The Doll That Came From a Dream

My Dollmaking Story

The spirit doll is an ancient being, familiar and beloved to many cultures around the world. Making a spirit doll is engaging in the art of healing and enchantment – to weave life and love into a creation by making something solely by hand with materials from nature.

By engaging in these ancestral crafts we weave a bridge back to our own great grandmothers who I believe send blessings to us and to the doll herself before she travels on to do her work with those who need her. I am passionate about embracing and honouring these folk magic handcrafts of our lineages that have been forgotten or worse still, been misunderstood. 

I believe my great grandmothers and spirit helpers brought this craft back to me when I decided to leave the city and move to the forest.

For over 30 years I had been reading the Tarot for others and this work progressed into journeying circles and past life regression. In my city practice, I kept seeing people receive the most beautiful visions of their spirit path during journeying sessions but I saw that they needed to have something tangible and real, something physical to hold to after their journeys to remind them of how powerful and magical they truly are. I knew a physical talisman was needed, especially something to hold onto through times of loss and fear.

The spirit doll actually came to me in a dream 13 years before I began to creating them.

In the dream I was walking on a road in a deep green forest and in my arms was a doll that looked like a wizard. Down the road I came to a village where a fair-haired woman stood in the doorway of her shop and was so excited to see the doll. She asked me if she could have this doll and even though I loved it, I knew that she needed it. We made an exchange and the wizard left my hands and went to live with her.

When I woke up I knew the dream was significant. Even though I had never made a doll, I could feel this dream was important. 13 years later, I was sitting up late one night with my husband Tony, and he asked me if we could live anywhere else where would it be? I instantly remembered a trip we’d made to Sherbrooke Forest where the soil was so fertile, the ferns grew as big as houses. The next day we were told that the house we were living in was being sold and we had 2 weeks to find a new home!

But finding a new home in the forest wasn’t as easy as I’d first thought. I wanted to live deep in the trees but everything available was on the fringe and time was running out. It was then that I noticed a giveaway for a tiny needlefelted doll called a ‘dream doll’. Even though I rarely entered competitions, I sent in my name and low and behold, I was chosen as the doll’s winner.

When doll was so small that I could fit her inside my tarot box with my deck. My daily practice was to wake up, write down my dreams and then pull a tarot card to give me an anchor or thread for the day ahead. Within days I began to smile every time I opened the box and saw the little dream doll. I was amazed at how quickly I began to feel genuine affection and connection to her. I whispered to her : please help us find a home in the forest. Within a week, it had worked, and we moved into our new home.

A few months later I met Nicole Ahava, the maker of the doll and asked her if she would teach me. After 2 hours I was completely obsessed.

Within days, I was creating dolls non-stop. It was as if my hands remembered this craft so well. I began to feel my spirit helpers guiding me and teaching me more about fleece & fibre, how to include plants that assisted with healing and where to find them in the forest.

As the time went on and I settled into my new forest home, I was creating a doll every day.

And I began to notice a new theme turning up in my work with the spirit doll. Not only was I focussing on the person who I was creating for, I began to become aware of the stories of forgotten women and children in history and environments that were carrying the memory of traumatic events that took place there. I began to dream about these events and started to create dolls both for the living and the dead.

The strongest stories for me were of the women and children incarcerated within the Magdalene Laundries and I began by creating and leaving a doll at the old site of the laundry near my home in Melbourne, Australia to be a comfort for the spirits who may still be feeling pain there.

Ever since my early 20s, I have made pilgrimages. The most significant being a pilgrimage to Madonna del Arco in Naples with my friend, mentor and most magical inspiration in my life, Australian artist, Vali Myers.

In 2016 I began a series of pilgrimages led by the spirit doll that took me to Scotland & Cornwall. I travelled to Ireland and left dolls for the women of the Magdalene Laundry in Dublin. I then met with survivors and created dolls for the living too. I felt compelled to create and leave dolls at the sites of persecution of women as healers and witches in Scotland and to gift dolls to a pauper's graveyard in London known as a the Cross Bones Graveyard.

These doll pilgrimages to remember the lost are ongoing today…

The balance of dolls for the living and the dead seems to be the way that I give back for my spiritual inheritance. Another way is to leave dolls in nature, in the forest - sometimes as gifts to the trees and sometimes with a note to let people know that if they find this doll she is theirs - she is a free gift to them.

You see something very magical happens for the doll maker. In the act of creating a spirit doll for another, we can't help but travel down that rabbit-hole like Alice in Wonderland - we cannot help but dive into the depths of our own heart.

I believe that this is an important process in making spirit dolls, we also get to 'make' and heal ourselves.

A kind of ‘collective shadow work'.

You cannot help but go inward with hand made work, there are long long hours and much repetitive movement. Like our grandmothers many moons ago caught up in the repetition of a needle going into thread, or a spinning wheel forever turning, we begin to enter a kind of dreaming-awake state.

In the act of making slowly and by hand, you begin to step into a liminal space between time and hear the voice of your own spirit – the dreamer within the dream. 

The spirit doll can be a mirror or a bridge to a powerful part of yourself that you might not be able to express. They are a friend and the more time you spend with this friend the more you love them. Perhaps you begin to tell the doll secrets that you hold in your heart and cannot share with others.

The doll lives with you daily - through good times and bad - the doll is always accepting. And then a funny thing happens, you begin to feel the living spirit in this doll and how much love it has for you. You then recognise this love as part of your own spirit and that love for the doll begins to flow back from her to you. You see that you are also a magical, beautiful and creative being.

You begin to heal yourself.

In 2019, my father passed away and I travelled to lutruwita / Tasmania to be with him in his last days. It was while I was there that I knew that this would be my new home.

We moved into a 120 year old cottage by the sea and I began to have dreams of teaching people to make dolls. It was time to pass on all of the teachings of the spirit doll I’d learnt in my 8 years of hermitude living and dollmaking in the forest and I created the Sacred Familiar Online Spirit Doll Course.

It’s been an absolute joy to share dollmaking classes with so many magical and creative people from lands and lineages from around the world over the years.

As an avid maker of physical pilgrimages, I was guided to create a course that could be journeyed through like an etheric spirit doll pilgrimage.

I’m so glad you’re here and that the doll has connected us. My journey into the mysteries of the spirit doll has transformed my life and connected me back to nature and to so many magical folk.

I believe our spirits remember the beloved bond with the familiar and I look forward to sharing this special doll magic with you.

See you on the pilgrimage path, Julia