Dried Apple Head Dolls
   The urge to do something with one's hands to construct something unique and beautiful is
expressed in the making of dried apple dolls.  I may start off with nothing more in mind
than just to make a doll.  Perhaps the resulting face isn't at all what I had planned, but it
will have an individuality and character all it's own.  Nature does the work, she is the
sculptress.  Perhaps as long as time itself, people have used the apple and other fruit for
dolls' heads.  The majority of people have never seen nor heard of apple head dolls,
however, the carvers of Switzerland and France have made dolls in this way for many years.
   In past generations the apple head doll was considered as a plaything for little girls.
Today, they are strictly collector's items.  Each apple takes on an individual personality of
its own and no two ever turn out the same.  After carving our dolls, they are dipped in a
solution, eyes and teeth are placed in the apple and now dried.  After the apple dries, it is
again dipped into another solution to maintain its lasting durability.   Each doll is about
17 inches tall.
   The body is constructed with an armature which can be positioned in any pose.  They are
fully dressed, usually in a hillbilly fashion of calico dresses, shirts, sunbonnets, aprons, slips,
pantaloons, black  stockings and socks, overalls, brogans and stovepipe hats.
   We have been making dried apple head dolls for thirty-five years.  Our daughter, Jalana,
is really the one that started our business.  When she was 12, she came home from school
with a dried apple doll she had carved and dried at school.  I was so intrigued by its looks
as an Ozark Mountain Hillbilly and right away started making dried dolls.
   In our home, a sign on the oven door reads, "STOP...DO NOT TURN ON OVEN.....
PEOPLE INSIDE."  The people in our oven are apple doll heads.     Around our household,
apples are valued for more than their nutritive value.  They're more likely to end up as apple
dolls.
   Our dolls have gone to people throughout the United States and many foreign countries.
A covered wagon with an apple doll family and their possessions won first place award in
France.
   Most portray hillbilly characters from a bearded fisherman with a real honeybee poised on
barefoot, to a poke bonneted granny holding a little apple baby.  But special orders have
been from the historical to the bizarre.  I have created Abraham Lincoln dolls for museums,
a classroom consisting of an apple doll teacher and apple doll students for a log cabin school
museum, a Sitting Bull apple doll for the Indian Chief's great-grandson and a Count Dracula
emerging from a jewelry box disguised as a casket.  Oh my, was it ever weird !  I kept it in
the back room until he came and got it.  My greatest specialty is in representing pioneer
figures in traditional poses.  There are some fifty figures and groups in this category.
They include women quilting, spinning, sewing, knitting, rocking a baby, boiling clothes,
holding a rolling pin, men pitching horseshoes, reading a Bible, bathing in a washtub, lying
against a stump with a moonshine jug, making lye soap, a shotgun wedding, square dance
routine and Santa and Mrs. Santa Claus.   Sometimes when I watch someone eating an apple,
I can't help thinking it would sure make a good apple doll.  Around our household, a big
red apple isn't something to eat, we make dolls out of them.......    Wilma