And of course, its Hinamatsuri, The Japanese Dolls Festival. No self respecting doll blogger should allow Hinamatsuri to pass by without mention!

The Doll’s Festival is also a celebration of the young girls in the family, and well wishes for their health, growth and happiness.

Most Japanese families with girls have hina-ningyo dolls, set up on display once a year for the holiday. Here’s some pictures:

Hinamatsuri, Hina-ninygo Dolls

Emperor and Empress from The Strong Museum Doll Collection

Unfortunately, I am not an expert on Ninygo Dolls, so I won’t go into further detail. But I am the father of a daughter, and I make my living selling dolls: We have so many useless holidays in the US… I wish we had a dolls and daughter’s day here like Hinamatsuri!

As promised, the story of how a doll saved our business.

Back in 2002, the dot.com crash had hurt our ability to give as generously to charity as we liked, and we were looking for a new ‘stream of income’ from which to rebuild our charity gifting. So Addie and I started our first eCommerce stores, one of which we called The Happy Baby Basket, and which featured various themed baby gift baskets.

We had an Irish themed basket with a stuffed Irish Setter with a four leaf clover hanging from it’s mouth; a New Jewish baby  Basket, with a Blue Teddy Bear in a kippa and the Star of David embroidered on its paw, and a basket for a newly adopted child with Ling, (shown above, wasn’t she cute?) etc. And for a year an a half we failed to sell a single basket. In fact, we couldn’t even find our site in the search engines!

So after a year and a half, we decided eCommerce wasn’t in the cards and decided to shut that portion of the business down. But since everything was already paid for, and our licenses had another 6 months to run, we decided to take the various items out of the baskets and sell them individually; to see if maybe we could recoup some of our inventory expenses at least.

So we listed all the items separately, the dolls, the silver piggy banks, the cute little 6 months custom tee shirts we had made up, etc. Now we had also been learning more about SEO and page ranks and everything else in that year and a half, and we must have done something right, because all of a sudden our Asian dolls were selling. ( Not for a lot mind you, maybe $12.95?… I don’t remember anymore).

Well, one of my favorite phrases is “you don’t learn a heck of a lot from the second kick of the mule!” and that was the case here as well. After a year and a half, something had happened, but what? So we called a few of the customers who had purchased with…”hi, this is the Happy baby Basket customer service follow up call. Thank you for your purchase… did everything go OK… and by the way, why did you buy that doll?”

And we kept hearing the same thing: ” We just came back from China with a newly adopted little girl, and we went into our local stores, and we couldn’t find Asian faced dolls. So we went online and found you!” We had found a niche market. Underserved customers with a need.

Today we have both PattycakeDoll.com and the SleepySoft.com as well as BooksAndDolls.com and MyAdoptedChild, selling Asian Baby Dolls, African American Baby Dolls and Hispanic Baby Dolls, and contributing thousands of dollars every year to children’s charities.

I have a pretty serious request for all my readers today. I am going to ask, no BEG! – you all to go to this link and sign this petition. The US government, in it’s attempts to increase toy safety, ( a good thing ) has written rules that require testing of all toys for children.

Unfortunately, that also means that if you handmake rag dolls here in America, and sell them to your local toy store or gallery, technically you need to get your dolls tested as well. Or if you make one of a kind Art Dolls. If you make children’s clothes, quirky, fun and original.

That will cost you from several hundred to several thousand dollars per doll. Even if you use all natural organic fibers and stuffings, these new rules still require testing! So Art Dolls, (if they’re to be sold,) Folk Art and Crafts Dolls Children’s quilts etc., all of us will be poorer for this rule. If not corrected, it could mean the end of home crafted dolls. Can you imagine a world with nothing but Barbie™?

This petition is to ask that Congress amend the law to exempt these small American Cottage industries that make handmade dolls and toys from this expensive testing.

please go here to sign this petition

Please visit here for more information The Handmade Toy Alliance

I’ve commented before on the Barbie vs. Bratz case, and followed it with interest, but even I was surprised with the severity of the final judgement:

If this is your first exposure to the story, let me summarize:

What was the crime? Getting paid by one company to design a doll, and then selling that doll to another company. Why is it a story? Because the Bratz dolls started beating the crap out of Barbie Dolls. What is the result? See above. But what I really want to know, now that they’ve won, is Mattel going to start selling Bratz?

Nude Barbie

It is so easy to offend… and yes I am talking dolls. For instance, two little words, nude, and Barbie. Ten little letters in the English language. Yet put them together — Nude Barbie — and whole treatises could be written about feminism, pornography, nudity, little girls self image…. it goes on and on. And has in fact, in blogs other than mine.

Here’s another Barbie causing waves… Tefillin Barbie by Doll Artist Jen Taylor Friedman. Why controversy? Well until very very recently, Jewish women didn’t wear tefillin, or for that matter study Torah (Yentl the Yeshiva Boy by Isaac Bashevis Singer is set in the late 19th century).

Tefillin Barbie by Doll Artist Jen Taylor Friedman

So is this a feminist statement? A religious one?

But if you gave either of these dolls – without any explanation – to any average four year old girl anywhere in the world, (well maybe not in the Middle East), what would happen? She would take the dolls, and play. End of story.

So I guess I should rephrase my opening line.

It is so easy to offend… adults. How about you? Offended?

Here is another way….
The Pink Artist Project: is a group of artists coming together to create two by two inch art squares, mailed in from around the world that when stitched together have built ONE magical creation, our lady Love Squared. An art doll MADE WITH LOVE and uniquely devoted to the cause of finding a cure for breast cancer. If you are interested, here is the site. The funds raised will go to the Susan G. Komen foundation.

In all our years of being in the ‘Doll’ business, I’ve come across so many wonderful people with so many unique collections. I can’t even begin to define what a ‘doll collection’ should look like! Some people collect Barbies, some Jumeau’s. Some collect anything ’30′s”, some collect one of a kind Art Dolls.

I collect ‘examples.’ Let me explain…

Addie and I will be married thirty years come December, and in that time we’ve moved three times, and with our children just about all gone on to their own homes, we’re looking to move once again. I like to think that I’ve finally learned not to collect too much; I usually only have one or two ‘examples’ of a kind of doll.

So I only have one Kachina Doll in my doll collection
But for the purpose of this blog, he’s a perfect representation of his kind, and if you are trying to decide what kind of doll you’d like to collect, maybe you’d consider Kachinas.

Made of wood, turquoise, feathers, shells and stones, Kachina dolls are a style of native American Doll found mainly in the Southwestern United States. Of course with the advent of eBay they are readily collectible from anywhere in the world.

My Hoop Dancer was made by a Navajo Indian. He’s about 10 inches tall. In the Indian culture the Hoop Dancers have no religious significance…they represent the athletic dancers with their magical rings that represent the circle of life. A quick check on eBay finds Medicine Men Kachinas, Buffalo dancers, Hilili, Badger, Butterfly healers and many other Kachinas readily available.

Want to start a unique collection? Kachinas are available, relatively inexpensive and like any good collectible doll can offer you a life-long journey into beauty and knowledge!

The problem is, that too many people hear a phrase… think they know what it means, and declare themselves part of the movement. And that’s exactly what’s happening on the SteamPunk Doll front.

Sorry, my friends, but SteamPunk is well defined, (it is over twenty years old now), and you can’t just declare your doll ‘SteamPunk’ because you don’t know what other category of Art Doll to put it in!

It’s really pretty simple; to be a Steampunk Doll requires three things. If your doll doesn’t have all three, it ain’t Steampunk!

1. Elements of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the Age of Steam as a power source.
2. Elements of Victorian Fashion.
3. Elements of the Fantastical that reflect the genre’s roots in Science Fiction storylines.

Here’s the litmus test. If your doll could be used as a prop in the movie ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen’ you got it. If it couldn’t, you may have a beautiful doll, but it’s not SteamPunk!

SteamPunk Doll image courtesy of ‘notpersephone’ at flickr