Crafty Thursday: Three Fairy Tales and a Saint with her Star Boy

It's evening as I write this, and I need to prepare for a storytelling gig tomorrow at the Children's Museum. Saturday I have a gig at Ravenna Third Place Books, and then next weekend, I have two birthday party gigs. I'm glad that the storytelling business is picking up again. Even with the economy the way it is, it's unpredictable. You may wonder how I have time to sew! Hint: it's the only work I successfully do while taking care of my daughter at the same time. She provides lots of opinions, and sometimes even gets the urge to try a little stitching. When that happens, I drop everything and work with her on simply getting used to pulling needle and thread in and out of the cloth.

I've started making more dolls based on folk and fairy tales. Currently in the shop is a Briar Rose/Sleeping Beauty storytelling set that features Briar Rose as both a 15 year old and a baby:




About 10 minutes before I started this post, I listed Vasilissa's Doll:




If you are unfamiliar with the Russian fairytale of Vasilissa the Brave and her encounter with the terrifying Baba Yaga, please visit Sur La Lune to read the story. The little doll that Vasilissa's mother made for her before the mother's death is one of my two main inspirations for dollmaking. (The other is M.B. Goffstein's Goldie the Dollmaker.)

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time making a Snow White doll with a little felt box containing representations of the comb, the laces and the poisoned apple. The colors are based upon the dress Snow White wears when she flees through the forest in the Nancy Eckholm Burkert version. Lucia does not want this doll to go into the shop. She wants the doll for her own. I understand. (7/25 edit: She now has a Snow White doll made to her specifications, though she said, "The hair doesn't have much of a part." The doll is white and yellow with blue roses, pink wheat-ear stitching, and a pinch of dried lavender inside.)

Here is the Snow White doll with the felt box of storytelling props:



The Vasilissa and Snow White stories turn me inside out. It is one thing for the hero of a story to start out with parents who have died, but in both Vasilissa and Snow White, the reader gets to meet the mothers briefly and know of their love for their daughters before they die. Trina Schart Hyman's depiction of Snow White's mother in particular gets to me. In her face is so much expectation and longing for the baby she will never get to hold, and who will have such a hard life as a result of the mother's death. Fairy tales are often meant to be two-dimensional archetypes, but the details in these two stories are so rich with significance that I find the Disney version of the movie a little hard to take and hope that no one ever attempts a mainstream version of Vasilissa without consulting me first. (Ha!)

Let us end with light. While Santa Lucia Day is not until December 13, I plan to list this Santa Lucia doll with her accompanying Star Boy sometime in the next few days. (Edit: here is the listing.) May the person who goes looking for it actually find it. While the Swedish Santa Lucia is depicted as a blonde, the girls who dress as Santa Lucia for the procession have all kinds of hair colors. That's why my first Santa Lucia has brown hair:



If you are interested in looking at the listings of Snow White and Santa Lucia dolls when they become available, you are welcome to subscribe to the shop feed here.

P.S. Sometime in the past 24 hours, someone became the 100,000th visitor. Yay! I wish I'd had a screen-capture for that.

Poetry Friday: Snow White (2 poems)

Illustration by the late Trina Schart Hyman (Article linked especially for Cloudscome)

Snow White Turns 39, by Anne Sheldon (my grad school storytelling professor)

"I'm planning how to break a talking mirror..."

Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, by Anne Sexton

"Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes."

Today's Poetry Friday roundup is at The Simple and the Ordinary. Here is a link to the history of Poetry Friday, written by Susan Thomsen of Chicken Spaghetti.

Snow White Ramble

This Playmobil Special representation of the wicked queen in Grimms' Snow White fairy tale is currently not in production. On eBay, the "buy it now" price is $25.00 USD. I don't need the dolly, but I sure do wish I had clothes like hers. If Playmobil made a line of goth figures, I would be tempted. Very tempted.

Speaking of Snow White, I hate the Disney version.* Snow White needs the following items in order to work for me:

1)The wicked queen demands the huntsman to bring back the lung and liver, not the heart of Snow White. The lung and liver represent the life-essence and spirit of Snow White. The heart is smoochy-sentimental.

2)When Snow White finds the dwarfs' house in the woods, it's quite meticulous and clean. Snow White gets to live with the dwarfs as long as she makes sure it stays clean. Dwarves are industrious beings, not slobs living in basements.

3)The wicked queen in disguise visits Snow White three times in three different guises. This is important. Most of us make mistakes in judging the character of other people without it making headline news. However, Snow White making that mistake three times brings to light some uncomfortable recognition of ourselves. (Maybe you're wiser than I am, but know I've believed the words of liars.)

4)After biting the poisoned apple, Snow White wakes from her coma after the prince's huntsmen stumble upon a rock, thus dislodging the bit of apple in Snow White's throat. There is no wake-up kiss. That's another fairy tale.

5)In the end, the wicked queen has to put on red-hot iron slippers and dance until she falls down dead. She does not get chased over a cliff by disgruntled forest animals. Where's the satisfaction in the Disney ending? Violence in fairy tales is not gratuitous, but it is just. As Anne Sexton writes,

"Beauty is a simple passion,
but, oh my friends, in the end
you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes."

You can read Anne Sexton's poem about Snow White in its entirety here. For those of you who say that you don't read poetry ("sissy stuff that rhymes" as Nigel Molesworth would say), Sexton refers to Snow White as a "dumb bunny." Are you yet convinced?

*Disney's Sleeping Beauty, which veers way off from all the other known variants, remains one of my guilty pleasures. I'm not sure why I make allowances for "Sleeping Beauty" that I don't for "Snow White," but I suspect Tchaikovsky's music has something to do with it.