The visitors to Pavilion No.8 can’t help making a stop in front of Pushkin’s curly head and charming Angels: handmade rag dolls inspire every person to have around warm and homely things. Olga Krestiankina, Doll Workshop Director, told us about her production:

“We have been working over 15 years. All our toys are handmade. We use only natural materials: cotton, linen, yarn, birch bark, and osier. We design characters ourselves, prepare cloth, sew, and make up fairy tales. The line-up of our dolls is quite wide: home pets, sorceress, fairies, Angels, styled dolls, characters from Russian folk fairy tales, and national style dolls as gifts from Russia. The Soft Small Paws series was especially popular at the Mir Detstva exhibition: these are the toys for the smallest kids; both kids and parents can play with them. Mother puts a toy onto her fingers and thus for her child she becomes a guide to the world of tactual and sense impressions. As an additive to these toys we offer game-books which we designed, for example, A Mouse from the Book in which mother and child can write their own story, their own fairy tale to inscribe themselves as the authors and to present it as a gift to their relatives; and this book will stay in the family as a long memory. The products of our workshop have been demonstrated in one of the private museums in the USA, and also at the Moscow Matryoshka Museum.”