For Beth Karpas, the joy of her work comes from making something new out of something old and in disrepair. Karpas fixes beloved childhood dolls and stuffed animals for a living out of her home workshop in Los Altos.
“I like creating things,” she said. “I like when it all comes together and they look healthy again.”
Karpas said she started down this career path by selling handmade dolls at art and wine festivals as a young woman and repairing on the side. She focused on repairing after her childhood teddy bear was rejected by a stuffed animal hospital in New York when she was 21.
A former librarian, Karpas said her first dolls were inspired by folklore and fairy tales. She added that the name for her business, Realms of Gold Doll & Stuffed Animal Hospital, came from a poem by John Keats in which books are called “realms of gold.”
The switch to running a full-time stuffed animal hospital came after a contributor for the now-defunct women’s online magazine xoJane wrote an article in the early 2010s on her experience having a stuffed animal repaired by Karpas.
The article helped launch Karpas to internet fame, and she subsequently went viral for a blog post detailing the various kinds of Winnie the Pooh stuffed animals.
“Doctor Beth,” as she is known online, now has close to 140,000 Tumblr followers, and her “patients” hail from as far as Singapore and Corsica.
“I’ve had people bring their stuffed animals and they’ve been following my blog for several years, and you can kind of see (in their reactions) the way I react to authors that I love,” she said. “And that’s kind of cool.”
Her work spans from simple restuffings (which must pass a family “chubbiness approval” test before being discharged) to elaborate “jigsaw” repairs that require reconstructing an entire stuffed animal.
Karpas regularly documents key stages of her repair process to post on her Tumblr blog and share with the families via email. The stages include “diagnosis photos,” bubble baths and the insertion of a fabric heart filled with the object’s original stuffing.
“The hardest part (of repairing stuffed animals) is that I can’t see what’s inside the people’s heads,” Karpas said.
In most cases, her patients don’t come with a picture of what they looked like before they fell into disrepair, and she said it’s impossible to return an object to exactly what it looked like before.
Although Karpas said most of her customers ask for the stuffed animal to be returned to as close to its original form as possible, she noted there are times when they ask her to preserve structural integrity while keeping the well-loved look. Some customers may ask for her to reinforce a stuffed animal’s lining but leave the balding spots as they are, or others may ask her to add fabric to a Raggedy Ann’s face to close burst seams without doing a full “face transplant.”
Over the past two decades, Karpas estimates she has repaired approximately 6,000 stuffed animals and dolls.
For more information on Realms of Gold Doll & Stuffed Animal Hospital, visit realmsofgold.com.
