A day with a Bendi and Paperclay

I borrowed an old issue of Art Doll Quarterly from a classmate, and in it found the results of the Bendi doll challenge. I think this was the July 2005 issue, but I could be wrong (I've since returned the magazine). I'd never heard of or seen a "Bendi doll". But in this magazine were pages and pages of incredible dolls, using all sorts of media. All incredible, all different, and all originating from this strange Bendi doll.

If anyone other than me has no idea what a Bendi doll is, it's a muslin doll with wired limbs, stuffed, but very 2 dimensional. It has a short torso, absurdly long legs, 2 black seed beads posing as eyes and is poorly sewn together. They come in different lengths. The doll I purchased is 14 inches long.

So what to do with the doll? Well I really didn't know. Much of the time, I don't have a specific design in mind when starting a project. I often only have a vague idea that I'd like to convey, or maybe only a single word that I use for inspiration. In this case, all I knew upon starting was that the doll needed to have a more defined body! I took off it's head (easy since it was only stuck on with 3 loose stitches), opened it's neck and started giving its upper torso more stuffing to better define its chest. After closing the neck back up I then stitched two darts on either of the torso towards the breast area for further chest definition, and needle sculpted a simple waist and navel. Remember when I said that these dolls are poorly sewn together, well, with all the needle sculpting and stuffing, the seams of the doll started falling apart, so I had to resew them too. I stitche the head back on and then decided what to do with that little pancake face.

I had a pack of Creative Paperclay which is also a new product to me. It says on the pack that when wet it will stick to almost anything, so I assumed it would stick to fabric. I opened the pack and found a substance much like soft playdough. It's very easy to work with, holds its shape and also holds fine detail amazingly well. Not being a sculptor, I spent several hours with this stuff, smushing it, shaping it, getting to know it. Learning that it's a lot easier to use when it and your hands are damp. Finally, I held my breath, flattened a ball into a disk the size of the Bendi's head and made it a face. Surprisingly, I didn't do that bad a job. It wasn't a pretty face, but it was most certainly a face. I don't aim for hyper-realism in my work anyhow, so I was quite happy with the outcome. I knew at this point that my doll was about to become a witch, complete with black cauldron, broom and toad. All I had to do was sick this face to the front of the Bendi, like a mask.

Tried as might, the paperclay "mask" wouldn't stick. So, I did all I could think of at the time- hold the face to the front of the doll, and wet more clay all the way around the dolls head blending the seems. That posed 2 problems. First, the head was too heavy for the dolls neck and kept falling over. Easily solved by building up the neck with more paperclay. Second, the flat face mask I sculpted was now horribly unproportional with all the extra clay making a whole head. Tired and frustrated, I admitted defeat and went to bed.

I looked at the doll upon waking the next morning, and decided that it wasn't really as bad as I had concluded. It looks....like a goblin. Yes, I think I might have a goblin now. That's okay. Halloween is coming, right? I don't know where I'm going to take it from here. I'm going to live with it for a while and see what it has to say about its fate.