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When Shirley Reschke was just a little girl of seven or eight years, she had her heart set on a baby doll about the length of a baby carrot, give or take a couple centimetres. The doll cost ten cents and she remembers having to save every single penny herself to buy it.
Seven decades later, Shirley still has that doll, lying in a cradle made from a saltbox. It has its own little crocheted outfit, mattress, blanket and pillow, all of which are as old as the doll itself.
“That was my first little wee doll,” says Shirley. “Ever since I was a little girl, dolls were my No. 1 thing.”
Though she was born in Calgary, Shirley has lived in the Barrhead area for virtually her entire life. She worked as a practical nurse for many years and she and her husband operated Affordable Frames for over two decades.
Her name is likely recognizable to some Barrhead residents for a couple different reasons, the first being that she spent many years teaching evening art classes to students of all ages, from as children as young as 12 to grandmothers.
As well, she and a group of other ladies was also involved in making almost 3,000 handmade quilts to be shipped overseas to less fortunate citizens in Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, Panama and other countries.
But while she is talented quilter and painter, Shirley’s most notable artistic credential is that she is also a master dollmaker, in that she literally possesses a grandmaster's degree in doll making.
In fact, the Oct. 24, 1994 edition of the Town & Country newspaper features a short profile of Shirley that suggests that she was the first-ever master doll maker from Canada.
While her obsession with dolls dates back to her childhood, Shirley really got into doll making after her four children left the nest.
“It was just like I was let free out of a cage” she jokes.
The first porcelain doll she made was in a class taught by the home economics teacher at the Barrhead high school. Shirley says the doll, which resembles an actual sleeping baby to an uncanny degree, is called “Sugar Britches.”
One of these dolls, she notes, was once mistaken for a real baby when left in the backseat of a car. The police only learned of the truth when they broke the car’s windows to retrieve the abandoned baby.
“That’s how real she looks,” Shirley says.
While Shirley has made dolls from ceramics, most of the dolls in her possession are porcelain. She notes that porcelain is lighter and prettier than ceramic, but it also has one other interesting quality: it’s translucent, so if you hold ceramic next to a bright light, the light will shine through.
Shirley says the process of making a porcelain doll involves pouring slip (a slimy, grey material) into a mold to create heads, legs, arms and other parts of the doll. The slip becomes porcelain when it is fired in an incredibly hot kiln, and once you apply paint to the doll, it has to be fired again at a lower temperature.
The reason for the second firing, she notes, is porcelain dolls are painted with “china paints,” which adhere to the porcelain like glue but can be just wiped off if they aren’t literally burned into the material.
Of course, all dolls require accessories — wigs, dresses, socks, shoes and so on. When you considering the time it takes to craft all of those items, the process can take dozens of hours.
That’s particularly the case with the antique reproduction dolls that Shirley actually underwent training to make. She spent years travelling down to the U.S. to undergo courses and attend seminars put on by the Seely Company, which is (or at least was) the largest doll company in the world.
To get her actual degree, she had to make a perfect reproduction of an antique doll, using photographs provided by the Seely Company as a reference.
The “perfect” part must be emphasized, as the judges literally examined Shirley’s doll with a magnifying glass to ensure it was a 100 per cent reproduction. She had to spend a week just on the doll's face alone, making sure its eyebrows had the exact same slant and depth of colour.
“If it’s an antique reproduction, it has to be the same as the old doll was years ago,” she said.
Shirley has entered her dolls in several competitions over the years and has a number of ribbons and awards to show for it. Notably, one of the dolls that won an award at a show in Edmonton was made with a process called “lace draping” where the doll is dressed in lace, coated in the slip and then fired in a kiln, leaving a doll that is literally clothed in glass.
“She is my pride and joy, that one,” says Shirley.
Over the years, Shirley has made dozens of dolls that populate display cases around her home, as well as many other unfinished dolls that sit in boxes in the downstairs.
While she originally had some notion of making dolls for actual clients, most of her dolls were made for the joy of having crafted something beautiful. She even jokingly refers to it as a disease.
“When you get into dolls, you get the ‘doll-pox’. And there’s no cure for it … you just keep going and going and going,” Shirley says.
