Doll Maker Dale Barrett

My Background:

A little background for those of you who don't know me: I worked as a Fashion Designer and Patternmaker about 40 years. I learned to sew from my mother and grandmother at age 8. My great-grandmother was a tailor and dressmaker in her day. At age 15 I found a book on pattern drafting and learned to make my own patterns.

Costuming:

Through the years I volunteered at community theaters doing costuming and developed an interest in period styles. When I retired up here I thought it would be fun to have a scaled down mannequin to dress, something about 26" tall. I didn't know anything about dolls and found that doll magazines had mostly children and babies. I took classes in porcelain reproduction doll making to learn how to clean and paint porcelain. But even the Fashion Ladies weren't over 18" tall and they were pretty shapeless. After about a year of that I knew I had to make my own doll. I found Lewis Goldstein's book of Doll Sculpting and soon after learned he has a video demonstrating it all very well. .

Sculpey: That was 1987 and I joined a doll club, the "Feather River Doll Guild". One of the gals in it made one-of-a-kind dolls using Sculpey over an aluminun foil base as Lewis had suggested, and that is how I started. I needed a model to look at so I went through some old 1940 photo albums and found these pictures of my younger sister when she was a model and would-be starlet.

Lady Laura: Lady Laura is the first one I sculpted, made molds for all parts and poured in porcelain. She has a swivel head on a shoulder plate. When I went to dress her I realized she needed a heavy saddle stand, not the lightweight post-out-in-back ones everyone uses.

Saddle Stands: I had a steel shop cut 6" squares 1/8" thick, and 8" squares for big heavy dolls. A friend made up the center posts and saddles from my drawings and painted them for me. He also made some doll cases and we showed them all at a few doll shows. As usual, we were before their time: we only sold a few. Now some of my doll club friends have asked us to make them doll stands. Before she was dressed and became Lady Laura she was modelling at the doll stand shows. A few people said she looked like me; that made me mad because all my life growing up I had to take a back seat to my cute little sister. I decided to do a doll of me. That led to the 1990

Christmas card of Laura and Madame Barrett, her dressmaker. Since the two-part Laura was hard to put on a body, awkward to put arms on and impossible to dress in off-shoulder gowns, for Madame I made her one-piece with the torso. That give me a place to string the arms through and solved a lot of problems.

Emerald Green: I took Laura's head and sculpted a torso right on it, one can do that with Sculpey, just add it on and bake again. Now I had what became Emerald Green with new arms up to the shoulders. Just what I had imagined for a doll 12 years ago. Trial and error and a lot of new molds took all that time to get what I wanted. Then I made a Madame Barrett, the seated Doll Maker holding a little Miss Apollo, the UFDC logo doll. Researching Miss Apollo, I found a lot of interesting so-called "woodens". I have started one and have a couple of scale drawings for two more of different years, one 1720 - 1750 so called "Queen Ann", 1800 - 1815 Empire pegged wooden and a 1925 bed doll. I have a fairly new poly porcelain air drying slip called Doll Magic to make them in. It doesn't shrink as much as porcelain, doesn't need firing, it is ivory colored so needs painting. It is almost unbreakable, is easy to mold and clean, also lighter weight than most composition and porcelain. I'm looking forward to them and will be happy to share them as they develop.