Bye-bye Nursery Rhymes

Since I waved officially good-bye to the french dreams collection, when they were all gone, I feel inclined to do the same with these beauties. These two collections were the start of the year, and I slowly progressed with them. From now on, they will all debut at the same time, a bit stressing for me, but it will be nice to take photos of all of them at the same time.

I always do a bit of reading and research on my themes. They usually happen backwards, I read something interesting and then I work a collection into it. Sometimes though, it happens the other way around. For example, with "In the Garden", I found the fabrics and the entire collection jumped at me. Sometimes it's like that, and if this happens to you then you are very lucky like me, to have the time and the resources to be able to see something from your dreams come to life.

This is an excerpt from a most wonderful book, You Are Your Child's First Teacher, by Rahima Baldwin Dancy. In Chapter 8, Nourishing Your Child's Imagination, she talks about the Importance of Oral Language and Storytelling. She mentions Professor Barry Sanders' book A is for Ox, and says he "mentions lullabies and nursery rhymes, which are valuable for the rhythmical qualities of language in which they bathe the child. Some are built on tongue-twisters or riddles, delighting a child by their playful sounds and associations. Others introduce the child to the concepts, values, and traditions of our normal waking consciousness".

She then goes on to say that "While some nursery rhymes help the child make the transition into waking consciousness, others present a series of interesting but fantastic pictures, which have the quality of images we might encounter in dreams".  She also quotes Robert Carter, in The tao and Mother Goose, who takes a basically jungian approach to understanding nursery rhymes and concludes: "It has been pointed out that nursery rhymes constitute a mythology of infancy and early childhood; and that, like dreams, they offer an irrational sequence of images which have a "certain hidden coherence". It has been claimed that the rhymes may contain archetypal imagery drawn from the collective unconscious, and that they thereby serve the psychic needs of early childhood, just as fairy tales serve the needs of middle childhood, and myth serves in the culture where it thrives. But this is a very broad definition of the functions of nursery rhyme. And of the 200 or so rhymes we associate with Mother Goose, certainly not all can be said to contain profound and hidden messages for the unsconscious mind of the child. But we can accurately describe the rhymes as an initiatory body of literature for the very young".

I believe nursery rhymes have a deeper meaning and that wether the lullaby sounds or the images they provoke in children, they are there to support their inner development and help them grow and understand later in life higher concepts. I strongly believe the repetition aspect of them, and the simple tunes, are so appropriate for small children, who thrive in mastering them and delight in the comforting sounds they bring.

I hope you enjoyed these dolls, created after some popular and not so popular nursery rhymes. I still have a few wishing to come out, but they will have to wait until next year perhaps. We are moving on to other things in the creative realm, but we are happy to have accomplished such a nice set of dolls. I hope that wherever they are, they are making little ones (or not so little) giggle.