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Rating: 
Summary: Beautiful book, relatively useless for a beginner
Review: The dolls made of paper clay, wood, foam, wire and paper and other items featured in this book are exciting and beautiful. The book is beautiful. The author is obviously quite talented as an artist. Unfortunately, I found the instructions are woeful in terms of helping a beginner. The author assumes the reader knows what a "wooden ball-top mug peg" is, what "push molds" are. For a beginner, some of the instructions are sketchy and difficult to understand. For instance, although steps of construction are numbered, in one case, there was nothing to inform the reader that she/he was trying to make a head out of a square of paper and some stuffing material. I give the book two stars for beauty and one for usefulness to a beginner like me. If you are new to this type of art, it might be a good idea to look carefully at this book at a store before purchasing to determine whether it would be helpful to you.
Rating:
Summary: "Paperclay" dolls, not "paper" dolls
Review: While this is a lovely book for the advanced crafter, I don't consider paperclay a true "paper" medium. Most of the recipes here call for items far beyond what I was hoping to see, such as beading wire and wire cutters, clay or paperclay, molds, cornstarch, and cheesecloth. You get to make dreamcatchers and modeled papier-mache dolls, but only half a dozen of the nearly 30 projects appealed to me as actual "paper dolls." The others have an advanced "Way of the Doll" feeling, but for the money, I'd rather buy several Dover paper doll books and create my own projects. This book gives instructions for re-creating specific art dolls but is intimidating rather than encouraging of individual creativity (even specifically disallowing commercial sale of the projects described within, because they are NOT "jumping-off" ideas, but copyrighted finished products). And though the author is trying to expand the definition of "paper doll," even an elastic word or phrase can be stretched past the breaking point, as has happened here. However, the doll projects are both photographed and, inexplicably, illustrated in drawings. The drawings could be photocopied and cut out to make interesting (and quick!) paper dolls.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful book, relatively useless for a beginner
Review: While this is a lovely book for the advanced crafter, I don't consider paperclay a true "paper" medium. Most of the recipes here call for items far beyond what I was hoping to see, such as beading wire and wire cutters, clay or paperclay, molds, cornstarch, and cheesecloth. You get to make dreamcatchers and modeled papier-mache dolls, but only half a dozen of the nearly 30 projects appealed to me as actual "paper dolls." The others have an advanced "Way of the Doll" feeling, but for the money, I'd rather buy several Dover paper doll books and create my own projects. This book gives instructions for re-creating specific art dolls but is intimidating rather than encouraging of individual creativity (even specifically disallowing commercial sale of the projects described within, because they are NOT "jumping-off" ideas, but copyrighted finished products). And though the author is trying to expand the definition of "paper doll," even an elastic word or phrase can be stretched past the breaking point, as has happened here. However, the doll projects are both photographed and, inexplicably, illustrated in drawings. The drawings could be photocopied and cut out to make interesting (and quick!) paper dolls.
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