Owner: Ediane Remark
Products: Handmade dolls, rattles and cockle toys
Price range: The dolls ambit from $30 to $65, depending on admeasurement and customizable add-ons; rattles ambit from $10 to $18; and the cockle toys from $8 to $15
Find her work: www.facebook.com/SweetRemarksByEdiane or www.instagram.com/sweetremarksbyediane
Ediane Remark brand to antic that she acclimated to be abashed of bed-making machines.
Now they’re an capital allotment of her artistic action as she makes handmade dolls, rattles and cockle toys for children.
Sweet Remarks began as a crocheted chaplet aggregation in 2012 afterwards Remark’s oldest babe was born. She’d accomplish headbands for her and began affairs them back accompany bidding absorption in absent some for their own kids.
It eventually acquired into her authoritative crocheted dolls, for which she sewed absolute apparel by hand. That, she says, was the breaking point.
“I said, ‘This is ridiculous. It takes so abundant time. I charge to apprentice how to use a bed-making machine,’” Remark says, laughing.
So she bought herself one as a altogether present in 2014 and fabricated her aboriginal babyish a year later, with a chargeless arrangement she begin online.
“I instantly fell in love,” says Remark, who anguish up authoritative added and gave them as favors for her youngest daughter’s altogether affair that year.
“I fabricated a boy babyish for one of the boys that was advancing and he was a superhero, and I acquaint about it, pictures, because I was so excited,” she says. “And a acquaintance of abundance was like, ‘Do you advertise the boy dolls?’ … And that’s affectionate of how I afflicted admonition because I realized, I’ve consistently admired dolls and that just, it was such a passion. So I formed to accomplish my patterns my own, and that’s basically how it started.”
“Even for the ballerinas that I fabricated as favors [for the girls], I admired the arrangement I got online but I knew that if I was activity to abide with it, I capital them to be mine, my vision,” she adds. “I’ve formed on the patterns to accomplish abiding the babyish resembles what I anticipate of childhood, continued and lanky.”
Add-ons to the dolls can accommodate headbands and name personalization.
She creates three types of dolls. The Lil’ Rags Baby, she says, is “designed to attending like a babyish cutting footed pajamas. Their anatomy is appealing abundant all in the aforementioned book and again they have, some of them accept what I accede a attachment pull, a band bottomward the middle, or lace.”
The babies alpha at $30 and are amid 14.5 and 15 inches long.
The approved Lil’ Rag doll, which starts at $35, is 15 inches continued and comes with ponytail hairstyles for girls, beanies for boys and disposable pants, with the advantage to add on dress-up sets. There’s additionally a 20-inch doll, alleged the Modern Rag Doll, that starts at $50.
Right now, the bigger dolls appear with disposable bottoms, but in 2018, Remark is activity to accomplish all the clothes disposable so the dolls can be dressed up. Her “Let’s Accomplish Believe” dress-up sets accommodate pieces that can about-face the dolls into mermaids, pirates, princesses, fairies and superheroes.
She’d additionally like to agree a architecture for an 8- to 9-inch continued babyish in the new year.
The bodies and faces of Remark’s creations are 100 percent cotton. She uses bleed for the hair, hand-embroiders the faces and stuffs them with a polyester polyfill, a mix of polyester and cotton.
She buys her fabrics from several sources, including Sew Simple on Wards Road in Lynchburg.
“I aloof adulation the fabrics that she [Sew Simple buyer Amy Johnson] gets in the boutique and a lot of my dolls afresh accept been fabricated application that fabric,” Remark says. “The new bodies that my dolls are activity to have, I absolutely begin [the fabric] there. I like the quality.”
Remark generally takes custom orders, which accept a turnaround time of four to six weeks. Anniversary doll, she says, can booty amid bristles and seven hours to complete.
“The faces are hand-embroidered, and the beard is hand-embroidered. They’re blimp in a assertive way,” she says. “It takes a assertive time to get that look.”
Customizable add-ons accommodate headbands or hats, name personalization and babyish quilts.
Her tagline is “because every allowance should accomplish a statement,” and Remark has done aloof that back starting her company. She’s fabricated superhero dolls, firemen, a pilot and, aftermost year, three flannel men for a woman whose bedmate had anesthetized away; she capital a babyish that looked like him for anniversary of her three daughters to beddy-bye with, Remark says.
Then there was the time she fabricated a dinosaur.
“A woman wrote to me and said, ‘My son wants him but as a dinosaur. What do you got?’” she recalls. “So I created a babyish that about is a anachronistic but has a child’s arch on it. I’m absolutely authoritative addition one. Somebody asked if I could accomplish one for them. I consistently anticipate that’s so fun.”
