Zombies

&

Ro_&bo ts
Bears

oh my!

BY MARY BELTON

The world of creepy
cute dolls and the
people who make them.

Klops is a sexy beast, with curved pointy horns and a bottom row of sharp jagged teeth. His handsome felt-lined button eye catches mine, and I admire his polyester strip of man-fur that runs from his chin to below his navel. He’s the ultimate Cyclops, a lady’s monster, if you will, at least according to his creators at Creature Co-op ( creatureco-op.com), who run a booth at the annual Los Angeles Bazaar Bizarre, a bustling craft fair that sells everything from knitted food to laminated purses to magnet boards made with vintage frames. I get to the fair right after the doors open, and already it’s mobbed with people. As I make my way down the long aisles of vendors, I realize that hand-stitched dolls — which range from adorable Japanese-influenced animals to half-crazed fuzzy creatures that hover somewhere between cute and creepy — are attracting swarms of people and seem to be one of the hottest categories at the fair.

According to Robert Kalin of Etsy ( etsy.com), an online marketplace for handmade stuff, the stitched doll trend started in 2003 with the popularity of Uglydolls ( uglydolls.com). Six years earlier, Sun-Min Kim, just out of art school, stitched her