I am literally laughing as I type this, because over the course of my life, this is the craft that I have most passionately wanted to work, but which has resolutely failed me time and again. And even if it works, so what? All you have is a shriveled apple head, which is gross and weird. BUT I WANT IT TO WORK DAMMIT.
These days, shriveled apple heads are mainly considered a Halloween craft. But back in the day, people actually made dolls out of them. Dolls for children to play with. "Here, kid! Have a toy made from dehydrated fruit! Sorry about the ants." These are usually considered an old American tradition, a hobby the pioneers engaged in when they weren't busy dying of dysentery.
Here is how you make an apple head doll: you peel an apple, cut a face into the flesh, then wait for it to dry. The shriveling process can take several weeks, depending on your ambient humidity and the moistness of your apple. If you want to speed up the drying process, this tutorial recommends that you either use a dehydrator or set your apple head on the dashboard of your car and park it in the sun.
Once your apple head is dry, congratulations! You have a wrinkled spongy apple that looks kind of like the face of a caricatured old lady. Now it's time to paint, dress, and play with your fruit leather.
Another route you can take with apple dolls is to make them into a faux shrunken head. Shrunken heads are kind of a racist thing, if you ask me. The vague idea is that they used to be made by cannibal tribes (of dark-skinned people, needless to say) as trophies. But there is a lot of myth and legend and apparently the vast majority of shrunken heads were just fakes for the tourists, like an Amazon River Basin version of the jackelope.
So there you have it: racism and toys made from dried fruit. Apple dolls: bad!
Image courtesy Flickr/Lansing Public Library, Lansing Illinois
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