About Us

After several dramatic life changes, we were looking to pivot from an IT support business to toys, wood primitives and the maker culture as a more joyful way to be.  During the pandemic, on a creative mission, we turned this dream into a reality and started designing doll costume stands to keep busy and figure out a way to bring them to market.  This website is the result and an expansion of our original blog website The Dollmaker.

Mountain Woods Media, LLC through this website project "Doll Costume Stand" offers primitive styled wooden doll costume stands for displaying handsewn, artisan or factory made high end doll costumes. After a year of trying to make stuffed muslin doll costume mannequins which were inconsistently sized and hard to make, we designed a wooden stand that was always the correct waist size for sewing costumes for each of our dolls in our collection.  And we played around with embellishing them with a bucket of knobs and spare parts lying around the studio.  All of our mannequin patterns are original to us, and all torsos are handcrafted and hand sanded by a seamstress turned woodworker from a basement studio in Northern Kentucky, USA. 

These doll costume stands are designed and handcrafted in a variety of sizes customary to historic or guild miniature doll costume design and carefully tested with regard to both scale and sizing from a personal doll collection.  Encouraged by another doll artist, we adapted and improved upon their design for a 10-12" Antique French Fashion doll by adding a hat tree topper shaker peg.  When larger and more expensive Huret / Barrois / Rohmer compo and resin body art dolls came into our collection, we were reticent to take these precious dolls to public events and adapted our 12" stand to the now very popular 15.5" - 16" doll costume stand by adding a more stable egg-shaped hat stand top.  We also added a wider oval base to allow for more doll costumes to be displayed on an angle and not tip over due to skirt weight.
 
We have been expanding our Huret doll costume stand design ideas into a 3 piece gift set allowing for display of a full mid-19th century dress with hat accompanied by a shorter cape / apron stand and an even shorter chemisette or corset stand.  You will also find on our site doll costume stands for Bleuette and smaller, as well as our own creative stand designs for the more modern Tonner BJD's such as Ellowyne, Grace and Gene.  We will be offering a doll costume stand for standard American Girl doll costumes as soon as we can build capacity to do so. As we acquire more dolls in our personal collection, we hope to add more stands as we are costume and fabric obsessed and have more ideas for costumes than dolls to wear them!

Thanks for taking a look at our creations.  Contact us directly for questions about upcoming designs and what doll shows we might travel to next!  We will take a break from sanding and write you back quick as we can!

Leigh Drake, Owner/Designer
DollCostumeStand.com
Mountain Woods Media, LLC

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