The Twilight insanity began and had reached a crescendo before I had even heard of the books by Stephenie Meyer.  My curiosity finally piqued, I had to investigate.  I bought the first book.  I began reading.  After the first couple of pages, I had to force myself to keep going.  I have to pause here to mention that if a storyline or the characters do not almost immediately draw me into their world, I usually put the book down.  My time is precious, and I’ve read hundreds of books over my lifetime, so I’m not a whiny baby about literature, but I do have high standards.  And I do love vampire stories…the romanticized versions thank you very much.  I don’t love them for the blood and gore and violence.  I love them for the torment of lost love, the yearning to find a soul mate with whom to spend eternity, the craving for humanity no longer attainable…  Twilight could not hold my interest.  I think it was the fact that I was reading about teenagers and high school…a period in my life I have no desire to revisit.  NONE.  All the things that seem so important to teens…and yes, I DO remember them…are so insignificant in the grand scheme of things.  I just could NOT spend any more of my precious time on Bella and her cohorts.  Sorry.  I am not one of those swept away on the Twilight tide.

However, I love to indulge my daughter, and when she caught the Twilight bug, I chose to go along for the ride.  She and I went to see Twilight at the theater.  I found the movie little more than “okay”.  My daughter disliked it because she had read the book at least 3 times prior to seeing the movie, and there were parts of the movie she found too unlike the book.  When the second movie hit theaters, I took a pass.  My daughter went with her bff.   When I began seeing the trailers for the third movie, Eclipse, my interest was piqued yet again.  The trailers included moments of antagonism, a battle between good and evil, a woman scorned, etc..  Hmmmmmm, this one might not be too bad, I thought.  My daughter insisted I see the second movie before I could go see the third.  We rented New Moon.  I disliked it more than I had the first.  Sorry.

Long story, short…(well, sort of), I went to see Eclipse at the theater, and it was so much better, in my opinion, than the other two movies in the series.  I loved the action, and the whining was made tolerable by the character development of some of the characters outside of Bella and Edward.  The characters who most intrigued me were Rosalie and Jasper.  Rosalie, in the other two movies, seemed cold and snobbish and downright unfriendly.  High school is filled with that type of girl.  I avoided them like the plague.   I still do.  Jasper, in the other movies, hovered in the background unless some inadvertent wound to Bella’s person caused him to leap from the shadows to pounce upon the whimpering human.  Again, not to my liking.  But, in Eclipse, both Rosalie and Jasper had some meaty screen time.  Their pasts were explored, and I found myself drawn to them…to the human parts of them, to their losses, their regrets.  And when Rosalie stood on the balcony of the Cullen home and revealed to Bella that she did not hate her but rather envied her, I was caught up in that spell.  And I knew I had to create a Rosalie with my doll art.

I enlisted two friends who do amazing work in the realm of doll fashion.  They created the clothing worn by Rosalie on the balcony.  I created the doll using a 1/4 scale Tonner fashion doll, and I hand-sculpted and hand-painted the Cullen crest necklace Rosalie wears.  I know that sometime in the near future, I will create Jasper as well.  His story captured my imagination too.  But for now, I will enjoy Rosalie.  I hope you do too.