Interview by A Local Press

Here I am with just a few of the rag dolls 
that I used to instruct course work with at the 
Burlingame Parks and Recreation Center, California

A long, long time ago, in a time that seems like ancient history, I was interviewed by Sherry Posnack-Goodwin for the San Mateo County Times newspaper. The article appeared as a large spread in the local paper and it really helped the community parks and recreation center at Burlingame sell the course I was scheduled to teach there. Part of the difficulty administrators have in promoting classes is that there is often little time or money to actually advertise the class. In this case, the administrator believed that the class would be an excellent human interest story because of its’ cross-curriculum flavor. During this class, I introduced historic doll methods with a combination of storytelling and early American history. Young students in the class enrolled with a family “partner,” meaning a mother or grandmother, who would cooperate with the child and sew a topsy-turvy doll together. Each partner was to make one half of a doll and then connect the two ends together in order to create one completed version of the historical character. The class was a giant hit! I taught over forty people for this brief class that lasted four or six weeks, I can’t really recall exactly how long it lasted.

Above is just one of the many sample topsy-turvy 
dolls that I spoke about. This one is a historical 
prototype based on a drawing of an original 
found on a old southern plantation