Mid-Week Treat: Faith & Porcelain-The Tools of Artist Sandi Walker

As I leaned in to study the porcelain doll faces displayed from corner to corner of the plate glass window, the door opened and an older gentleman poked his head out.

“Have you ever been in here before?”

“No, I haven’t but I was just about to,” I said. 

He swung the door wide and said, “Well, come on in, young lady,” in that quintessentially small-town way.

What I found inside Dolls & Designs by Sandi was extraordinary.  Valdese, North Carolina sits a little over and hour east of Asheville in the foothills of some of America’s greatest mountains.  It has a population of 4,400.  This isn’t the type of town where one expects to find rare artisans practicing their craft inconspicuously, but this is where I found Sandi Walker.

First, I do not collect dolls and knew nothing about the craft before I walked in, but I was an admirer by the time I walked out two hours later.  Walker has been handcrafting dolls for 38 years and is the largest custom dollmaker in North Carolina. 

My first gasp was for the sheer number of her creations.  The tiny store on Main Street displays hundreds of custom dolls from floor to ceiling.  They range in size from three inches to nearly life-size.  There is one narrow aisle in the center just wide enough for she and I to stand.

My second gasp was for the quality of the handiwork.  I turned to see a nearly life-sized Princess Diana staring back at me. She did not need a label.  The features were unmistakable.  Nearby, on the left, were life-like infants.  On the right were period pieces in gowns from a dozen eras long past.

In fact, Walker was preparing for her annual doll giveaway.  World Doll Day is celebrated on the second Saturday in June. Annually, Walker gives away dozens of free dolls to neighbors in the community. Sorting an inventory as large as this one to determine which dolls should be kept on display and which should be given away is no small feat.  Jerry Walker continued sorting while Sandi patiently answered my rapid-fire questions.

• Where do you get all the clothes? She designs and sews many of them herself.
• What’s the first piece of clothing you designed yourself?  A gray 1880’s ballgown.
• Where do you get the ideas for each doll’s appearance?  She can design a doll to look like a person from a photograph and others are just from her imagination.

Walker also offers “doll doctor” services for those very old specimens that need cleaning or repair.  To illustrate, she continued to saturate a small doll’s orange hair with an unknown chemical and delicately brush it out while we talked.  She explained that people ship their old family heirloom dolls to her from all over the country.  She repairs or cleans them and sends them home.

“Fewer and fewer people are sculpting the faces by hand anymore,” she said.  “I buy a mold to make a cast.  If it is a custom portrait doll, I look to see if I have a mold with similar features to the person in the picture.”

“She’s got 5700 molds, you know,” Mr. Walker interjected.

Sandi Walker continued, “Then, I sculpt the face and other features by hand to make it look more like the person.”

In fact, the pièce de resistance in the store for me was Miss Flossie.  This genteel elderly lady combines hand sculpted features, hand painted wrinkles and veins and hand sewn clothes.  Every inch is impeccable, right down to the shoes on her feet that really lace up.

In 1991, Walker won “Best of Dolls” in the professional class at the Western North Carolina Ceramics Association competition against 300 competitors for her childlike rodeo clown doll.

Equally important is that Walker is a member of the Waldensian community.  In her spare time, she leads historical tours of the “Trail of Faith.”  This local attraction tells the story of the Waldensian people who founded Valdese in 1893.  In fact, “Valdese” is the Italian version of “Waldensian.”  Theirs is a story of religious persecution by the Catholics and eventual exile from their homeland on the Italian-French border into the Swiss Alps in the late 14^th Century. 

The only thing besides dollmaking that Sandi Walker discusses with equal fervor is the history of the Waldenses.  First, she tells me of their belief that lay people, not just clergy, should be able to read the Bible.  This belief did not sit right with the Catholic church of the day.  Then, she recounts the tale of how the Lord diverted the bullets as her ancestors fled to safety.  Today, in fact, tiny Valdese represents the largest group of Waldenses outside of the Alps. Walker is a woman of great faith and she believes unequivocally that her talent is God-given.  She learned to sew as a child from her mother and grandmother.  She used to ask them how they were able to sew so well.  Their reply was always, “God.”  Today, this is her reply too.

Bringing joy to children and adult collectors is her passion.  Walker lost a son 17 years ago and his childhood doll has been resurrected as “Susie” for her own granddaughter.  The day I visited Susie was on display next to an old photo of Walker’s son as a young boy. He holds the doll in its original form.

A teacher at heart, Walker shows me a Bye-lo baby doll that is nearly 100 years old.  “It was known as the ‘Million Dollar Doll.’  The company that made them sold one million of them for $1.00 right before Christmas in 1923,” she explains.  Then, she tells me the story of the time she went to a guy’s house to buy a used car.  He knew what she did for a living and gifted her a china doll head that he found buried in the dirt in his yard.  Incredibly, as it turned out, it was from 1890 and the head was all that remained.  She took it to her shop and recreated a body, the limbs, and clothes for it. I gasp again.  You don’t have to be a doll collector to be fascinated by Walker’s stories and the sheer vastness of her knowledge.

In my naiveté, I said, “I assume many of these aren’t meant to be played with, but rather collected.”

“Oh, of course you can play with them,” she scoffed as if I’d just said the most ridiculous thing.  “If it gets dirty or damaged, just send it back to me and I’ll clean it up,” she said handing me a century-old doll to examine with supreme confidence and faith that it would be safe with me.

In reality, that confidence has been earned over four decades.  Sandi Walker is an artisan of the highest order and rarely seeks recognition in competitions or through public accolades.  She is happy to design custom dolls, repair those that have seen better days and, lastly, to give away free creations one day each year in the tiniest, most unassuming shop in the North Carolina mountains. With faith and porcelain, she crafted a simple, beautiful life.

So, next time you are in the Western North Carolina mountains, if you’d like to visit Mrs. Walker, the Fairfield Inn & Suites in Morganton, North Carolina (see my discussion of that property here) is a perfect base of operations. In fact, from this beautiful hotel, you can also visit the Catawba Meadows Park and living history site that I’ve written about previously.