In February of 1998 I attended the Jekyll Island Doll Seminar (JIDS) and took a class with Carole Doubek on fabric manipulation. Carole makes marvelous dragons, gargoyles and reptiles. Unfortunately for Carole, her luggage with all her class materials (and sadly many of her creations) was lost. So she had to think on her feet and design on the spot. I think her original plan was to make frogs but instead we made (to see a sample click on) TURTLES. Use your browser's back button to return to this page.

Now these are not the kind of dolls I make and although it was fun and I learned a lot, I doubted at the time I would ever use this particular bit of knowledge. So much for what I thought.

On Monday we left Georgia and drove straight through to New Hampshire, a trip of about 21 hours. Of course when you arrive home at 6 a.m. and are dead tired the phone rings off the hook. Once call was from someone needing an anniversary gift for his wife. They would be celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary in a few months and for 25 years they had collected turtles. He wanted something unique and special for her. "Could I make a pair of turtles dancing?" Could I?

Based on the knowledge gained in Carole's class, I drew up a much smaller version of what we had made in class. And whereas, Carole does a lot of detailing with dimensional paint, I used almost none. All the shell details are done with needle modeling and then painted and varnished using my normal methods. The turtles stand on an oval mirror (not shown) with the following inscription on the back:

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