An acquaintance of mine at the work went to a conference in Adelaide and brought back a pack of worry dolls. Those little dolls are probably made of tooth picks as structures and wrapped with knitting yarn. They are so tiny and cute that I couldn’t help falling love with them.

Then I was told about the idea behind these little dolls, which was even more impressive. It is actually a good way to teach kids how to deal with their everyday worries and stress. What it’s supposed to do is to tell the little dolls what you are worried about, then wrap the doll in a little blanket and put them under your pillow before the sleep. It’s expected by the time you wake up in the morning, the worries will be gone.

I love the concept very much, though I admit it’s a bit of superstitious and childish, or maybe just being self-deceptive. But I think it will work well on little kids. Children probably would buy it, just as they believe in Santa Claus. At least it’s much healthier than keeping the worries inside their minds.

That’s where I started to think about making my own worry dolls. I finally decided to replace the little yarn-wrapped dolls with some cute embroidery Russian dolls (pattern is here), then I designed a triangle felt piece to wrap around the doll as a blanket. Finally I fastened the dolls with some silver ribbon.

I made totally 5 dolls. They have different colours of beads sewn on the belly. The felt pieces come in 5 different colours too. It took me some time to do the embroidery but it’s actually fairly easy, except I still can’t get French Dot stitch right

I love what had turned out eventually, just as what I had imagined at the beginning. Now I am using different dolls for different days to try out this worry-release approach. I know I am too old to play this game, but given that worries often don’t go away with ageing, who has right to justify what is really appropriate for our age?