A Different Kind of Doll

The pleasure of making versus consuming

After I wrote about the Barbie movie last week, several women friends told me they never liked Barbie. One said that neither her daughter nor her granddaughters had Barbies. I was glad to hear I’m not alone.

While I didn’t have a Barbie and never particularly cared for them, I did have some plastic dolls when I was younger. The only specific one I remember is Lalla, who stands out because she spoke in Italian when you pulled a cord in her back. She’d say things like “Mi chiamo Lalla” (My name is Lalla), “Ti voglio bene” (I love you), and “Andiamo nanna” (Let’s go to sleep). I don’t recall wanting to mother dolls like Lalla; mostly, I liked styling their long hair.

But the dolls I spent the most time with, the ones who were nearest to my heart, weren’t plastic, and they weren’t bought at stores. They were simple stick figures made with pipe cleaners, just two inches high. I’ve kept a few of them and recently dug them out of the box they now live in.

Some of the pipe cleaner dolls, complete with a baby in a walnut-shell crib; pen for scale. I’m not into beige, but I think we had a lot of that material and it was easy to work with. The doll at the lower left is wearing tiny tights!

To be fair, the pipe cleaner doll craze among my friends started when I was 9 or 10, past the age of playing with regular dolls. But I spent far more time with these dolls, because they weren’t about playing with dolls at all. They were about making all their clothes and household items.

While Barbie has been critiqued for the doll’s promotion of rampant consumerism, our dolls were all about reusing and making. We made use of leftover scraps of cloth, including old panty hose, for their clothes. Match boxes made great chests of drawers and beds; walnut shells provided a perfect frame for comfy chairs; the little furry pods from pussy willows were pet guinea pigs. We even used small bits of wax from candles to make them their own tiny candles, complete with wicks made of thread.

Doll clothes I still have, including extremely tiny shoes.

A sampling of their furniture, including a couch yet to be upholstered, a fireplace, and an early-1970s picture for their wall.

The dolls also got a few musical instruments.

Rather decrepit-looking piano with toothpick keys, guitar, possibly violin, and harp.

Making pipe cleaner doll clothes and furniture is the first time I remember being in what’s known as a flow state, or “in the zone.” I’d spend hours and hours absorbed in this activity, not thinking about anything else and not wanting to go downstairs when it was time for dinner.

My dear friend Lucy was as devoted to pipe cleaner dolls as I was, and we’d often get together to work on making things for them. Though we gave them names, we rarely did anything that resembled playing with the dolls. A notable exception was a time when some of them invited some others over for tea, where we served tiny cakes made of little bits of Sara Lee pound cake. We’d made them their own tea set, of course.

One of the little drawers contained board games, complete with pieces in a tiny box. The dolls also got a kite, an easel, a functional marionette, candles, books, pencils, maps. I love the Pierre Cardin matchbox, which held the tiny tea set.

We made books for the dolls with actual tiny pages, so tiny I can’t figure out how we made them. I can just barely make out titles like Little Women, Little House in the Big Woods, The Wizard of Oz, and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We loved challenging ourselves to write as small as we possibly could.

Our dolls wrote one another tiny letters in tiny envelopes; I’ve kept a couple letters that Lucy’s dolls, or “P.D.s,” sent to mine.

Tiny envelopes and a letter that was inside one of them. I love the colorful 1970s envelope!

Over time, some of the dolls got more elaborate, with faces and hair.

A fairy and a little family, apparently with older parents.

But what I remember the most are the stick figures, and the many hours we devoted to creating things for them.

A sadly blurry photo of part of the “house” where the dolls lived — a large, white wooden box, which you can see a bit of in the photo of 10-year-old me. Their “rooms” were divided by rugs; the orange one is a fuzzy 1970s smiley face.

I don’t recall how long we continued creating pipe cleaner dolls and their possessions, but they remain one of my fondest childhood memories. To this day, there have only been a few other things that get me in that flow state. I’m glad I kept a few of the dolls and their things — but whatever becomes of them, their memory will always remain.

---

A note on writing about dolls at this time

It feels odd to write about dolls at a time when children around the world are being robbed of their childhoods. I had it easy. Though the First Noble Truth in Buddhism reminds us that everyone suffers in life, my suffering hasn’t included living through the horrors of war.

I don’t feel qualified to comment on what’s going on in Israel and Gaza, or in other places around the world where conflict continues. Nor do I want to offer platitudes. But it wouldn’t feel right in this dark time not to acknowledge what’s going on, and my own privilege, which I’ve enjoyed throughout my life — a privilege that gave me a safe and protected childhood in which to create my dolls and their world. I wish that safety and peace for every living being.

---