I don't really have any works-in-progress or finished stuff to show just now, but I think I will share photos of something I made a number of years ago that I never posted about here.

This is one of the little creatures that lives on my bedside table.

Years and years ago - it would have been perhaps 1975 or so - I read a book in school (it would have been first grade for me) about a girl who was part-fairy. She was (apparently) orphaned and was sent to live with her aunt. She had a sort of guardian or fairy governess in the form of a tiny dog named Gloria.

I remembered the book very fondly...I read it, as I said, during SSR ("Sustained Silent Reading") time in school. I forgot the title but remembered Gloria and the basic outline of the story.

And one haunting bit - which I remembered as the end of the story, but I guess was not. Annabel (the girl) had done something that displeased Gloria - perhaps she even denied her fairy nature (?) But at any rate, Gloria did something that struck me and kind of haunted me, because I think it was the first instance I experienced of the idea of self-sacrifice, at least written in a way that would make sense to a child. (Of course, I had heard the Easter - or rather, the Good Friday - account in church, but I think I was still too young at the time for it to make a big impression on me).

Anyway, Gloria, having decided that Annabel had no more need of her, sat down in the glass case of mechanical animals (Gloria's aunt collected small wind-up animals), adjusted her gold collar, and willed herself to become inanimate.

Thinking about that as a child made me profoundly sad. And angry at Annabel for her stupidity at hurting what was such an excellent and wonderful friend in that way.

(The book does, as it turn out, have a conventional happy ending. Though what I remembered was Gloria turning herself to stone for the sake of Annabel.)

Anyway. I don't think the book I had had pictures; I always imagined Gloria as a beagle-sort of dog, as that was the kind with which I had the most familiarity.

I forgot the title and the author (and apparently most of the story), but I still kept that image down through the years. And one day, in grad school, surfing bookseller sites I ran across Loganberry Books, where the owner posted information about books people remembered but could not find.

And I rediscovered the book!

It is - if you've clicked the link (or if you were a kid or had kids in the early 1970s and have a better memory for titles than I did) - No Flying in the House, which is apparently far from being an obscure book, is one remembered fondly by many kids (mostly girls, I'd guess) who were of the age to read it in the early 70s when it came out.

(This is also the book where supposedly the hallmark of being of fairy blood is the ability to kiss your elbow. I don't remember trying to kiss my elbow when I read the book but I suppose I did. I think it's a pretty safe test to use as I have never met a human who COULD kiss their elbow.)

So I went out in search of a copy of the book, armed with the title and the author. And almost immediately found a copy at Babbitt's Books, the wonderful used-book store in the town where I lived at the time.

This was a 1982 edition with illustrations by Wallace Tripp. And in it, Gloria is shown as being a terrier sort of dog - perhaps like a white Jack Russel.

And even though I was in my mid-to-late 20s when I re-found the book, I felt the inspiration to make my own little version of Gloria. (I had always wanted a tiny toy of her as a child, but never had quite the skill to make a good one. But as an adult I did:)



This is her side view. She's felt, with embroidered features, and a gold collar (that is an important part of the character).

I also added other details - tiny paw pads worked using a pigma pen



Gloria has "thread jointed" limbs (a technique I learned from making tiny teddy bears and that works pretty well on a toy that's really more for display than active play). So she can stand, sit, and lie down.

Even though it's not "canonical" to the book, at the time I was making some Christmas gifts for people out of a delicate leopard-print polar fleece, so I made a little puffy bed for Gloria out of the scraps.



You may have guessed from the perspective in the photos that Gloria is fairly small. One of the things I really wanted to do was to try to make her "actual size," that is, the size the character in the book would have been if she was "really real." So I think she's about 2 1/2" long. Here's a photograph for scale, with her standing against a standard mass-market sized paperback.



I love being able to do this kind of thing. I haven't done it in a long time but it's one of those funny skills I have - I can start with making a paper pattern of what I want, and then I just cut and adjust and change things up as I go to get what I want. The drawback to this is that everything I make this way is a one-off and I would never even have patterns I could give out or sell based on the creatures I make, nor could I make one just like it. But it's how I know how to do stuff - doing pattern drafting to have a "permanent" pattern is different from how I do things (and not quite as fun or as "loose").