I already had a Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Hindu Barbie. So it was time to address Bhudism. I started with a box that I planned to spray paint orange having ask ChatGPT to draw me a Buddhist Barbie.
And the box I chose was actually too big and the paint job not good at all. Then Debby gave me a piece of wood with a square platform that seemed perfect. The orange was too pale so I sprayed it gold. I crocheted a mat using a very large 8mm hook and ecru jersey. Round the end I glued the struts of a fan, then parts of a flowery tree around them and edged it with a cut down sushi mat I found somewhere in the street.
I had three small lego planters for the three corners, a plinth I sprayed gold and put on a piece of desert rock on top for meditation purposes. I used this particular Barbie as she had legs that bent. Not quite the lotus position but not so far off. I used some kebab sticks I had sawn off for both ends to support the meditation flags in green, yellow, white, red and blue velvet sewn onto black rope.
I made her outfit out of brocade my Buddhist friends Maria and Christian had brought me from Japan. She had trousers that came up to her chest and a shawl with sleeves. I decided I could not face shaving her head so she is going to have to reach enlightenment without being a monk or bald!
The parts needed
A leg folding BarbieFan strutsCrocheted cushionFlowers from a decorative plantLego plant lilacLego plant (fly catcher) with gold plinth
Tova and I decided to go on a trip to Akko late June 2025. This time Talulah didn’t come to Akko and we stayed in a marvellous stone built ancient house within the old city. We ate at Uri Buri and Doniana and had a wonderful hammam trip to the Ghattas baths. It was a sud filled experience.
On the Friends of Jaffa WhatsApp group, Itamar who has opened up and new party shop near me was offering kits to make a butterfly and he was going to post them on social media. I popped along but it was all stuff I had and I had some ideas. I had a spare Barbie head and so that could go on. When speaking to Galina she reminded me about all the dead cockroaches I had collected. Ah ha. They could become the wings. I glued and them embroidered them in, used a black hair clip for the body, gave her earrings and antennae using puff paint with beads at the end. Hey Presto – not sure Itamar will put it on his instagram – it is rather creapy!
With 5 eggs
I had some very interesting feedback from my friend Christian that I have decided to include.
Did you feel any urges to kill and eat people lately? 😬
Maybe the butterfly in the upper right corner is the reality anchor though, and the disturbing rest is just expression of the unconscious. In Buddhism, if you dream about creepy insects, it is seen as a sign of purification – the difficult impressions are leaving the mind and will cause no difficulties in the future. In this context, the eggs could be more hopeful – the probability of good things emerging is increased after the purification. 👍
… And the cockroaches are her wings, allowing her to fly… Wow.
Anyhow, it looks like a very strong piece to me. I hope it doesn’t smell bad.
I showed this to a father of a patient and he said. The eggs were for life, the cockroaches for death and the female being is perfect as Barbie is perfect. Actually he said a lot more but I have a terrible short term memory!
Using artificial intelligence to change a renowned piece of art
I went to an amazing lecture about Hieronymus Bosch and his famous painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. As it is 500 years old, there have been many interpretations including recent ones using artificial intelligence. It is a triptych with heaven on the left, earth in the centre and hell on the right.
I copied this image into Chat GPT and asked it to redraw all the figures as Ken and Barbie. It came up with this
This felt a bit too blue and pink so I asked chat GPT to redraw it with all the colours of the rainbow! And it came up with a LGBT+ version with rainbows!
I wanted chat GPT to draw it with lots of colours but not as a rainbow. However the people looked rather modest in their outlook and rather dull. When I tried again this AI tool told me I had used up my free goes!
Freezing Barbie in ice and then melting her
I went to an exhibition in the Amiad gallery and it had two photos of flowers in resin. I thought I would reinterpret this with ice. I had to find the right sized receptacle and a Barbie that could fit inside.
This Barbie can fold up quite small – she can actually cross her legs so she is to become Buddhist Barbie soon! Here she is having been frozen in a round pyrex bowl and slowly defrosted.
I had the Barbie who was crocheted into a dress and was going to be made into Coffin Barbie – where her dress extends into a coffin. She is already with her bells as Victorians were often buried with bells in case they weren’t actually dead and woke up. They then could be heard underground. She could fit in a pyrex rectangular dish of Tova’s.
This to show the set up. The frozen dish with the Barbie sat on a radiator with my i-phone set at time-lapse. It is held still on with a tripod in a bowl of avocados and there is an extra bright light to illuminate the ice melting.
A Wigwam for Barbies
I was offered a cat play toy but took too long to collect it. It was always going to be for Barbie art and not the cats. So I improvised and used the bamboo sticks that Lucy gave me. Hey presto.
The comments were the best
Lovely now we can just start a campfire underneath Debby
They are looking slightly like they are about to be given the Joan of Arc treatment and burnt at the stake! 😂😂 Fran
Fascinating! This is an alien uplifting-experiment. The Barbies have been caught by aliens with a native American cultural connection. (Native Americans are descendants from aliens who crash landed a long time ago in north America.) So these aliens cought them and fixed them to their transcendence structure. It has a slight resemblance to the stakes that the American natives used for torturing, but has a different purpose, that got lost to the their crash-landed relatives over the 3000 years that they had to live on earth without connection to their culture. It is used by the aliens to achieve transcendence. It works on the outer level with fasting and fixation, so there is some resemblance to the practice of the native Americans. Only after transcendence are you considered a grown up in this alien society. They picked Barbies, because to them they looked very close to what they would consider high potential teenagers. The aliens are looking forward to making contact with humans from earth, but it only makes sense to them after humans are transcended. So this transcendence experiment is part of their outreach program. Very exciting! Let’s hope it turns out well!
BTW, the aliens that crash landed on earth were teenagers (pre-transcendence) who stole away on a rogue trip with a ship one of them “borrowed” from their parents when they were out visiting friends one night. 🤷♂️ So next to the hopeful essence, there is also an obscure cautionary element in this piece. Christian
I added some more mesh and Barbies.
Barbie Brompton Bag
Leah and her siblings along with their mother and old friend of mine, Ayala made this Barbie Brompton Bike bag with 4 real actual Barbies in the front pocket.
I have chosen to put Barbie either in or within frames or as part of canvases.
Barbie escapes the clutches of the hummingbird’s beak by a hair’s breadth…..
I went to a painting evening at The Tel Aviv Art Studio at 42 Frug. I sat next to some lovely young people who were from France and Germany and to include me changed to speak English. Then Kylie came and sat next to me and painted a really beautiful red flower. For relaxation she paints bottles at home and lives between Haifa and Acre. The wine was flowing and the food amazing (cheese, crackers, roasted veggies, loads of fresh fruit and brownies.
We had a 30 cm x 40 cm canvas and were copying a Yayoi Kusama hummingbird with a red flower. To overcome her childhood trauma Yayoi paints with lots of dots.
I like spirals so included them in my painting. As we used gauche paints (liquidy and quick drying) I experimented by put lots of paint on top of other colours and ended up with 5 marbled circles (on top of spirals).
The flower and pollen pods in pencilAdding in the hummingbirdOutlined with marker penA wet canvas to take home on the bus number 10 with Talulah
My hummingbird was not great so when I returned home with my canvas I applied real feathers and puff paint for his crown. I embellished her beak with a snappy and sharp and scary hair-clip beak. I didn’t have any spare Barbies to use for this piece so suggested Barbie’s exit from the clutches of the hummingbird’s beak with a pair of pink Barbie shoes.
Imprisoned Barbies on a Cork Noticeboard
Debby found an old cork noticeboard. I had all these drawing pins – with small grey and white stones on the outside. So I decided, having decorated the corners and edges with textured fairy stickers, I would capture the four (3 pink and 1 purple) small Barbies with self striping sock yarn. These Barbies I bought on the Holloway Road, Archway, London.
Let’s not stay too long like thisWith our favourite historic coastersUp close
My friends Christian and Maria gave me a load of Algerian sweets. I was already the third recipient. The sweets were incredibly sickly and all made of almond. We ate a few and then I gave most of them away. Christian suggested the Barbies would look better in this box rather than within the rather cheap aluminium frame. It took some doing to remove the frame without ruining the cork but I did it! Debby suggested rope as an internal frame. And Yasmeen suggested we call it “Trafficked Barbies” which really resonated with me. Thanks all! Christian since then said it is too narrow a title as it doesn’t allow the viewer independent thought. He suggested calling it Barbies tied up in an Algerian sweet box. Hmmmmmmmmmmmm
Saree Barbie is a Ganesh devotee
This time I made the saree for Barbie having followed a YouTube video. She has an orange Ganesh (who went round Dubai airport at the time of the Hindu festival of Diwali) and four instrument playing Ganeshs at her feet. I painted the background using stencils with felt tip pens and watercolours.
Barbie in her multicoloured dream coat
I went on a course to learn how to do punch needle work. It appears I do not have the patience for this and in fact do not really like the end product. The teacher was wonderful and the rest of the women there loved what they were doing but I went off piste. Firstly I used my own yarn (alpaca as opposed to the provided acrylic which was better in fact!), secondly I “imprisoned” some fleece to variable degrees of sucess and thirdly I thought I would use this new technique on Barbie. I had brought with me a canvas painted Barbie pink and a Barbie. I had fun “imprisoning” her using the punch needle. I redid it at home with firstly dressing her in a velvet back shift, using black yarn for her boots, rainbow fleece with pink needle punched yarn and a rainbow rubber band necklace.
The punch needle threadedAttempts at punch needling and catching fleecePunch needling Barbie in fleeceMaking the holesFirst she needed a dress and a rainbow treeWith a hidden punch needleFinished with her rainbow tree, necklace and coat of many colours
Carly has a good deal to say on the subject of olives and has decided to dedicate an entire story about them. She wrote a good number of her stories on a wonderful yoga and writing retreat in Lemnaradis, Greece. It is silent in the mornings, and this suits her and all the other participants to attain writing nirvana. Especially as there is no Wi-Fi. On her 4th trip, she was staying in an apartment in a nearby village. She set herself the task of finding her way back along the olive groves in the pitch black at night, as a sort of scary, masochistic task. This is one of the joys of being in a remote place. There is minimal light pollution and ready access to a star-studded sky.
One of the other writers proposed she use this as the basis for a ‘Carly story’. Carly considers this idea. But Carly isn’t keen to solely feed off other people’s suggestions. Much better to build on them. Her relationship with olives is much more profound than just trying to remember which knobbly olive tree she needs to change direction to find her apartment at night. No, she will just write about olives in general. And she thinks that although this was well intentioned, it said more about how other writers perceived her bravery or foolhardiness to travel from A to B in the dark, refusing to use a torch, just to be different. For Carly it was more about seeing if she could do it. And she did, so she could.
Olives do grow on trees. And so, this seems to be a good place to start. As Julie Andrews sang in ‘The Sound of Music’ – start at the very beginning. Yes, thinks Carly, this really is a wonderful musical. She has listened to it multiple times. It is feel-good entertainment with loads of sing-along tunes and an important message. But mostly, it holds a special place as her son, Haz, had a solo singing part in primary school. Just thinking about his role makes Carly’s bottom lip start to quiver and her eyes fill with tears. He’d never sung in public before and had the sweetest of voices. Carly knew she was biased. But, so what?
Back to olives. Where to start? It could be a chicken and egg situation. The equivalent here being an olive tree versus an olive stone or pip. But the trees are for sure beautiful, so she will go for the trees first. They are gnarled and knobbly, lumpy and bumpy. A bit like someone has done a bad macrame job of their tree trunks. And the lovely sage green of the thin, lip-like leaves. The trees all look so very old and seem to have been in place for eternity. Maybe planted by farmers living in ancient times? Carly loves the idea of placing something in perpetuity for those in the future to find. Certainly, she has always encouraged her children to bury items of interest when they bury their deceased pets. And they have buried a fair few. This is the problem with living in a capital city with lots of cars and slightly fearless cats.
As usual Carly has gone off on a tangent. Back to olives. And olive trees which you can hug. They aren’t very wide. And hugging each one would be quite a different experience as they have numerous shapes and contours. Tree hugging is fun, but one can get a bit carried away in an olive grove. And Carly has far too many things to do. She cannot embrace every tree in an olive grove just so some trees don’t feel left out. This does bother Carly. She likes things to be fair. However, she reasons, her clothes are likely to get snagged on these trunks. There is an alternative. But Carly doesn’t fancy cuddling a tree in her birthday suit as she will end up with scratches and bruises. And we know what happens to 50+ year old skin. It takes a very long time to heal. Unsightly to say the least.
The other thing Carly likes about olives is the multiplicity of uses. Olives are eaten in various forms. Olive oil to drink – well sort of. And olive wood to carve items of beauty.
Let’s start with olives. Carly muses how even the olives can be different. Green or black. Wrinkled or smooth. They can be bought in tins, jars or loose. Pitted or with stones. And sometimes filled with wonderful items such as almonds, pimentos and anchovies. Yum yum. Carly is so excited about the range. A feast for all the senses. Even if you cannot hear olives, you can talk about them enthusiastically, muses Carly. And you can make olive tarts and tapenade. And put them in salads. And on pizzas. But you cannot really make them into soups, juices or cakes. No. That is not a good idea. So pretty versatile. And always a tasty snack. She wonders what category olives fit into. She realises they are grown on trees and so come under the general category of plants. But they don’t seem to be either a fruit or a vegetable. “Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm”, contemplates Carly. She really doesn’t know.
When her sons were young, they loved olives, and you could pretty much guarantee they would eat them. One day she was at work for 24 hours and, Ades their father, had to look after them. They were still quite young and rather fussy eaters. But olives were always a winner. And this is all that he fed them for the entire 24-hour period. Which was sort of fine as a one off. But not sort of fine, when changing nappies, the next day. You can get too much of a good thing.
Now moving onto olive oil. There are probably people out there with PhDs on this subject, thinks Carly. Virgin, extra virgin, extra + extra virgin, cold pressed, organic, fairtrade. The list goes on. She really has no idea what this all means. Well, it does certainly affect the price. And probably the taste, as well as how it should be used. She does wonder if it really is all that healthy for you. And it is a waste to use it to fry food. The heat denatures the particles, so it isn’t the healthy oil it was before and it is still much more expensive than other oils. But it is lovely on a fresh salad. And you can put it in soup just before you serve it. And in cakes. Like olives, the oil often comes in lovely packaging making it a very acceptable gift item. And you can use it on your skin. Especially for children. Yes, says Carly, who is a paediatrician. She often recommends olive oil to parents whose babies have cradle-cap. It makes a nice alternative to coconut oil.
Carly always associates olive wood with items for sale in Jerusalem. All three monotheistic religions have deep roots there and many objects of religious significance are made there. The wood is a wonderful mellow yellow. And is also knotted like the trunks. The olive wood items show all these features proudly.
Ah yes, remembers Carly. You can also make olive oil into candles and soap. She wonders what she has left off the list. Maybe she needs to go on a course to fully experience olives. And Carly loves courses. Later she will look to see if they exist. Probably. And she notes. Writing without Wi-Fi does mean you need to rely only on your memory. None of this obsessive-google-checking all the time. It is good to keep thinking and remembering, Carly reflects, to stave off dementia. “Here’s hoping”, Carly whispers to herself.
Carly has a cousin whose children always tease Carly that her stock phrase is “Just give it a rub”. This is in response to whatever ailment anyone suffers, however serious or debilitating. It has become their mantra every time they see her. Even if they are entirely healthy or unwell and in hospital. This has made Carly ponder. Not a lot, as Carly is not prone to the longevity of pondering. She is always in a rush hither and thither. But she does wonder if it is true. Does she truly believe that rubbing something will make it better? Is rubbing an area better than dishing out paracetamol and ibuprofen? Rubbing, at least, is a physical act and less emotionally distant. Certainly, returning to hugging, which is a large-scale version of rubbing, as the pandemic relinquishes its tight grip, has been great for everyone.
And as Carly is a doctor, a paediatrician to be exact, she sees a lot of patients with ailments. Many of which would be helped with a rub and probably wouldn’t need to see her in the clinic. She spends at least half of her clinic appointments explaining to children who have functional (also known as psychosomatic) headaches and tummy aches, about laughing and crying. She asks the children “Why do people laugh?” They nearly always think this is a trick question. But she reassures them that it isn’t. Then she asks them, “Why do people cry?” Carly explains that laughing and crying are the physical manifestations of feelings and emotions. And she feels this helps to explain to them why they might have a pain or feel dizzy or a multitude of other ailments.
She wistfully remembers one such patient. Let’s call her Mandy. That wasn’t her real name. Mandy is not a common name at all for a girl these days. Carly has seen lists of names that parents give their children nowadays. Olivia is very popular. As are Milly and Molly. Just not Mandy. Carly had been seeing Mandy for quite a while. She seemed overly sensitive to life’s knocks and bruises. One day she came to the clinic to see Carly. She refused to get on the scales for her weight to be documented. She said she had a very sore toe from stubbing it in a door. Carly looked at her records, as Mandy had come to the Emergency Department howling the night before. So much noise for a stubbed toe. She had an X-ray of her foot, which was, of course, normal. Everyone knows when you stub your toe, you are given carte blanche to swear your head off, you give the injured toe a rub and all will be well.
But Mandy had form on this. She had hit her elbow a year ago and still wasn’t fully using her arm. Chronic regional pain syndrome had been diagnosed, and she was in a bit of a pickle. Carly really didn’t want her patient to have the same problem with her toe. So, she took off Mandy’s shoe and rubbed it gently. The level of hysteria in the clinic room was really overwhelming. Mandy was screaming, her father was crying, and her mother was looking vengefully at Carly. Then Carly tried to explain to them about allodynia. This is the reason you rub something that you have injured. The body senses the ‘touch’ and this lessens the pain. But if you don’t do that then the pain becomes intense. The nerve fibres that were originally for touch, become associated with pain and every time you touch the injured area the skin is hypersensitive and all you feel is pain. This is called allodynia and Carly knew all about this as she had done her PhD on these nerve fibres and how they could change Aδ to C fibres. She knew Mandy had allodynia in her elbow and she wanted to show the family that if she rubbed the toe then she could avoid that problem recurring in another part of her body.
However, the emotion in the room was too intense for anyone to listen to Carly giving her scientific explanation about these nerve fibres. Now really wasn’t the time. Maybe Carly could explain it in a letter to the family afterwards. Fortuitously, after a few minutes, Mandy calmed down, her father stopped crying, and her mother looked at Carly with slightly less fury. And the toe hurt less. Within a couple of days, Mandy had no pain in her toes at all and they weren’t sensitive. So, in this instance “Just give it a rub” had been the right course of action. The elbow took longer but the family now understood how to better manage these painful joints. Interestingly, if she hadn’t stubbed her toe, ended up with an X-ray and a clinic appointment soon afterwards, Carly mused she might still have an elbow she couldn’t move and socks she could neither put on or take off? Stinky feet. The worst…
But advising parents to always “Just give it a rub” isn’t the right response sometimes. Recently, Carly had a lovely patient, Nina, who was born with a very scrambled heart. She was eight and again this wasn’t her real name. Some very clever surgeons had cobbled her heart back together with bits and bobs and flipping things around. Nina was pretty well and doing pretty much what other eight-year-old girls do. Her parents waited a very long time for her to be stable before deciding on having another child. One of Carly’s genetics teachers told her that parents often do this, so they don’t overburden themselves with many children with severe hereditary conditions. It is called reproductive choice. Nina’s mother was an inpatient on an antenatal ward because of some medical obstetric complication while her baby was still cooking – well gestating is probably a better term, decided Carly.
Nina had come to Carly’s clinic with episodes of her heart beating too fast. Carly has decided she is a bit of an expert in these functional symptoms. Whenever anyone gets stressed, especially teenagers, they can get palpitations and experience a fast-beating heart. Carly sees loads of these patients and the trick is to say it is anxiety and not do a whole load of unnecessary investigations. These just uncover minor variants which are in the normal range and then everyone is stressed, and yet more investigations are ordered. Such a waste of time and money, not to mention unnecessary anxiety. It is like a vicious cycle of more investigations to prove the first ones were normal, when they should never have been undertaken in the first place.
In this instance, Carly very nearly didn’t organise a heart tracing test for Nina. But she had been told by the specialist heart doctors down the road she must. Grrrrrrrrr thought Carly. Really this is just anxiety about her mother being in hospital and a sibling about to be born. Often Carly doesn’t do what she is told but Nina is pretty young for adolescent stress to cause palpitations. And she did have a previously scrambled heart, and this means she possibly could have real palpitations. So reluctantly and confident that she would be proved right, she organised a 24-hour heart tracing test. “Well blow me down with a feather” thought Carly when one of her cardiology colleagues phoned her to say she really did have some very serious palpitations that would need treatment. “Phew”, thought Carly who had begrudgingly organised the test, and “Thanks”, to having good colleagues who called her up to say it was abnormal. So, in this instance, “Just give it a rub” would have been wholly the wrong thing to do.
Carly wonders if giving things a rub and hugging are actually the same thing. Rubbing is a repetitive movement over a particular area that is sore. Hugging is helpful when you are feeling mentally sore, or just lonely. Carly thinks back to these last few years. She has always liked hugging. Her sons are good at it. Her daughter is more unpredictable. But the pandemic put paid to hugging. Well, it did if you followed the rules. Which Carly doesn’t. So, she hugged lots of people. These were all people in her ‘bubble’. Carly had a rather loose definition of her bubble. It was really more of an ephemeral construct which would expand and contract according to Carly’s needs. Mostly she wanted cuddles and hugs. But Carly also realised there were times when she didn’t.
Carly cries a lot. And this can be overwhelming for others. But she doesn’t actually mind crying in front of others. But they don’t always like it. So, they will engineer an end to Carly’s sobs by hugging her. And if Carly didn’t want this, she could put up her hand as if to say, “No hugs, it is the pandemic after all”. And then she tries to explain in this particular instance that hugging isn’t helpful. Crying is fine. She even cried in an Uber recently when she and the driver were each trying to make sense of their recent divorces. The driver didn’t try to hug Carly. He gave her his copy of the Quran instead. Maybe that is a spiritual or religious hug. Words to surround and comfort you. Yes, thinks Carly. That is a hug. Good.
I was sent a hilarious video of someone who returns home, having had their kitchen entirely covered in tin foil (aluminium foil) as part of their Pesach (Passover) preparations.
This is to ensure that all the surfaces are ready to be used without fear of contamination of breadcrumbs. This project was a skit on this but taking it to the extreme of making it look like the entire house contents of all the rooms were covered with silver foil. I used my collection of five “Voodoo” Barbies as they were spare and the right size. They had already been all over Mexico and featured in an earlier blog post.
We spent the day in Hydra, an island near Poros which has no cars or scooters. Only donkeys and horses. But one rubbish lorry! And now hand held electric carts that can navigate the cobbled streets. Such a wonderful day. Except for the untimely arrival of two large cruise ships. Hey ho. Still a lot of fun.
I have been coming to Limnisa every six months since October 2019. Even during the Pandemic and was here when the October 7th war started in Israel. Except for October 2024 as I went with the wonderful Tanya to Rajasthan, India. But I am back and for sure, this is my most happy, happy place. I feel I can be me. I am challenging and being challenged. Not just in what I write but how I write. We have had lots of discussions around writing memoirs and using pseudonyms or not and that exceptional topic we rarely touch – death.
Every morning I write about three cards I randomly pick from my Angel Cards. These help get the creative juices going and I have done them here for years. My lovely friend Rebecca introduced me to them.
