On Imagination Snowballs:

I have a project that has been a love/hate relationship for me. It has snowballed and has been going on for about ten years now. I’ll start at the beginning.

One day I was looking for something new to do and I had all these scraps of fabric around. I wasn’t in the mood to make another quilt so I decided to make myself a Victorian fashion doll.

I remade a pattern for a small doll I had from an old magazine article I had cut out years before. I made my doll 15 inches tall. Larger then the seven inch doll in the magazine. I added more detail and embroidered her face. I made her hair out of some rusty orange dyed fleece. She was cotton and wool, soft and comforting.

I made her some under things, a bustle and petty coat, a shirtwaist and skirt, shoes and a hat. She sat on my dresser. Then was moved to the children’s classics book shelf. I made her some more clothing. And well along came Christmas and I made her a little mantle to hang her stocking on and got her a tiny tree. She was moved to the coffee table.

After a friend was added came a house. And for the size to be right for a 15 inch doll the house with three floors needed to be 6 feet high with wheels to move it around. By this time I had stories about her and her friends in my head. More dolls and another house for them.

Like I said in an earlier blog I have finished the story books to go with the dolls and their houses. And I am onto the phase of making the rest of the stuff needed to take the pictures for the illustrations in these books. I have a miniature world taking up a third of my bedroom and more.

Eight dolls, two houses, a garden, furniture, stuff and clothes. (Hundreds of pieces of clothing alone.) All waiting for me to get the job done. And I procrastinate. Why? Because I love them and when they are all done and the books are together. Out they go.

I have no storage space or room for them any more. I need to be able to live in my own home without tripping over doll stuff everywhere. And since we are not building a room onto the house for them. They need to go. And I will miss them terribly when they do. They have been a daily part of my world for a long time.

Yes, I know that it will be months before I’m done with what still needs to be finished for the book. But the more I get done the closer to the end it comes. So the work has slowed down to a crawl and Mountain Man asks yet again, ‘When is this stuff getting out of here?’ For him the snowball is melting on the floor.

I know that all together it is taking up the space in my house of a small room by itself. And I need the space for other things. But it’s my snowball project and I want to keep it all. What should I do?