The first thing you notice is their faces — pert, pink cheeks, puckered lips and darling eyes looking up. Each one has its own dainty design right down to the toe rings, painted nails and floral hats. There are fairies and witches, clowns and grinning grannies, frogs and pigs in tutus, and divas in all their dazzling charm.

“I’m always trying to think of something new and different,” says their creator, Gerri Ridge. Like a gardener looking over her prized perennials in bloom, she surveys the dozens of dolls that will be on display in an upcoming craft show this weekend in Haywood County.

This menagerie looks like the culmination of years of careful study, but Ridge discovered her love for doll making only recently. After she and her husband retired from Aiken, S.C., they moved in 2003 to Bryson City, where Ridge had grown up before leaving in 1978 to pursue a career as a dental assistant. For years, she had been used to using small tools and examining the details of faces close-up, and when she was looking for something creative to do in retirement, making dolls seemed like something fun and new.

“My first dolls were soft sculpture,” she says, meaning their bodies were flexible unlike immovable versions of porcelain dolls.

“I never thought I’d be doing this,” she adds. “I’ve always been too busy and just needed to find something to do.”

Picking up fabric and accessories at various craft stores, she’d piece together outfits, and once she learned in doll magazines about how to use polymer clay to create body parts, a hobby soon turned into a major production. Last year, she sold more than 100 dolls.

The polymer clay allows the artist to form a doll’s face that almost looks real. Once she forms the basic head shape, she adds in cheeks, nose, eyes and ears. Then, she takes the head and bakes it for about 30 minutes in an oven outside on her porch. After the clay has hardened, she’ll paint it with an acrylic. Next come the shoes and hands — also made with polymer clay. The legs and arms are made out of a soft polyester material wrapped in floral wire. This allows the dolls to pose their arms and legs in various gestures. And Ridge likes to set her dolls up, legs crossed, hands outstretched to catch a bit of rain or display some jewelry.

“I’ve never grown up,” Ridge admits. “I guess I’m just a kid.”

This weekend, she’ll be displaying and selling her dolls along with other crafters at the Blue Ridge Artists and Crafters Association show on Saturday, July 5, and Sunday, July 6, at the Fairgrounds in Waynesville. She’s also showcased her work at Western Carolina University’s Mountain Heritage Day, and a one-of-a-kind Sequoyah doll she made is on display at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.

Young girls on up to senior citizens buy these dolls. Orders for the dolls come from all over Western North Carolina, but Ridge continues to make one doll at a time, rather than making clones on an assembly line. It’s the unique personality of each doll that gives her Blossom Original Art Dolls their flair, and besides, she reminds herself, it’s all about the joy of the process.

Self taught through trial and error, she’s discovered little tricks along the way. For example, the torso of each doll is actually a wine bottle — just the right size so a head can fit snuggly over the top neck of the bottle. For slightly smaller doll sizes, she uses Laura Lynn hot sauce bottles. She’ll cover the bottles with fabric, much like a pillowcase, and then seal the neck area with hot glue.

“I don’t want my dolls to come apart,” she says.

Once she dresses the doll with clothes, she’ll sew on the legs and arms. Then come the accessories — a lily pad umbrella for a frog, balloons or cotton candy for a clown, or butterfly wings for a fairy.

“ I try to make the back of the doll as interesting as the front,” she says.

Her signature is some sort of flower — either a hat or a dress design, a bouquet or frilly cuffs.

And with doll names like Prissy Pig or Simply Ravishing Rose, some also come with a little attitude. One clown named “Cast Your Troubles to the Wind” carries pink balloons in one hand and a black balloon in the other that she’s letting go. Fitted with matching pink and black polka-dotted suspenders and stockings, a touch of green, a top hat slightly askew, and a toe popping out of one of her shoes, she seems composed after weathering the blues.

Some dolls appear wide-eyed and ready for shopping with their matching hat and handbag while others have their eyes closed and wear a contented smile as if caught sniffing their own flowery fragrance. With their purses, earrings, and color-coordinated accessories, these dolls are fashion models of fantasy, with faces that invite a conversation. It’s an art form that continues to amaze.

Where to buy:

Gerri Ridge’s Blossom Original Art Dolls are available at area galleries including Déja View Gallery in Waynesville, Primrose Lane in Franklin, the Artists’ House Studio and Gallery in Bryson City, the Flower Shop in Bryson City and Hearthside Handmades in Little Switzerland. For more information, email 2ridge@myway.com.