Felt Wee Folk: New Adventures: 120 Enchanting Dolls

By Salley Mavor

“A fabulous book! . . . If you enjoy tiny, detailed projects that allow for lots of creativity and personal handiwork, I cannot recommend this book enough!” —Feeling Stitchy

Salley Mavor’s book Felt Wee Folk inspired tens of thousands to handcraft dolls from simple materials. Now, she invites you to return to the wee world with Felt Wee Folk—New Adventures, starring 120 dolls to spark smiles and creativity. As requested by fans, this long-awaited follow-up shares more challenging projects. Explore fresh scenes and an array of new outfits, hairstyles, and accessories, with full-sized patterns. Make bendable dolls that resemble you, your family, or your favorite fairy-tale characters with wool felt, chenille stems, and decorative stitching. Display the figures in a dollhouse, atop a wedding cake, or in a holiday scene to be cherished year after year. From the pages of Mavor’s award-winning children’s books to your home, the enchanting wee folk dolls appeal to crafters of all ages and skill levels.

• More dolls, more scenes, and more outfits
• Use your stash—wool felt, chenille stems, and simple embellishments
• Delightful, challenging projects, as requested by fans
• Felt Wee Folk was a Foreword Reviews’ GOLD WINNER for Crafts & Hobbies

“While the original book included projects beyond Wee Folk dolls, the new volume focuses on the dolls themselves. Fairies and families, kings and knights, and even some not-too-scary pirates all grace the pages of the book, beckoning readers to at least admire, if not try to create, Wee Folk of their own.” —The Enterprise (Cape Cod)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781607058878

Salley Mavor

Salley Mavor rediscovered her childhood delight in sewing and creating miniature scenes while studying at RISD. “I found I could communicate ideas more clearly than with pencil or brush, that my hands would direct me in a compelling way.” Her innovative bas-relief sculptures appear in the award-winning Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes, as well as other picture books. She lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.   www.weefolkstudio.com Instagram: @salleymavor Facebook: Weefolkstudio

Book preview

THE AUTHOR’S STORY

Salley at Rhode Island School of Design, 1977

y favorite way of working is in mixed media. For as long as I can remember, I have felt that my pictures were plain and unfinished unless something real was glued, stapled, or sewn onto them. I have found a method of working that allows me to explore and play with a variety of supplies and techniques. Although I have no set formula, the common thread in my work is, well, thread. I embroider, wrap, and sew felt and found objects together, creating three-dimensional scenes in relief that are photographed and reproduced in picture books and on posters and cards.

Growing up in a home full of art, music, and dance contributed to my belief that creative expression is a fundamental part of life, defining who we are as individuals and as a society. When I was a little girl, my sister and I spent countless hours creating a miniature world with our toys and found objects. Scraps of cloth, old buttons, snaps, and eyehooks became clothes, accessories, and furnishings for our dolls. Our measure of excellence was the impeccable doll clothes sewn by our Southern great-aunts, Dell and Alma Salley.

We created a roofless, one-floor ranch house on an old oak table for Barbie and our troll dolls. I remember trying to make Barbie sit in a natural position, but all she could do was stick her legs out straight, pointing her pitiful little high-heeled feet upward. The trolls, in contrast, were stable and grounded in their homely squat bodies. The doll table was a major interest for many years, until the onset of adolescence, when our continued attraction to dolls became an embarrassing secret.

It was not until studying illustration at the Rhode Island School of Design that I started to sew and make dolls again. After struggling through a watercolor class, I came to understand that I would never be an illustrator in the traditional sense. I regarded my paintings and drawings not as finished pieces but as a starting point from which to launch an idea. The impulse to add textures and objects was so compelling that I found myself interested only in creating work that had a three-dimensional element. I was aware of a tactile connection to the creative process, much like the synergy of play. It was such a relief to find out that I could communicate my ideas in three dimensions and still be an illustrator. Encouraged by my teacher, Judy-Sue Goodwin-Sturges, I continued to experiment with doll-making and found objects, learning techniques and processes on my own. By my senior year, I was making dolls of all kinds—animals and people with movable limbs—and setting them up in scenes to be photographed.

Detail of Hansel and Gretel, 1978, part of my senior thesis

After graduation in 1978, I made and sold a line of stuffed fabric pins, designed sewing projects for women’s magazines, and worked on a series of homemaker dolls and their stuffed appliances.

Fabric pins, 1979

In an effort to have my work recognized more as art than as handiwork, I decided to adapt my technique to a relief format so that it could be presented in a frame. I explored ways of covering cardboard with fabric and formed people, animals, and buildings that were sewn onto a fabric background. My husband, Rob Goldsborough, made beautiful wooden shadow-box frames for the new work. I welcomed the added challenge of making backgrounds for the figures, keeping a three-dimensional quality to their magical, miniature world behind the glass.

Noah’s Ark, 28˝ × 30˝ × 1˝, 1985

Apple Orchard, 28˝ × 20˝ × 1˝, 1992

Motherhood saved me from fully escaping into the manageable and controlled fantasy world of my imagination. But I remained determined to find time to work on my art. I learned to be efficient with little windows of time. I experimented with fabric relief sculpture, dyeing fabric, wrapping wire, adding found objects, and constructing wooden parts for the scenes. My work was turning into miniature, shallow stage sets, with scenery, props, and characters telling a story. Soon I was ready to try illustrating a children’s book. Some editors found my work interesting but too idiosyncratic to fit with any story they had on file. Later, my friend Judy Richardson and I went to New York together, as writer and illustrator, and sold The Way Home to a publisher.

I was not prepared for the lengthy task of filling a 32-page book with pictures of my creations. For a year and a half, after my boys went to bed, I would sew the elephant characters and hand embroider blades of grass. When the book was published in 1991, Judy and I were as proud as new parents. This was the beginning of my career as an illustrator. In the years since, I have had the pleasure of working on several children’s books, including Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Illustration from Mary Had a Little Lamb, Orchard Books, 1995

Becoming involved in my children’s Waldorf school reinforced my belief in the value of creative and imaginative play in the classroom and in life. Our school’s parent handwork group introduced me to the wonderful wool felt and fleece that now are staple ingredients in my artwork.

Working with the group, I had to learn how to break up a technique into steps and explain methods in a way that was not overwhelming. Because I am self-taught in needlework and take an intuitive, experimental approach to my work, it is a challenge to dissect the creative process into logical parts. I observed that many people like to have an idea of what a project will end up looking like, have all of the materials at hand, and have clear directions to follow. With this in mind, I decided to put together an acorn-capped fairy doll kit and launched a business named Wee Folk Studio. Encouraged by the popularity of the kits, I decided an instructional book would be the next step, and I wrote Felt Wee Folk: Enchanting Projects, which came out in 2003.

In between book projects, I make artwork for myself. Self Portrait: A Personal History of Fashion is a spiral time line of my life, from birth to age 52, with a doll representing each year. Each doll is dressed in an outfit I would have worn that year, and my hair shows gradual graying as time goes by.

In recent years, I have embraced traditional nursery rhymes, finding the subjects and settings to be charming and timeless. I first illustrated a group of four board books: Wee Willie Winkie; Hey, Diddle, Diddle!; Jack and Jill; and Mary Had a Little Lamb. After this, I was ready to tackle a comprehensive volume of nursery rhymes. I put together a collection of my favorite verses and songs, which became Pocketful of Posies: A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes.

Detail of Self Portrait: A Personal History of Fashion, 2007

The rhymes presented an opportunity to bring to life specific characters and their distinctive place in the world. Because each page illustrated a different nursery rhyme, I was free to add one-of-a-kind items from

Reviews for Felt Wee Folk

[Efrat Maor · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Similar cute characters to the previous book.
A modern classic. Perfect for Waldrof Education (or Steiner Education) decor and for qnyone loving fairies and fairytales.