach folks what to do with their land, once they get there.
Been there, done that, got the blisters!
