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Dried Fruit Faces The popular Public Broadcasting television program, Antiques Road Showhas helped broaden Americans' interest in the field of doll collecting. What often begins with the musing question, “I wonder what those old dolls in the closet are worth now?” often blossoms into the obsessive barter, buying and selling of antique dolls. Or not, as the case may be.
Catherine Christopher, author of The Complete Book of Doll Making and Collecting (Dover edition published in 1971, originally published by The Greystone Press, New York, in 1949) offers timeless advice for the dollmaker working with fruit as a medium for doll heads and faces. This book (which you can find in used bookstores or on eBay™ of all places) has many wonderful photographs but the ones of particular interest to some of us at Fruit From Washington are of “amusing and well detailed dolls” that have apples or pears as heads. |
A doll, pictured in Catherine Christopher's book, is posed in a small rocking chair with a tiny baby doll on its lap. Titled “Grandma Howell and Baby Seckel,” the faces of both the grandma and baby doll are made of dried pears! At least fifteen years ago, my sister, Sophia, experimented with using an apple for making a dried fruit face doll known as a kitchen witch. The result wasn't beautiful...but then she wasn't trying to create Glinda, the Good Witch of the North from the land of Oz. The process of making dried apple or pear faces for dolls results in wrinkled expressions of age, character and wisdom! Sophia gave me this green haired kitchen witch which has a tiny, nut brown face, a little nose and sunken chin. This very well preserved doll resides in my kitchen bringing the household good luck according to tradition. Some believe that the kitchen witch keeps pots from boiling over and toast from burning.
Dried Apple Face Doll |
Directions for Making Dried Fruit Faces
The Complete Book of Doll Making and Collecting, by Catherine Christopher, gives the following advice for making dried apple or pear doll faces:
Almost as long as people have been growing apples and pears, they have used the fruit for dolls' heads. Both fruits shrink and go brown in drying. A little preliminary carving before the drying process results in interesting faces usually associated with really old peasants. For generations, the carvers of France and Switzerland have made dolls this way.
Select under-ripe fruit that is normally firm and crisp of flesh. Peel and thrust a wooden skewer up into the bottom, leaving enough projecting below head to make a neck. With a penknife carve a quite bold nose. Scoop out shallow eye sockets and indicate the mouth with a moderately deep slash. Carve away below the chin. The profile should be bold and well defined. The natural shrinkage which takes place will diminish the size of the features considerably. Push a small-headed clove into each eye socket, embedding it quite deeply. These are the eyeballs and are later touched with a dot of white paint to give them brilliance and sparkle.
The carved fruit must be dehydrated in a place that is free of drafts and quite dry; otherwise, it will get moldy. A few experiments will indicate how much preliminary carving is required to get certain results. Wrinkles, which occur naturally in the drying, may be emphasized and directed by scoring the fruit with the fingernail or knifepoint along the desired lines.
Finish the face with a touch of color high on the cheeks and lips. Sometimes the entire face is painted with a base coat before the features are colored. A more interesting effect is obtained by simply coloring the features, then lacquering the entire head. Attach wool hair and tiny eyebrows while the lacquer is still wet.
Visit these Links for more about Making Apple Head Dolls
Carole Beausoleil is a doll maker who carves apples into humanoid faces and has newly revised her Granny Apple Head booklet on how-to create these unique fruit dolls. Originally self-published in 1989, her booklet now includes four additional fast and easy projects along with new drying and preservative methods, helpful dollmaking tips and doll patterns! An article about Carole's apple art titled "Granny Look at Me Now" has appeared in the April-May issue of UK's Doll Magazine.
