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Because of the pandemic, the club is not holding in-person meetings, so this month we are holding a virtual club meeting with members sharing their Black dolls in honor of Black History Month. The first is this wonderful one-of-a-kind creation by our talented member Elaine McNally (a pair of her beautiful Izannah Walker cloth creations have appeared earlier on this blog). This diminutive doll is 6.5 inches tall and carved from black walnut. Elaine thinks that the doll resembles Ruby Bridges as portrayed in the Norman Rockwell painting "The Problem We All Live With."
This type of little wooden doll is called a "Hitty type," inspired by the wooden doll heroine of Rachel Field's 1929 children's novel, Hitty, Her First Hundred Years. In the book, the eponymous Hitty (short for Mehitabel), a simple wooden doll carved by a peddler in the 1820s, narrates her adventures and travels over her century of existence. Hitty was based on a small antique wooden doll acquired by Field and the book's illustrator Dorothy Lathrop and the original Hitty now resides in the Stockbridge Library Association collection. The book's charming historical tale has inspired generations of doll artists to carve their own versions of Hitty.
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