Porcelain pelmanism.....

The promised rain has duly arrived and I was right about this being a dithery day.

In order to avoid having to decide what to do in the workroom I've been engaged in some useful displacement activity, cleaning the kitchen and doing some more clearing out upstairs.

However since even I couldn't realistically spin that out all day I was eventually forced to do something useful work-wise.  I probably should have been casting, or working on the list of new kits in preparation, but I just couldn't summon up the enthusiasm for either of those equally worthy tasks.  So instead I tackled all the boxes of porcelain bodies and limbs with a view to either matching up complete dolls and toys, or ditching the odd parts.

Boxes of oddments are the bane of dollmaker's lives.  Well..... mine anyway.  The little doll's dolls I make are so small that often the stringing holes aren't quite big enough, either in the bodies or the limbs, or one of a pair of arms or legs gets broken and I'm left with odd limbs.

I know that I should throw all of these out straight away, but given that it may have taken several week's work to get them into their bisque-fired state, I am perhaps understandably reluctant to chuck them out.  I reason, (quite reasonably) that if the law of averages works properly, eventually I WILL end up with matched pairs.  In theory that's fine.  In practice I invariably end up with several dozen left legs, or right hands for each of the dolls I make.

So, today I pledged to be completely ruthless and after sorting through almost a dozen boxes of spare parts and bodies, I've cleared out ALL of the odd/mismatched limbs for an assortment of little toy dolls, and various tiny toy animals. 

This should be a monthly task, which would then take only an hour, as opposed to the many hours it's taken today.

Let this be a lesson to me..........