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Doll maker Tammy Blunte has seen firsthand how important it is for children – and even adults – to see your own image in a doll.
Brent told Yahoo Life that she grew up in Trinidad in the ’80s and ’90s with cabbage dolls and white Barbie dolls, “but I never found a doll like mine. To find one,” she added Black dolls are very difficult. If you find a black doll, it’s always been an Afro-centric hairstyle. It never got the right skin tone. Representation does not exist.
Blunt shared that she comes from a “creative” family and learned to sew and crochet from her mother and aunt at a very young age. As a child, she made her own doll clothes using a children’s Singer sewing machine. In 2014, she ventured into making her first crocheted doll, but said, “I never thought it would be a long-term career”.
However, when Blunt started posting pictures of the dolls she made on her Instagram, she received a flood of positive reactions. “A lot of people said, ‘I’ve never seen anything like this,'” she recalled. “‘This is so beautiful.’ ‘This is so beautiful.’ I want to have one of my own.'” She added that some people texted her saying, “Where were these things when I was growing up?”
The positive response to her work “was an inspiration to me to develop this market that I realized was neglected,” said Blunt, a mother of four who lives in El Paso, Texas . “This is where Tammy B Creations was born. So I can share my dolls with anyone in the world”.
Making sure her dolls have a wide range of skin tones is important to Blunte. When a customer orders a custom Tammy B Creations doll, there are 21 different skin tones — “I try to match your skin tone,” she says, along with about 10 different hairstyles to choose from.
Customers can also pick “what type of clothing do you want the doll to wear,” she said, “shoes, eye color, lip color,” and more. In addition to glasses, Blunt can also accommodate special requests, such as hearing aids and birthmarks. “I have a lot of attention to detail,” she said.
If a customer submits a photo, Brent can “recreate the photo for you” so the doll exactly matches it. “I want my doll to go to the house of a little girl who doesn’t have anything like her,” she said.
She also makes custom dolls based on people who have passed away, which is a comfort to children and adults alike who miss their loved ones. Brent said it was a “very touching” process.
Brent can take anywhere from 4 to 6 weeks to make one doll, and she makes parts of different dolls at the same time – head, hands, feet. She estimates she has made as many as 300 dolls so far.
Learning that mass retailers still have “limited” selection of black dolls, prompting her to continue making her crocheted dolls. “It’s still a bit of a tricky thing to go to a store and see a black doll,” she said.
She wants bigger stores to see that having dolls of all skin tones is “deeply needed,” she said. “It’s important to let black people know they are represented and that black dolls need to be just as important as dolls of other skin colors.”
she added. “Until then, I’m going to keep making my dolls, just to get that representation out, because we need it,” she said. “We need it.”
Brent shared that she’s received so many heartwarming videos of kids getting excited about their custom dolls, “that’s what keeps me going”. She believes the dolls can help children “gain confidence and improve their mental state, like ‘wow, I’m beautiful'”.
Having a doll like theirs was a “special gift,” Brent said. “Says like, ‘Well, this doll has my skin color, it looks like me,’ and those words — ‘Like me’ — I love to hear.”
she added. “I need people to understand that having something that makes them happy and proud, it can really do a lot for little girls and boys and even see that for adults.”
