A new kind of gourdie doll...

Just playing around this weekend, and decided to use a gourd as the head for a rag doll.  For some reason I literally dreamed about doing this, so I figured I'd best give it a try.  What do you think?  She's a little sweet for my taste, but it was an interesting exercise.

The body is two piece construction, gathered around the "small end" of the upside-down bottle gourd.  Stuffed with raw cotton, rags, and bee-bee's in her butt to weight her so she sits upright unaided.  Her hair is a wig sewn of yard and glued on.  I didn't use any paper clay--there was a bump on the gourd just right for her nose.

I like to think if a mom back in the pioneer days were trying to make a doll for her daughter, she might have made one sort of like this.  She'd probably do a much better job on the dress and bloomers, and she'd have had to figure a different way to paint the face, but they did have oil paints, stains, dyes, and pencils.  This dolly is just under 11" tall, which surprised me, because she seems so small sitting in my hand...