Does it seem to you that it would be a delightful business to make
hundreds of thousands of dolls every year? H’m! Does this huge kettle
of bad-smelling mush make you think of the dainty, smiling dolls in
the toy-shop window? Dolly is made, though you would never guess it,
of chopped up bits of old kid gloves and pieces of cardboard boiled
to a pulp in a gum made from the horns of goats. And here is a man
shovelling sawdust into a kettle half full of boiling water. Now he
is turning the mass into a big mixing trough, adding one shovelful
after another of the gluey mush. The machinery creaks and turns and
cuts and slaps as this mixture is kneaded into a composition pulp.
Now he is carrying some of it in a hod, for all the world like sticky
mortar, to a weighing table! Sweep! it is spread out in an even
thickness. Clip! down come the knives which part it into the right
quantities, and it is swiftly pressed and moulded to the shape
of a body, an arm, or a leg. In one factory alone the parts of as
many as forty thousand dolls are thus made in one day, and the ugly,
greenish shapes set aside to harden. Another day they pass quickly
under the brushes in the painters’ hands after which they have the
more familiar rosy pink color, and dolly can now be put together
except for the head.
[Illustration:
_Copyright, 1908, by Underwood & Underwood, New York_
DOLL-MAKING]
Of these dolls the heads are to be of porcelain. Once for all, long
ago, some artist made the model of which many duplicate moulds stand
ready. Into these moulds liquid porcelain clay is poured; before it
hardens the openings for the eyes are cut and tiny holes made by
which it can be joined to a body. After the moulds are opened, as the
rows and rows of little heads stand in metal trays, a painter comes
by, covers them with a glaze-wash, tints the cheeks and outlines the
brows and lashes. Now into the oven goes the tray for hours of slow
baking. But even with the head sewed on we have but a sad-looking
dolly, both blind and bald.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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