Santa’s Workshop Close to Home

From midnight on Monday, Dec. 1 it is 24 days until Christmas morning arrives and while many children envision Santa’s workshop filled with dozens of elves furiously building the toys on their wish list, the truth is some of the toys are made a lot closer to home

One of them, local doll maker, Beth Karpas doesn’t have a magic sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer and her workshop is in Mountain View not the North Pole. But, her toys have delighted children all over the world.

Her multisided dolls, which when turned inside out reveal a different doll, are almost as well known as the nursery rhymes that accompany them. The Little Red Riding Hood doll that transforms into the grandmother and the Big Bad Wolf is probably familiar from your own childhood.

Karpas began making dolls at the tender age of 8, when a teacher taught her to fashion a doll out of a jelly jar, a stocking and a handful of cotton stuffing. Next, Karpas taught herself how to make puppets and then began creating dolls in the images of friends and family.

“I never had any type of training,” she said. “I make them because I like creating things and sharing the stories.”

In 1992, Karpas began working as a librarian and using the dolls and puppets to make story time come to life.

“ I started out with the traditional folktales,” said Karpas, who worked as a librarian in Ohio and Los Angeles. “I tend to look for stories with animals and people in them. The multisided dolls make it easier to tell the stories because they have multiple characters in one.”

When her husband’s job brought her to Mountain View in 2000, Karpas retired as a librarian and started her own toy company, Realms of Gold. She began selling her dolls at arts and crafts shows and later set up a storefront online where she offers several variations of the multisided storybook dolls including the Apple Children, chubby-faced youngsters who change into apples, and the multisided stuffed animals, which are larger versions of the storybook characters.

At first, the Karpas’ dolls coincided with characters from classic children’s books, such as “Cinderella,” “The Frog Prince” and “Little Women.” But now her product line has expanded to include characters from Asian, European and African folklore.

“I research a new country each year,” she said.

This year she designed dolls for several Thai stories and a Cinderella story that is found in Cambodian, Vietnamese and Indonesian folklore.

Karpas’ home studio reveals her dedication to the craft of doll-aking. Rolls of fabric fill closets, 50-pound boxes of cotton stuffing sit in the garage, books can be found in every room and she often says that no one leaves her house without catching a piece of yarn or string on his clothing.

The dolls can take from one hour to five hours to make. She has made over 400 dolls this year and says the months leading up the Christmas are the busiest.

Further North on U.S. Highway 101, is Stanford Business School graduate Daniel Grossman’s toy company, Wild Planet Toys.

Grossman graduated from Stanford’s MBA program in 1991 and started Wild Planet Toys in 1993 with three business partners. A decade later, the San Francisco-based company employs 50 people.

Wild Planet Toys and its employees strive to design toys that promote imagination and spark creativity as well as treating both genders equally, said Kim Bratcher, a spokesperson for Wild Planet Toys.

The company designs and manufactures high-tech toys for next generation of secret agents and world explorers. The Spy Gear line offers an assortment of secret agent gizmos including a truth detector, night vision goggles and a motion detector.

While the Off the Map line provides the next generation of world explorers with a Go Go Gadget tool to conquer the great outdoors such as a wrist walkie-talkie and a watch that combines a magnifying glass, thermometer, digital alarm clock ,compass and mirror all in one timepiece. This year’s hot seller, the Eye-Link Communicator, not only enables the person wearing it listen to conversations through doors, walls, buildings and from across the street but also allows children to type a message and transmit it via high frequency radio transmission to the illuminated eye-pieces of their playmates.

“It gets very busy as the holidays approach, but not for the reasons one might anticipate,” said Bratcher. “The cycle of toy sales is such that (during October through December) a toy company is busy showing its new ideas for the holidays of the following year to buyers.”

Wild Planet designers are busy experimenting with new sample toy models that won’t be under the Christmas tree until 2005.