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Last year, I took an online class with the excellent Morbid Anatomy which focussed on the history of the Anatomical Venus. Their site explains her best:

"Reclining on velvet cushions with Venetian glass eyes, strings of pearls, and golden tiaras crowning their real human hair, Anatomical Venuses were created in eighteenth-century Florence to teach the general public about the mysteries of the human body. The Venus also tacitly communicated the relationship between the human body and a divinely created cosmos; between art and science, nature and mankind."

The land & its spirits lie at the very heart of the Itinerant Bizarrium, both as a source of folkloric inspiration and as an ethical concern. This planet is all we have, and it crucial to all our futures that we respect and care for it.

Thus I try to make informed ethical choices in everything I do & create, beginning with fibres & textiles.

Do you ever look back across the years, wondering just what it was that shaped your tastes, your imagination, your very view of the world?  Whenever I do, my mind settles upon the childhood years I spent roaming the flat lands of East Anglia on my trusty bicycle.

As a small child, I lived with my former-milliner grandmother in an East Anglian village stalked by windmills, the forest on the horizon.  These were the days before computers, before cable television (let alone streaming services), with just two buses a week heading to the nearest market towns.  We made our own diversions, and when the icy winds of winter swept in across the North Sea that, for me, meant sitting before the fire, learning sewing skills.

One facet of my commitment to building a sustainable business concerns the hardware used to create my work.  After all, it is not only the obviously environmentally-impactful elements like fabrics that have consequences - everything we choose to buy has baggage, and I am trying to make myself a list of suppliers whose ethos aligns with mine. (Please note, none of the following are affiliates - this is an honest list of what I use and why)

Rumour has it that some folks are interested in how inspiration strikes and a collection develops...

In this case, I was intent upon creating a group of burlesque-inspired figures and had got as far as trawling Pinterest for pictures to form a mood-board when I began taking a correspodence course with the fabulous Johanna of The Pale Rook.  An early exercise was taking a sheet of tissue paper, subjecting it to whatever folds, twists and pinches came to mind and see what it suggested.....Every last one of my experiments looked like a Victorian lady :

To anyone who knows him now, Bombadil's performing life began in the most unlikely manner since he spent his boyhood years as a (somewhat reluctant, it must be said) choirboy.

His days of singing practice & surruptitious wine-drinking were brought to an abrupt end, however, one snowy Christmas Eve.  Whilst walking home from kirche still clad in his Sunday best lederhosen, young Bombadil fell prey to a press-gang & was bundled aboard a brig headed for Batavia, kept below decks for days until they were safely out of sight of European shores.

Well, what an interesting year this has turned out to be.... although by "interesting", I actually mean "unforeseeably crazy".  Maybe that's why "Alice" came to the fore?  Perhaps we have all fallen down a rabbithole...

Lewis Carroll was not the first to notice the craziness of hatters - apparently the phrase "mad as a hatter" was first used about one Robert Crab, an   eccentric Englishman who, in the 1650s, gave all his goods to the poor and lived on dock leaves and grass.

Following on from my last post, when I was beginning to assimilate what I learned from Johanna of The Pale Rook...

Epona was my first real success at combining textiles, embroidery, and a little bit of painting into something that felt authentically "Bizarrium".

Magda adds some wire-work to the mix; iron wire will continue to rust and add to her texture.

Lavernia came next, with lashings of antique lace and a whimsical tail.

Just this week, I made Arunas with his quilted wings and tail.

So, a couple of weeks ago I drove from Somerset to Glasgow to attend the first doll-making workshop given by Johanna Flanagan (she of the Pale Rook).  Not that I am an inveterate workshopper (this was only my second, the other being wirework which helped in the development of antlers and fairy wings), but I do believe this was rather special. I am certainly happy with what I learned...

Firstly, a stuffed doll flat-patterned on the spot, adorned with scraps of antique lace.