One day I was going through the garage to pull out some things for a yard sale and I ran across a box of dolls from my wife's childhood. Among the dolls was an Eskimo Pie advertising doll. It was just two pieces of printed fabric that were sewn together and stuffed with cotton, or something. A very simply process that left lots of room for design potential. I decided then I'd like to make something like that.
I sat down to ponder and draw and came up with some stuff that I didn't hate — "Devil Dolls" — limited edition hand-screen printed, stuffed dolls. The dolls would be sold on a subscription basis only. For, let's say, $150 you'd get a total of six dolls guaranteed to be in a limited production of no more than, let's say, 50 or 75 each. The dolls, packaged like cheap dime store toys in clear plastic bags with printed cardboard headers, would arrive once a month for six months. The header would have depictions of all the dolls in the series except for the last one which was shown only as a Devil Doll silhouette with a big question mark reversed out of it. The last doll of the series would be a "Mystery Doll." The Mystery Doll would arrive packaged like the other dolls except that instead of a clear plastic bag, the bag would be opaque black and the header would be all black except for a big question mark on the front (secretly I hoped that people would never open the last doll's packaging to see what it looked like).
I worked for a while on some doll and header designs. I even made a few prototypes. It was exciting and fun to think about.
Work from paying clients heated up and I wasn't able to spend the amount of time on this project that it needed. I still like this idea and I hope to revisit it some day. Maybe someday soon I'll have the time pick this up again and actually make it happen.
I've had a few more thoughts on it...
