Introduction

My name is Lobke Dekkers. I grew up in a creative family in the Netherlands, so I learned a lot from my parents. It started with sewing clothes for my regular dolls and later my Barbies. Later I learned to knit and crochet, weaving, spinning, dyeing textiles and wool, macramé and much more. At that time we had a pottery workshop at home where I also worked. We also had a large garden with a vegetable garden.

For twelve years I had a shop with fabrics and haberdashery and many hobby materials. It was a beautiful and pleasant time, until the Corona. I had a group of Barbie dolls on the cutting table, for which I regularly made different clothes and sometimes new furniture. My customers saw that and many hearts were melted. When saying goodbye to my store, a customer gave me a bag with Barbie dolls. It contained dolls with movable hinges.

After I quit the store, my husband and I moved to France. We have a large garden and try to be self-sufficient as much as possible. We make our own bread by hand, make our own sauces, jams, juice, etc. I don’t have much time for my hobbies, but the Barbies kept drawing me. Every free moment was spent in it.

The movable hinges allowed me to give my Barbie dolls pose. Ideas grew, plans kept growing in my head, while I was busy with completely different things. I could make my dolls represent something. Suddenly I started building a house for them. After some thinking and measuring, it turned out to be a scale of 1 to 6. Very different from regular dollhouses, which are usually scale 1 to 16. I started with plywood cubes of 35 cm high, 50 cm wide and 40 cm deep. We had the plywood lying around anyway. I liked the idea, I could place them however I wanted. All four have a different floor and wall covering (with fabric of course, because I have plenty of choice). When I built an attic and wanted to put roof tiles on it, the plywood cubes turned out not to be sturdy enough.

So I made a new house with sturdy beams (tile battens) and 1 cm thick plywood. This new house is approximately 170 cm high, over 120 cm wide and approximately 60 cm deep. The floors and walls are covered almost the same as the cubes, because I still liked it, just a few adjustments.

In my shop I had tulle, which in the Netherlands is usually on cardboard planks of 2 mm thick (sometimes a little thicker and without a wave). I’ve been saving them all these years, and sometimes building things from them. I now use it to make the furniture for the Barbie dollhouse. Not only furniture, but also the stairs, doors, window frames, windows, balustrades, alarm clock, sewing machine, etc. Every time I measure the dimensions in real life and divide it by 6. I usually make construction drawings with dimensions to get a good plan before I start anything.

The first photos are from July 2022, the first cupboard I made for the kitchen and which has already been renovated. The cubes were already ready by then, I made them in June, but I don’t have any photos of them. From the very beginning, stories arose in my head, things that the people (pardon me, dolls) in the house experience, things that they do and feel. For me they live as we do. I have sometimes shown something to friends and acquaintances, photos or in real life. Someone often said that I should show that to others, via the internet or an exhibition. I can’t even think about moving my Barbie dollhouse, so that’s not going to happen. I will only do that once more and that is when my large studio is ready and that could take a few years. Until then it will remain in the guest room and the outside will remain unfinished and there will be no garden or sheds. Two of the old cubes have been back in use since last week. One is a ballet hall and the other is JP and Noa’s workshop.

This week we started the La Cerise site for the story of my Barbies and the other things. My husband takes care of the technical aspects of it and teaches me how to deal with it, so that I can do what I want with it. My husband is a WordPress specialist and can create just about anything I think of. At the top is the word Barbie dollhouse in pink, which is my reference to the pink appearance of Barbie. I made the font classic and slanted, due to the antiquity of a dollhouse.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Lobke Dekkers
November 12, 2023