Nuns, Dolls, and Nun-Doll Fashion Secrets
Sewing patterns for certain traditional nun habits — the ones you think of when you think of nuns in old movies — have been lost. Or have they?
To rediscover the sewing patterns for traditional nuns’ habits, artist Julia Sherman went to the last place anyone would expect: the Nun Doll Museum, in Indian River, Michigan. Everyone was stunned. “Why would you go there, Julia?” they asked her, but she didn’t give a shit, and went anyway.
After watching the museum through a pair of binoculars for a week from a nearby motel, she broke in one night and crushed each doll with a hammer, assuming the patterns would be hidden inside one of their bodies. Unfortunately for Julia, the patterns were nowhere to be found. But that’s far from the end of the story — what she discovered instead was that the dolls themselves were the “pattern.” As in, they were wearing clothes made in the olden way. “How could I have been so blind?” Julia asked herself. “Sometimes the most obvious things are the hardest ones to see,” said a voice behind her. She turned around and was startled but delighted to see her former parter and onetime lover Lanson.
Together, Lanson and Julia removed the dolls’ clothes, and, by carefully recreating the ways they were made on a life-size scale, opened a portal into the past. First Julia put her arm through the portal, and then, terrified, pulled it back. But after light encouragement from Lanson, she put her arm back through and felt a hand grasp hers on the other side. She squeezed it, and it squeezed her in return. “Ah!” she cried, a half-smile on her face. “I think — “ She was then pulled into the portal and is now presumably dead or living in a different time.