Carving Out a Brand-New Life Through the Looking Glass

Mary Lee Sundstrom spends much of her day with a small sharp knife between her fingers, meticulously crafting pieces of soft Asian wood into popular storybook characters.

Right now, the Santa Paula woman is busy making 100 wooden reproductions of Alice from the 1865 Lewis Carroll classic, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

During the past 10 years, she’s carved other dolls. But none have been as popular as Hitty, a simple country doll less than seven inches high that is based on the heroine of a decades-old children’s story.

Some of those dolls sold for $1,000 each, Sundstrom, 68, said recently from her bright and airy home in the foothills of Santa Paula’s Sulphur Mountain.

Some collectors are so desperate to get one of Sundstrom’s limited-edition dolls that they ply Sundstrom’s mailbox with letters, each asking how and when they can get their own Hitty.

One woman’s letter to Sundstrom begins: “Where have you been for the last 45 years?” The woman explains that is how long she has been searching for a faithful reproduction of Hitty, the title character from the 1929 book “Hitty, Her First Hundred Years,” written by Rachel Field.

Sundstrom’s success with Hitty took even those well-versed in the doll collector’s market by surprise.

“It seems people are just intrigued by the story of Hitty,” said Caroline Cook, publisher of the Doll Reader, a Pennsylvania-based magazine for doll collectors with a circulation of 100,000 readers worldwide.

“There is sort of a romance for that little creature,” Cook said. “I don’t quite understand it myself.”

Sundstrom, a retired illustrator, had no intention of tapping into a hidden Hitty cult when she began carving dolls about 10 years ago. She just wanted small, lifelike figures that would fit perfectly into a two-story dollhouse given to her by her husband, Al.

She learned to carve, starting with soap, as a young girl growing up in Washington state, Sundstrom said. She quickly moved on to wood, which remains her favorite sculpting material, she said.

For her dolls, she uses a soft, fine-grained wood called Jelutong. It comes from gum trees found in southeast Asia, the same trees that are used to make latex, she said.

“I love wood,” Sundstrom said. “It smells nice and it’s soft enough so you don’t have to fight it, but hard enough that it holds its shape.”

“That’s the relationship a carver must have with wood. You have to coax it into shape.”

Sundstrom said it takes total concentration to carve her finely featured dolls. The pieces are first “rough carved” on a machine by Don Reinke, a Santa Paula neighbor who runs a doll-carving business with his wife, Sandy.

Sundstrom then fine-tunes the carvings, paints and assembles them. Sandy Reinke, an accomplished seamstress who is also a doll collector, stitches the detailed costumes the dolls wear.

Just as Sundstrom uses only high-quality wood for her dolls, Reinke said she tries to find the best materials for the clothes. She buys tiny satin ribbons from Salt Lake City, for example, and orders fine cotton cloth from Florida.

It is the women’s craftsmanship that makes the dolls so desirable for collectors, Cook said.

“Sundstrom’s scale is so accurate,” Cook said. “So many other Hitty dolls are way out of proportion and don’t look like the original.”

Field’s book chronicles the adventures and misadventures of a doll named Hitty. The author based the book on a tiny doll she actually found at an antique shop, Sundstrom said.

The original Hitty doll is now housed in a Massachusetts museum, Sundstrom said.

Sundstrom said she decided to make reproductions of Hitty after reading about the doll in a periodical for collectors. At first, Don Reinke was skeptical about making such a tiny doll, his wife recalled.

“When we sold the first one for $800, he changed his mind,” Sandy Reinke said.

All 100 copies of Hitty have been sold, Sundstrom said. She is now concentrating on making eight-inch-high versions of Alice from the Carroll book.