Who is Antonia? And why am I purling her?

Friday, March 7, 2008

Bears eight and nine are taking shape.

My blog received its name from my last project, a journal about a group of dolls I gave away Christmas 2007. I had named them alphabetically but when I was done I decided to let the children name them. Anyway, Antonia was the first name I had picked from a book on baby names. Every time I bought another doll I named it, entered the name in my journal, noted the date of my purchase. Antonia and her friends didn't make it to the 100 mark, even though I worked on them for a couple of years. I had collected around sixty second-hand dolls, had cleaned them, given them haircuts, dressed around 40 of them and then gave up on the last 20 because some of them had really bad hair days. And others turned out to be less sturdy than I had hoped.

Before that there was Easter Island, a collection of around 80 hand-sewn and dressed bunnies of all sizes. I exhibited them at the County Fair in a Christmas scene with a tree and toys and presents and all sorts of other handmade items. Eventually I gave the whole group to a Family Homeless Shelter. I wrote several stories about Easter Island for my writing group. My favorite of all the bunnies was Alfie. And, as I just realized, his name also starts with the letter A. Easter Island didn't make it to 100 inhabitants either.

Because this is my third try to make 100 of something I kept the old project name alive. Maybe that will bring me good luck; at the very least it will be an incentive to make it this time.

Tonight I am going to knit bear number ten and if I stay up long enough, finish eight and nine. This isn't bad for the first two weeks but, of course, I won't be able to keep this pace up. There are other projects to be finished, weeds to be pulled, letters to write, bills to pay, vacuuming to be done, laundry to be washed, dust to be chased away, stories to be written, pictures to be taken, telephone calls to be made, and a bunch of other things to be attended to.