CRAFTS : Tableau Artist Dolls Up Living Room

Her hands give it away. The necessarily short fingernails, typically stained with paint, and the nubby fingertips callused from years of pinpricks. Rosita Apodaca has devoted a lifetime to creating beautiful things.

Often at it for 18 hours a day, Apodaca’s expansive repertoire features felt and porcelain dolls, elaborately decorated eggs, painted china figurines, figurative paintings and embroidery. She has done up her home with decorative pillows and lacy curtains, laid all the tile and hung all the wallpaper.

“I do everything but plumbing,” jokes the ebullient 48-year-old, who makes all her dolls’ costumes and accessories. She has produced everything from a miniature king’s purple velvet robes to a tiny clay jug hung from the waist of a shepherd, to a minute leather purse--smaller than a lima bean--that opens and shuts and has a white hankie inside.

“I like to say I started from scratch,” she says. “This is my pride.”

Lately, Apodaca has been toiling over her annual Christmas project, a dazzling 45-foot-long, five-foot-tall Yuletide tableau that she has re-created in her living room for the past dozen years. It’s populated by 250 felt dolls--people and animals--and illuminated by about 1,000 lights, including one for the Star of Bethlehem.

Images of Joseph, Mary and the baby Jesus in the manger form the centerpiece of the scene, which also boasts the Wise Men and their bejeweled camels, a toy-stocked Santa’s workshop, myriad elves, Mrs. Claus, a Christmas tree with ornaments and blinking lights, sledders, skiers, carolers, and, bearing gifts for the Christ child, an international array of travelers (with different facial expressions) clad in colorful native garb from such countries as India, Spain, Ireland, Mexico and China.

Add to all that some 120 snow-covered houses, each lit from within, an ox, a mule, sheep, chickens, a snowman and llamas. And, of course, there’s Santa and his eight reindeer, suspended above Apodaca’s living room piano.

She made four new dolls this year, and “I already have plans for next year; I always add to it,” she said during a recent interview at her Fountain Valley home.

The true genesis of the ode to Noel harks back to her childhood in Madrid, Apodaca said. “We always made a little (Christmas) scene in a corner of my house. My daddy used to say it’s more special when people make things by hand.”

Then, about 12 years ago, she closed Rosita’s World of Art and Craft, a store she owned for a short time in Huntington Beach. She brought home the dolls she had made for a Christmas window display, laying the groundwork for the ever-expanding tableau. When the tableau threatened to overwhelm her living room floor a few years ago, she built a shelf along three walls of the room to suspend it eight feet off the ground.

Wood, cork and cardboard go into the winter wonderland’s infrastructure. But Apodaca fashions her dolls--which are from a few inches to about two feet tall--largely out of felt imported from Spain. Each doll takes about 20 hours to produce, she said, and she shapes their three-dimensional facial features by stuffing cotton into a felt mold of sorts, then making small stitches for indentations. Finally, she paints on eyes and lips.

“I don’t use any patterns for the dolls; I just go and cut,” said Apodaca, who rarely buys the bits of fake fur, brocade, flannel and myriad other materials for her dolls’ clothes. “I ask friends for leftover fabrics or broken jewelry. That way I have more variation.”

Apodaca now sells her work on a piece-by-piece basis by special request only, but ideas for projects come to her constantly. Her home, garage and attic are filled with felt and porcelain dolls, 200 handmade costumes worn in high school plays by her two daughters and other handmade collectibles--proof of that creative fervor.

“I just close my eyes. If I only had the time for all the ideas my imagination dreams up . . . “ she said with a faraway look.

Of course, assembling her snowy scene, which she usually begins Nov. 1, is never easy. She said it all seems worthwhile on Christmas Eve, however. That’s when about 30 relatives and friends gather for an annual holiday feast.

“This represents who I am and what we used to do when we were little,” she said. “It’s a lot of work, but when I have my family here on Christmas Eve, it’s all worth it. I am making memories for them.”