Pretty appalling …

Every Thursday I spend a day at The Jelly Reading.  It is a good place to make my stop motion animated films.  It isn’t perfect because I need to catch a bus and take my equipment for each visit fortunately, I am allowed a little storage space for the stage and structural equipment. During the week before my attendance, I write the story and prepare the dolls and props accordingly.  I have over a hundred dressed dolls, several boxes of props and at least 20 backdrops and these are added too frequently! While all are packed away carefully, I have no idea which doll, backdrop or prop is in which box. There is a true saying that ‘there is none so badly shod as a shoe menders son.’

I was a rare books cataloguer in a university library for 20 years and able to place the books in Dewy decimal order so each one was findable among 100,000s items, and have allowed my dolls to become ‘unfindable’ this is an appalling state of affairs.

So, from today I am going to attempt to unravel a few notes written on the proverbial fag packet and see if I can locate my dolls as required instead of scabbling in boxes on a Thursday morning. 

I took these dolls this week and it would seem that the doll in the yellow silk dress, dyed with onion skins and alum is Box 3 Doll 1, the doll in the natural nettle knitted dress with mother of pearl buttons is Box 3 Doll 2, the doll with the bottle green knitted dress is Box 3 Doll 3.

I made 2 stop motion animated films that day, one can be seen on Instagram @coathangerdolls and the other on my YouTube channel Helen Westhrop.