Dear reader, thank you so much for indulging me in my week off last week. It is true that this is something I do largely for myself and it is also true that the tens of you who read probably didn’t notice Poppington’s absence. However, I still feel some odd sense of responsibility to you whenever I can’t quite get it together. And last week as I mourned the loss of my access to my mom’s Netflix account, I couldn’t quite get it together. But without further ado, I’m here to dive into something that’s been on my mind.
If your twitter feed looks anything like mine, images like this have been occupying plenty of precious visual real estate for the last week.
She and her kind have become a meme out of nowhere, as most memes do. But there’s a little more to it. When I see a meme of some character I don’t recognize, I just assume they’re from something I’ve never seen. I don’t watch much reality tv, I’m not a Spongebob head, I don’t dive into Marvel movies (to name a few cultural blindspots).
And when miss thing showed up, I assumed the same was true. After I saw enough Tweets with her and characters just like her with captions like “its always 2 dumb bitches telling each other ‘exactlyyyyyy’” and eventually:
At this point, I grew increasingly convinced of the fact that there was some cultural touchstone I was missing. But I couldn’t find any information anywhere. I tried semi-hard and just could not track it down. Was this a cartoon before or after I was a Cartoon Network kid? Some toy nobody I knew played with or that I never saw commercials for? Was it regional? Was it something that schools had?
I had to get to the bottom of this. And fast. I was losing my goddamn mind over these “sneaky bitches.”
As a paralegal and amateur (pop) culture writer, I’m familiar with certain tricks of the trade that help me get to the bottom of things. So often in life, the answer is just a couple quick clicks away. Such was the case of the three sneaky bitches.
I took the first image (see above) and placed it into a reverse image search engine, which took me to an early aughts style html site entitled Doll Maker’s Journey. There weren’t just three sneaky bitches. There were some eighty patterns for dolls of this similar whimsical, boho, sneaky style, including dogs and frogs to boot!
But I was still left with so many questions. Who were these sneaky bitches and where did they come from?
As I was pouring over the patterns on Doll Maker’s Journey, I noticed the name “Jill Maas” cropping up over and over again. Whoever she was, she had something to do with this.
For a moment I thought she must’ve been the author or illustrator of whatever book they came from. Or perhaps the Ruth Handler to whatever toys these girlies are.
If you’re out there going “OMG, duh! Jill Maas,” no you are not. Jill Maas is not a big time designer or manufacturer. These girlies are not from any franchise. They were never in a book or tv show. They’re not widely sold dolls or characters. They’re just regular old, independently made and designed cloth dolls. whose signature designs can be found on her site Slightly Weathered Ladies.
Jill Maas is based out of New Zealand, where she not only makes these dolls and patterns, but teaches workshops. These dolls are really her specialty and she loves making them from odd scraps of fabric that she finds.
And if you can’t make it to one of her workshops, you can purchase the patterns from Doll Maker’s Journey or Jill’s website. Jill also has a handful of videos with useful tips and tricks for making your own cloth dolls. It’s not too late to pick up your Q1 hobby.
I’m very happy to have figured out this meme’s origin, but I can’t quite put my finger on its spread. These dolls are not famous by any stretch. And yet, an image of them became a meme and then several images of them became their own memes. It exploded, seemingly out of nowhere. A big bang of culture so confusing that there’s hardly anything to say about it.
This kind of meme is so often proliferated because it is a shared touch stone amongst people online. And yet this time it was just a random thing spawned of something most users had probably never seen before.
To me, this says a couple of things. You really can find anything on the internet. People will interact with your post even if they don’t get it. And there’s an undeniable charm to cloth dolls.