TUTSI

this young lady with unruly curly hair turned 30 last year, and she definitely has some stories to tell. her name is Tutsi, i got her as a gift for my 5th birthday.
in my little family we always had a tradition of making gifts vs. buying them. may be because back in the soviet russia buying something you want was never an option, or may be because both of my parents have been always very crafty, or combination of both. my father is an antique restorer by profession, but in real life he is a real jack of all trades, from jewelry maker to house builder, and whatever he takes on as a task is always accomplished with precision and perfection. my mom, having an impeccable taste for fashion and design, was always very good with the sewing machine, as well as with knitting needles. as a kid, and up to this date, i always enjoyed their hand-made gifts, which were always incredibly thoughtful and made with so much love. Tutsi was one of them.
i clearly remember one of the summer evenings in our living room, my dad watching TV, my mom and i, on the sofa, flipping through a foreign magazine in an unknown language (it was German, and noone in my family could understand it, but again, in soviet russia you didn’t get to choose things, but you definitely felt lucky getting a hold of anything – and i mean, ANYTHING – foreign) with pictures of many beautiful things. there, on one of the pages, i saw a perfectly styled image of a doll – soft and cosy, made with fabric, hand-painted face with cute freckles, curly blond hair and the most adorable outfit. knowing my mom’s magic skills with sewing machine, i asked her if she could make me one like that. she studied the picture attentively and answered sadly that it would be simply impossible to find the materials to make this doll – in the “era of deficit” & cold war when even essential products and groceries were scarce, finding skin color jersey, as well as special fabric paints, and pre-made doll’s hair, was simply unimaginable. i remember feeling envious of these little kids in that mysterious country far far away who were smiling happily to me from the pages of this magazine. but one thing i didn’t know back then was that “impossible” was just a matter of time and hard work for my parents. just like someone said: “the difficult we do right away. the impossible takes a little longer”. that was, and still is, my parents’ spirit i was raised to.
on the eve of september 28, 1984, i was anxious to go to bed early so that i can wake up even earlier for my 5th birthday the next day. i didn’t know that my parents were also eager to put me to sleep as soon as possible because they still had a sleepless night ahead of them, finishing my hand-made gift. as a tradition, on every birthday i was waking up finding flowers & surprise present on my desk, close to my bed, sort of like a personal christmas. i went to bed obediently but tried to stay awake, waiting for them to peek into my room with flowers and that special something, but of course i dozed off before i even knew it, and woke up only with the morning light. and there she was – my Tutsi, sitting next to a beautiful bouquet of pink roses, matching the flowers with her cute onsie with cartoonish cat and scribblings in russian. she had unruly curly hair and cutest hand-painted freckles.
only later i learnt the story of how Tutsi was made. after that conversation we had, my mom went on a scavenger hunt looking for perfect jersey fabric, but the only kind she found was made in stark white. she thought a doll with stark white skin might have looked too creepy, so she decided to die the fabric to get a perfect skin tone. fabric dyes were as difficult to find as fabric itself (or anything else for that matter) so she turned to an old folk recipe for dyeing easter eggs – boiling it in a water with dry onion peel for long 4 hours. meanwhile, my father was looking for a recipe to make permanent fabric paints so he can draw the face features of the doll. he managed to find them through his fellow artist friends at the restoration shop he worked at. that night of my birthday he was busy painting the face while my mom was finishing Tutsi’s hair – she knitted sort of a hat using fashionable at that time loop technique, then she wet it and blow-dried it, and cut each loop so the threads turned loose and curly. it was not the real-looking doll’s hair from the magazine, but in fact it suited Tutsi even better.
i was so in love with Tutsi i was afraid to play with her, not to ruin the magic my parents did. she was always a centerpiece in my room, as she is now in my son’s nursery. Leo just reached her hight – 62cm, so i borrowed one of his outfits for her, to give her a more modern look. a girl in early 30s, she is as cute as she used to be before, with these adorable freckles and unruly hair made of wool threads.