Colleen Moody is a self-taught doll maker whose work is reflective a bygone era when clothing styles were thoughtful, detailed and mostly created by hand.
She has always led a creative life even as a child growing up in Northern California where she would always ask her mother for art materials. Then, she was often drawing and filling in coloring books. It wasn’t until she was a teenager when her creative spirit moved into fabrics and doll making.
Inspired by vintage images of girls in bonnets and boys in straw hats, Colleen began embroidering old time scenes of those children. She found it to be a relaxing past time. She remembers one very large embroidered scene that took her four years to complete!
Those early days of handwork soon led to primitive doll making. She was in a quilt store and happened to find a pattern for a soft, primitive doll. Excitedly, she bought the pattern and set to work. Her first born son was still an infant, and in between naps, she used her embroidery skills to stitch the faces of her primitive dolls and add interest to their clothing. Making the soft dolls look worn with age and well loved was her focus and friends and family started buying them. Soon she had a home art show, and her then business, A Seasonal Mood, came to life. It was named so because she created patterns that celebrated the seasons.
It wasn’t long before Colleen began participating in folk art and juried art shows. Her business expanded and for three years she not only made primitive dolls, she also created doll patterns, selling them at wholesale to quilt shops and directly online to customers. She met other artists at the shows and one woman in particular shared her love of primitives. So they teamed up, and while Colleen’s young son played, the two women created patterns together under the name 2 Best Friends. Although sweet, her pattern making days were short lived and her love of doll making superseded her desire to make patterns.
At the same time, she and her mother would often attend doll shows featuring antique Victorian dolls. Colleen loved the old dolls made with hard paper pulp heads and soft bodies. She remembered them being beautiful despite being dirty, missing a hand or having a broken foot. The history called to her as did the stories each one might tell. She wondered who was the little girl who loved the doll and carried it around? What had that doll seen over the years if it could talk. This curiosity inspired her to change the style of dolls she made and instead of focusing on primitives, she moved into making dolls with paper mache heads, soft sculpture bodies and handmade clothes. But the evolution of her work didn’t end there.
She also loved the Victorian clothing the dolls wore. Many of the Victorian dolls were dressed in elaborate old silks, cottons, and laces that were adorned with glass buttons or beads. So Colleen set out to re-create time-worn looking dolls with exquisite clothing that resembled the antique dolls of yesteryear. She was particularly taken with Victorian mourning clothing, and the fact that Queen Victoria had influenced society so much that widows were expected to wear black for two years after the death of their loved ones.
Finding beautiful antique and vintage textiles is as much a passion for Colleen as is doll making. The older the better, but faded colors get her really excited. She believes that shows the true age of a fabric. She scours antique stores, flea markets, online marketplaces and even travels overseas to find treasured textiles. Mourning clothes is a focus, but it is very hard to come by here in the US. She remembers a shop owner telling her that black lace was the holy grail of mourning attire. And though it is not very common here, she found it to be quite prevalent abroad, where she makes periodic shopping trips to find trims, laces, ladies dresses and fabric.
Her rule when finding old clothing though is that if it is a dress or a piece of clothing in good condition, she will not cut it up. It is added to her collection of women’s Victorian dresses, shoes, millinery flowers, bonnets, ribbons, buttons and trims, most of which are displayed in her Nashville, TN, studio for inspiration. If the antique item is torn or in disrepair, she gives it another life as part of one of her doll’s dresses.
She has a good number of reference books to lean on when designing the clothing for her dolls. Getting a specific Victorian look for a doll’s outfit is important. She notes that it is amazing how dressmakers back then would sometimes just use the fabric of the dress to create ruching and trims that looked so different than the fabric itself.
When starting a freeform doll, she will often make two or three at a time, starting with the basic form. She explains that typically, the fabric is the driving force behind the doll. Although she makes dolls for all seasons, the beautiful blacks of Victorian mourning clothes make Halloween a favorite theme. The unofficial holiday also holds dear to her as she recalls childhood memories of costume wearing, trick or treating and ghostly décor.
In addition to freeform dolls, you’ll find Colleen’s dolls incorporated into beautiful antique frames, cloches, old boxes or cabinets. These pieces call to her when she finds them and demand that they feature one of her dolls. You might also see some soldering in her work as she has taken many soldered jewelry classes and loves the process.
With more than 30 years of doll making experience and being in shows, Colleen has been featured on the cover of Art Doll Quarterly, Somerset Studio and has been in the pages of Prim’s, Marie, Live Artfully Magazine and Danville Weekly. For fours years, her work was selected to be in the Early American Life directory of Traditional American Crafts. She has been a licensed artist for ESC and teaches workshops across the country.
And though she has been making dolls for a long time, it never gets old. Every year is a new adventure and she is very excited to be a part of Bewitching Peddlers of Halloween. Her creativity has grown since she was a child, and though her first love is doll making, she still loves a good coloring book!