Do you miss your Mum? Fancy a chat with your sister?
Need a word of wisdom from your Grandma?
Has your favourite cousin gone off travelling
the big wide world without you?
Simply choose your favourite Universal Aunt,
and you’ll always have a companion at your side!
(Please note: advice given by Universal Aunts cannot
be guaranteed. Some of them are wiser than others.)
If you’ve been following me on Facebook or Instagram lately, you’ll have seen these little Ladies popping up all over the place.
I have a couple of BIG DOLLS wandering about in my head. (As you do.) They’ve been in there for a year or two, but I’m too intimidated to let them out. So, I needed to improve my doll-making skills, and what better way than by making some little ones? I started with the Lady above, just as an experiment really, using up scraps from my sewing room and trying to create a character.
I wasn’t sure who this Lady was, to begin with, so I started carrying her about with me, showing her to people, and waiting to see who she turned into. (Here she is, in my Fairysteps handbag, bringing a packet of chocolate biscuits to a friend.)
Over the next week or so, more Ladies started to appear, wearing different outfits, and keeping me company. (This Lady, as you can see, is doing a spot of shopping.)
It has been suggested that some of these Ladies are incarnations of various different parts of my personality over the years. I couldn’t possibly comment.
(I spent far too long deciding which books the Ladies should be looking at. So far, nobody seems to have noticed that the two Sensible Ladies are interested in the Women’s Land Army, while the Goth Lady glances sideways at Harness & Saddlery.)
As I was carrying a selection of small felt dolls around in my handbag (doesn’t everybody?), I found that I was really enjoying thinking of places where I could photograph them, and also feeling comforted by the quiet sense of companionship from having a tiny character who I could just glance at during a stressful day.
(A friend suggested that this very smartly-dressed Lady should be named Mrs Partridge. Because she’s in a pear tree. Get it?)
It was at this point that the Universal Aunts were born.
A small felt keepsake doll, just right for sitting on your bedside table, keeping you company at your desk, or tucking safely into your handbag. I think of them as a cross between those tiny little “worry dolls” and my niece’s beloved Bunny, who goes everywhere with her. We may think of ourselves as “too old” for bunnies and blankies and even dolls… but who couldn’t do with somebody friendly to confide in every once in a while?
They also reminded me of my honeymoon, where we took little knitted incarnations of ourselves (beautifully made by my Mum) and had great fun taking photographs of them on their holiday!
These first few Ladies aren’t for sale – they’re made from acrylic felt, with plastic eyes, and a lot of them have some distinctly experimental stitching involved! But now that the patterns are developing nicely, I’ve bought some wool felt and some glass beads, and I’ll be making a lot more Ladies of a much higher quality to pop into the Inexplicable Emporium.
(They’re going into the Emporium rather than the Eternal Magpie shop because I thought they might get a bit lost amongst the hats, and I wanted the Universal Aunts to have a little showcase all to themselves.)
I’m planning to go back through my Instagram posts and tag all of the Ladies with #universalaunts, in the hope that once they start making their way out into the world, I can encourage other people to do the same. Wouldn’t it be lovely to see what kinds of adventures the Aunts end up on? (Here, they’re admiring my small collection of ceramics by Sue Mundy.)
So, there you have it.
Universal Aunts.
I hope you like them!