Welcome to Land of Oz Dolls new website and blog!. My name is Connie Zink and I have owned and operated Land of Oz Dolls in Savanna, Illinois since January of 1979. My original website has needed updating for many years now. My daughter Stacie, built it for me years ago when she worked for me full-time. Since then Stacie has gone on to pursue other career options, and has no extra time to completely update my dinosaur of a website, so that leaves me trying to figure out what in the world to do with that thing. (Not a whole lot of computer experience here building websites.) My friend Jan also started me a second website about five or six years ago and honestly it is also in desperate need of updating, something I have needed to do for several years now. So I have decided the easiest way to do this is going to be to start all over, all by myself and figure this thing out. I will never be able to keep a website updated unless I learn to do it myself, so here goes. Eventually my other two websites, www.landofozdolls.com and www.landofozdolls2.com will be phased out. But, that is going to take awhile as I learn to build this new website www.landofozdolls.net.
Land of Oz Dolls is home to my museum quality antique reproduction and modern dolls. I started making dolls in 1978, while taking classes from a teacher in Clinton, Ia. After a year of weekly classes, I decided this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I opened a studio in my basement in January of 1979. Now 34 years later, my shop and studio is a 2800 square foot, two story building, connected to my house. My husband Dennis and I also have a one and a half car garage completely full of doll molds along with a 600 square foot storage building for doll molds, attached to the shop. A current soft-fired greenware catalog for the hundreds of antique reproduction and modern dolls available is still being put together. (Another very slow process)
On May 14th 2012, we had a devasting fire that destroyed the storage unit for molds we had used for over 20 years. Molds for over 2000 different dolls were lost. It has been a long tedious year, trying to put our mold inventory back together. The replacements are now housed here on our property with us. (No more off premises storage units). Thanks to so many wonderful customers and friends who were willing to part with their mold collections, we have been able to replace many of the treasured molds we lost. The difficult task now is trying to put an accurate soft-fired greenware catalog back together. I want to thank all of you who have been so patient during our struggles. It will still be sometime yet before I can get a catalog together so please just email me if you have questions as to what soft-fired greenware is currently available. My email address currently for orders is landofozdolls@mchsi.com or you may phone me at 815-565-0024.
Well, I think it is time to close for now, it is well after midnight. It is kind of exciting, embarking on this new adventure of rebuilding my website. Before closing, I think I will try to figure out how to post my first image. If when you read this, there is no photo, you will know I didn’t figure it out yet. If there is a photo, you will know I will be adding tons more images for you to view in the future. My second love, after making dolls, is photographing dolls so there will be lots of photos forthcoming!! I am looking forward to visiting with you again soon.
Connie Zink
Here is one little corner of my doll room.
