Jeniland Omnibus #1

 Jeniland Omnibus #1

Knitted Acorns, Talking Dolls, and Vanessa Bell

Hyacinth and Flora. These girls are both Palitoy Talking Dolls! Hyacinth came with four little colored records that fit in her back. Flora says bunches of things and one of them is “Show me the flower, please.” So this is how these sisters got their floral names. They’re helping me with an audio project that I’ve been contemplating for three years now! I have gathered the materials, so it’s a matter of hunkering down and making it.

LISTEN NOW · 0:05

So far, I’ve learned that Flora (in the white dress) has a lot to say! One of my favorites, naturally, is “What song can you sing?” Click the play button to hear her.

If you’re reading this in your email inbox, you may see that the letter cuts off at the bottom. That’s because I’ve included lots of photos in this omnibus! So, if you’d like to see them all, please click the heart or the play button above to be whisked off to Jeniland.

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Hello friends,

I had this idea last Friday that I would take the whole weekend and sew a dress for Juliet a gorgeous French doll that my friend Jan gave to me. But when I woke up on Saturday, I was very tired. Not just tired, but incredibly sleepy.

I was sitting downstairs visiting with Hyacinth and Flora – two talking dolls who are helping me with a new musical project – and Stanley and Odile. I was sitting in a dining chair, so not a comfortable chair really, and I rested my head on Hyacinth’s plastic head and promptly fell asleep. Had I actually been lying down, I’m sure I would have slept for hours, but my head slipped and woke me up.

I decided to employ my philosophy that “Sometimes a nap is the way forward.” 

So, I slept for a few hours and felt much better. 

I am always pushing myself to do more and more things because as my friend the painter Vivienne Strauss once wrote to me in a letter, “I’ve come to the realization that I won’t be able to do everything I want to do before I die.” Sometimes, this idea gets the better of me and my body has developed a very insistent way of telling me that I won’t be making a doll’s dress on Saturday. Instead, I will fall asleep in a chair while holding a talking doll.

But before I fell asleep, I had two weeks of adventures and I feel really excited to show you these different things. 

So here they are:

Knitting

I knitted an acorn!¹

My acorn which is obviously based on a Fairyland acorn color-wise.

A Romper! How much do I love the fact that there’s a garment called a romper!?!²

I’d never knit such a multipart garment before. I feel so proud to be at this place with my knitting when only a few years ago I thought I would only ever be able to knit a scarf. If you want to read more about how my doll clothes and bear knitting helped me get over my fear of knitting instructions, I wrote an article about that for Modern Daily Knitting!

Doll & Bear Spa Patients all the way from Colorado!

Just before we made our way up north to Lancashire two weeks ago, I received a parcel from my good friend Roger in Colorado.³

Here are my new friends from Roger. Roger Dog on Stanley Bear’s lap, Florrie a handmade deer, Marcello the Bear, and Mirabelle Doll holding hands with Odile.

Mirabelle and Marcello enjoying their spa day. Mirabelle and her clothes had a bath. I unstuffed her body, so that I could wash her pink self. She had a shampoo and conditioning. Marcello was stuffed with a foam that had crumbled to dust. So, I removed all of that and he had six soaks to make sure he was all clean. Now they are in the re-fluffing process!

Art Exhibition: When two friends are obsessed with floating dresses

The Englishman and I took part in an art exhibition at the home gallery of our friend ceramicist Jan Huntley-Peace. ⁴

One of Jan's ceramic dresses and one of my doll dress cyanotypes. I love how our work has this resonance.

The Englishman presented his Toy America series as well as what I call his horizonless landscapes. I am a huge fan. We had a tremendous time seeing friends, drinking tea, and eating cakes and scones while gathering to celebrate the desire to make things with our very own hands.

The Englishman takes children’s lead figurines and enlarges them to huge proportions in his Toy America series.

Hollyhocks and Vanessa Bell

Hollyhocks have become my favorite flower after I started some from seeds I gathered at Berwick Church in Sussex. I’ve been growing them for five years now though I missed starting any this past spring. ⁵

One of my Vanessa Bell Lancashire hollyhocks.

Things I saw almost by accident

Two weeks ago, I had a chance to walk around a somewhat derelict Georgian house and I couldn’t resist taking photos of all of the wallpaper and curtains.

Wallpaper and a curtain from a Georgian house in Kendal, Cumbria.

I felt moved when I saw all of these decorative traces of past lives in paper and curtains left behind. There’s a story in these remnants which we’ll never know and which no one remains to tell. 

Do you hold your knitting needle in your armpit? More people do than you think!

This past week, Modern Daily Knitting released my latest article which begins with an anecdote about my sister-in-law showing me how to knit cables. When she came over to our house, she put her knitting needle in her arm pit and proceeded to instruct me! That took me on a journey filled with knitting sticks, sheaths, and belts as well as cones filled with porcupine quills. Seems like we’ve been letting all of those stray porcupine quills go to waste in contemporary knitting . . . If you want to hear about all of the ways people manage their needles, don’t miss reading the comments!

Knitting sticks I saw at the Dales Countryside Museum in Hawes, Yorkshire. This is one of the best museums you can find in all of England. I wrote another article about it here. But be forewarned, it will have you wanting to press your own cheese and stamp designs into your butter.

A song for the man who read the gas meter.

If you missed the Jeni & Billy song for Mr. Wilson of Paradise, Baltimore, one of my readers asked if I could make the song available to purchase. So, it’s now a single in my Bandcamp Shop.

Well, that’s the good news from me where dolls and bears are repaired, woolen acorns are born, flowers bloom, meter men get their own songs, and vestiges of the past are honored for the memories they hold. I wish I could do more to make all of the news better. I won’t give up.

Love and friendship from me,

Jeni and the bears and dolls with guitars and yarn

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Other places you can find me on the web:

Tip Jar at Paypal or Ko-Fi. Thank you for supporting the new song, dolly rescue, bear rehabilitation, and loom re-stringing society!

Substack Notes where I post pictures and thoughts plus excerpts from other writers whose work I’m enjoying.

My shop where you can buy real albums that you can hold in your hand. Albums for the USA and Canada ship from the USA. Albums for the UK and Europe ship from the UK. Everywhere else, please write to me first! What chaos, the tariffs!

My website. And my tour page with dates currently being added.

Instagram and Facebook where I post my adventures almost daily.

My articles for Modern Daily Knitting.

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Mabel and Juliet, Best Friends Forever! Juliet is finally getting some clothes . . .

1

I follow a lot of knitters, wool shops, designers, shepherds, and sheep on Instagram. This acorn and her woolly friends came across my screen and I realized that I needed to knit an acorn that minute. Stop everything and make an acorn. So, that’s what I did. I also knitted the pinecone which was completely fascinating in the way it was constructed. I seriously know how to make a picot bind-off now. I really should have used fuzzier wool for my pinecone because it’s a bit too smooth. If you’d like to knit some woodland things, here is the pattern I used. I have no affiliation with the designers, I just liked the look of their things. I found the pattern to be well written and I learned some new skills, too.

2

I collect vintage doll clothes knitting patterns and I’m pretty devoted to this one pamphlet by Penelope. I’d always wanted to make the dolly romper featured in it. So, on the way to Lancashire, I started it and finished about a week later while I was chatting with folks at our art exhibition! I LOVE it. I think it will belong to Juliet. I’ve just been looking in my button tins for the perfect tiny buttons to fasten the back.

3

When Jeni & Billy were touring, we played two house concerts in Westcliffe, Colorado, for Roger, his wife Marcy, their friends, and Roger’s radio colleagues. One of my great memories is that a very substantial Great Dane named Guinness came to the concerts and was an unusual and attentive audience member. Even though his head was at the exact height of the dining table, no snacks disappeared.

Roger had been keeping an eye on my doll and bear hospital. So, imagine my joy when I opened the package and found the doll that belonged to his mother and the bear that belonged to Marcy along with some other friends and lots of handmade doll clothes! Oh my heart! I’ve named the doll Mirabelle and the bear Marcello. They are both recovering from spa treatment and awaiting fresh fluff. Just today, all of the clothes Roger sent are in the dolly laundry. Thank you, Roger, for entrusting these friends to me! We are having very fine adventures.

4

We met Jan when we first got our house in Lancashire because she was showing her work at John Ruskin’s house Brantwood. She and I got to talking about reproduction wallpaper and have been friends ever since. Jan recently asked me if I could write about her work for an upcoming exhibition and here’s one of the things I said, “To enter her world is to visit a place where the material and the message are one and the same – clay has memory just as we do and Jan’s life’s work is to marry inert clay to the very alive human imprint in all that we gather and all that we leave behind us.”

5

Back in 2020, I brought the seeds all the way up north and the flowers seem to love it here. Every year, I look forward to seeing them bloom. I gathered the seeds because Vanessa Bell, one of my favorite painters, worked with Duncan Grant on murals at Berwick Church. So, every time these hollyhocks bloom, I think of her and feel buoyed. She and I share a birthday! Two years ago, the Englishman gave me her biography for my birthday and I highly recommend it. I don’t generally get on with biographies because a lot of times they feel like a laundry list of dates and places, but I love the one by Frances Spalding because she spends so much time talking about Bell’s shifting philosophies about art-making, particularly painting. Are we dealing with line, shape, color, patchwork, realism, impressions?

Thanks to The Gusset for inspiring the way I’ve organized my first Ominbus. Mostly pictures with some narration followed by footnote for those who want/have time to read a bit more. I LOVE reading about Sarah’s adventures in The Gusset.