Some ministries rely on Scripture, music and dynamic preachers to spread the faith. Teri O’Toole’s ministry relies on cotton, paint and rubber.
The 53-year-old graphic designer sold her home to finance Soft Saints, a line of toys she said she hoped would inspire youth to model their lives after someone who lived an ambitiously pious life. Five years later, her squeezable saints have barreled past their intended audience and found homes in the arms of an entirely different group.
Along the way, O’Toole forged an intimate bond with Marie Trotechaud, her 99-year-old grandmother. O’Toole may produce role models, but Trotechaud is hers.
O’Toole’s timing couldn’t have been better. When the Orange County, Calif.-based Soft Saints launched in 2001, she unwittingly joined a growing market.
Plush religious toys are “definitely a trend, a very successful one,” said Alan Napleton, founder of the Catholic Marketing Network, which promotes Catholic items such as statues, rosaries and, now, holy figures in miniature. New Catholic shops are cropping up each month, he said, and for the first time since the 1940s and ’50s, they’re gaining momentum in a business long led by evangelical Christians.
Many stores carry dolls such as Soft Saints or Faith-Filled Friends, stuffed biblical characters whose makers, a pair of stay-at-home moms, encourage parents to give their tykes saints to bring to Mass in lieu of action figures or Barbies.
One2believe, another California-based company, takes religious education one step further with its Messengers of Faith dolls, which recite Scripture with the push of a button, in an “easy-to-memorize style.”
O’Toole’s decision to enter artisanship followed two years of caring for a cancer-stricken friend. When he died, she thought: “If I could change just one life, I would be grateful.”
She and her creative partner, Celeste Galanger, who lives in Oregon, decided that goal could best be achieved from the inside of their business out. The pair employ only stay-at-home moms to do any extra embroidery, sewing and assembly. O’Toole, a single mother who raised four boys, said she always wished she could have been home with her children.
She’d never sculpted anything before sitting at her kitchen table one day with a wooden spoon and a wad of clay to mold her first head – St. Jerome, the cantankerous monk who translated parts of the Bible. Before she begins, O’Toole looks to history for inspiration and information, studying the saint’s life along with any images she can find, real or rendered. When she crafted St. Patrick, an abbot lent her his miter and staff. When working on St. Veronica, she met with a retired nun who had lived in Galilee.
Recently, O’Toole set to work on the head of a Baby Jesus doll, which she planned to give away at Santa Ana’s St. Francis Home, the assisted-living facility where her grandmother lives. She’d always noticed the nuns’ kindness toward Trotechaud, but when her grandmother fell ill a few months ago and her need for attention became greater, O’Toole’s appreciation grew.
She works in a cramped garage in Tustin, where heavy-duty tools loom over teensy shoes and boxes of wigs. Clear plastic bags of limbs marked “female feet, no shoes” and “Baby Jesus arms” dangle from the walls, and 60 heads lie unblinking on a table.
When asked how many dolls she pumps out each year, O’Toole laughed. “My dad is always asking me that, too.” She says she has no idea. She said she didn’t get into doll-making to turn a profit, “so what does it matter?” She conducts most of her business at home, fielding orders and special requests from her Web site, www.softsaints.com. Each sells for $98.
She crafted the original Baby Jesus, now one of her biggest sellers, as a Mother’s Day gift for her grandmother. Trotechaud said she loved it but something was missing.
“Teri, he’s cold,” she’d complained, noting that the baby wore only a gown.
“Grandma,” O’Toole said, “he’s a doll.”
Her grandmother said it didn’t matter. He looked cold. Now every Baby Jesus comes with a white blanket. Trotechaud sleeps with hers, and during the day, he rests – tightly wrapped – on a yellow silk pillow.
Until a few months ago, Trotechaud helped assemble the dolls. She always had a pile of headless, limbless doll bodies beside her bed, which she stuffed while watching Mass on the Eternal Word Television Network. “I don’t know if they’re going to be the pope or Mary,” she’d often say.
On a recent visit to the St. Francis Home, O’Toole brought a bundle of her creations to give away. She routinely donates dolls for church raffles and silent auctions around the country, but she said there’s no greater joy than visiting a retirement home or an assisted-living facility and seeing how the elderly react to hugging one of her dolls: how they smile, how their voices soften – it’s why she does what she does.
About 50 women watched as O’Toole filled a table with 27 saints, all 18 inches high. As O’Toole spoke and quizzed the group, Trotechaud sat off to the side in her wheelchair, hands clasped in her lap, smiling.
The ladies gasped when they learned that St. Patrick was Scottish, not Irish, but they quickly rebounded with knowing nods as they correctly identified the doll with the brown robes as St. Francis, whose thrice-knotted white cord signified the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
Mary Evanoff squealed when O’Toole revealed that St. Jerome was two dolls in one. When flipped over, Jerome’s gown slips down to reveal a lion – a witty nod to the story of the saint removing a thorn from a lion’s paw.
When it came time to read the first red raffle ticket, Rubie Nelson discovered that she had lucky No. 237. The 81-year-old looked a little perplexed as O’Toole handed her a Baby Jesus doll.
“Isn’t he pretty?” Nelson said, brushing the doll’s cheek. “He doesn’t have a mustache. That’s good.” She pressed the doll to her chest and wrapped her cream-colored knit cardigan snugly around him. “I have to keep him warm.”
Later, as she prepared to leave, O’Toole carefully returned to the trunk of her SUV various saints, including Mary’s mother, St. Anne.
If the saint looks familiar, it’s for a good reason. O’Toole modeled the face after her grandmother.
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