Jannie de Lange lives in a small
village in the Netherlands. She has had a passion for dolls since her
childhood but since it was impossible to purchase any where she lived,
she instead collected pictures and made paper dolls out of them. Her
doll collecting started when she became a mother. As she bought dolls
for her three daughters.
It
was when she visited a doll show and saw some hand-sculpted dolls made
of polymer clay that she immediately enrolled in a sculpting class and
since that time has sculpted her own one-of-a-kind dolls. She quickly
developed her own style, tried all different types of clay and settled
on polymer clay.
Jannie
has been sculpting since 1994 and her baby dolls since 1999 which are
well known world-wide now. She quickly developed her own style, tried all
different types of clay and settled on polymer clay, which she mixes
from different colors and from her own experience to achieve her
realistic skin tone. Polymer clay needs a lot of kneading and it
takes a long time and a lot of preparation before it is soft enough to
be used. Before the sculpted head can be baked in the oven, she treats
the clay in her own special way to imitate the skin texture as realistic
as possible.
Her
Baby-dolls have become immensely popular worldwide. The head,
arms/hands and legs and “Belly-plate” are sculpted of a polymer-clay the
body is made of cotton. She stuffs and weights them to feel like a
real baby. The babies have glass blown eyes, human hair eyelashes and
wear high quality mohair wigs. The sizes of her babies vary from 18"
to 22".
