So today, I unravelled yesterday’s head and am starting an amigurumi head, which I’ll make separately and then sew on to the existing body. The head will be out of proportion to the body—as amigurumi heads generally are, larger in relation to the body for a greater “cuteness” factor”—and that will take away the poppet aspect of the dolls.

But the funny thing is that as soon as I recognized the doll as a poppet, I started hugging it, snuggling into it. My poppet. There’s always a European-based witch somewhere saying “my poppet” like golem says “My Precious”!!

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this before, but I have major skin color issues with the Mother Bear Project. What I mean to say is, these will be toys of children in Africa, and many of the American women make light-skinned bears. Like the woman who sent me the welcome kit told me that her favorite fur color is the “caffe latte,” basically because it’s brown but it still shows up all the detail. And I’m all indignant, like caffe latte is the paper bag test color. And almost none of the kids that I see in the fotos are caffe latte. They’re mostly all espresso.

But maybe I’m anthropomorphizing too much. They’re bears, not dolls.

I remember that when I first tried to do the mother bear project, in… 2011? that I had made a bear with black yarn for fur. And it hadn’t turned out that well. and I experimented with giving it to Nopalito as a toy but was disturbed to see him dragging this black man around, and quickly took it away from him. It’s a bear. Not a person.

But then, I also believe that fiction writers will be held to account for all the people of color characters that they torture and kill off to advance the narrative of the white characters.

So yeah, I guess I hold on to things.

I think my original idea had been to make a bear for Baby Tony and then make another for the Mother Bear project, and there would be two kids across the world who had sibling bears.

But obviously there’s also the element of thinking of Baby Tony as “my” pagan baby in another country.

(In case you don’t know, Catholic schools used to always raise money for “pagan babies”—missionary efforts overseas— and we would “name” our “pagan babies” with certificates that we would post up in the classroom. At the time, of course, I thought that meant that somewhere else in the world a pagan baby was being baptised with the name that we chose. Now I realize that was just a symbol. That those names likely never left our classroom. Anyway, American Catholics who went to parochial school often have this shared memory of the “pagan babies.” Sigh. First world guilt.)