I have finished dressing the second lady. This doll really has everything.
Drawers and shoes (the shoes are removable, the drawers are not.)
She has a shift which is removable and has a drawstring neck like the real sixteenth century shifts. As you can see from portraits of Henrician Tudor ladies and eventually Elizabethans, the material of the shift at the exposed neckline became gradually finer. Later linens are almost diaphanous; textile technology having reached a peak not seen since ancient Egyptians were so clever at weaving fibres that they were able to utilize plants to make paper.
The leather corset is laced under the bust. As you will know if you wear a modern bra, the support depends on the fitting of the band which goes round the torso under the bust. The sixteenth century corset may not look very supportive, relying as it does, on the linen shift to encase and cradle the bust, but look what happens round the back.
That is a lot of support and warmth. I have seen actual sixteenth century leather corsets in museums, the costume museum in Bath has good examples. They are business-like garments. The gathered neckline of the shift means the new mother could feed her baby without removing her corset and the garment is adjustable simply by tightening or loosening the lacing. Needless to say, surviving examples show major signs of sweat, I haven’t seen one leather corset anywhere without dreadful stains.
It must have been a relief to the nostrils to get a substantial embroidered skirt over the top. The skirt, like everything else, is removable, it has a drawstring tied in a bow round the back, and look, you can neatly push your shift and corset strings down your skirt front. I wonder if this was the origin of the pocket? Queen Elizabeth’s inventories mention pockets, although they did not come into general use until the seventeenth century for women. They were what I used to call a Dorothy bag, a small pouch with a drawstring top. These were worn under the skirt with the strings looped through a belt or the skirt drawstring. Later, slits in the skirt that enabled the pocket to be reached without getting undressed, turned into what we would recognise as a pocket today.
Dressing these ladies with all their clothing tied on with strings, made me realise the origin of another popular doll, the pedlar doll. Pedlars and packmen have been depicted since the twelfth century selling various wares including early forms of literature, and ribbons. In rural areas they must have been essential in the middle ages. If your ribbon snapped or just shredded under the strain of general living you would have had to tie your clothes on with a cuttingly thin spun flax string or a bit of wool. How grateful you must have been to see a pedlar hove into view with a nice tray of broad ribbons. The earliest pedlar dolls date from the sixteenth century, the dolls proving testament to the history. Pedlar dolls with enticing trays full of miniature wares continued to be popular until the nineteenth century, when the industrial revolution brought much of the population into towns where there was work and haberdashery shops.
Here is the lady with the overgown, her removable hood and her diamond earrings. This doll, as you may have noticed, also has green glass eyes and eyelashes. This thirteen joint porcelain doll is the equivalent of about five foot four.
I was reasonably happy with her and nearly skipped off downstairs for a cup of tea leaving her standing on her own.
Fortunately I realised what I had done and took a photo and then I even went back and laid her down, flat and safe.
Over the last thirty three years I have discovered that the main aim of any doll with separate porcelain fingers is to throw itself off tables, face down on to hard surfaces and succumb to as much gravity as possible, breaking fingers on the way. Dolls should not be left unsupervised anywhere, not in houses, not on tables, nowhere.
Tomorrow if the sun comes out I will do some mother, daughter, doll photography and then I will make some doll stands.
After that I should be getting on with the doll’s dolls in history but there is a man lying in a box next to my work table who needs to be a rock star, every time I look at him, he smiles.
If I had behaved like some doll makers I have interviewed, or, even most of them, I’d have worked out how to do it, bought a ton of commercial moulds and a book of dress patterns, all of which exist, and set up a production line, I might even have charged an amount of money that had something to do with the amount of work.
However, I have belatedly realised that what I do is art. No two dolls are the same, unless they are such as the prototypes for the Tudor doll’s doll. I am happy making little individual works of art and collectors are happy collecting them.
Today a regular reader knocked at the door, as it was raining the lockdown library wasn’t on the drive and she had a jigsaw to return. She went off very happily with a huge bag of books and I was happy because she declared herself happy.
That’s it really, isn’t it? If you can use your time to do things that make people happy, that’s a good use of time.
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Happily for you it is only two and a half weeks to Miniatura, all the details and the tickets are to be found here www.miniatura.co.uk
