Making skills of cloth toys

Wendeng cloth toys were popular in Ming and Qing Dynasties, and as a folk custom of Han nationality, jieshi town cloth toys are the most famous. Every wedding festival, the women in the village get together in twos and threes. On the kang, in the shade and in the alley, these pieces of cloth with needles and wires become exquisite works of art as long as they pass through their hands.

Wendeng fabric toys are mostly made of silk, flannel, fur, colored thread and gold and silver thread. Aunties and grandmothers are stylists, cutting materials at will, sewing them into shapes, filling them with wood powder and cotton, and then pasting eyebrows. One by one, lively and lovely cloth toys are made. No matter who has children and their birthdays, the villagers will send several colorful and spiritual toys.

The tiger is called the king of beasts among the Han people. People think that putting a cloth tiger beside children can ward off evil spirits and protect their safety. This is also permeated with ancient culture, showing traces of totem worship. In the Han folk, the old people let the "tiger" grow up with their children from the day they were born. Cloth tiger is not only a comfortable and practical product for children's life, but also a beautiful toy for children. At the same time, it is entrusted with the good wishes of the elders for the healthy growth of children. Cloth tiger takes cloth as the surface, buckwheat skin and sawdust as the core, and then uses various patterns. After being cleverly dressed by Han folk artists, he looks like a clever and brave crouching tiger. Jieshi people fully grasped the characteristics of tigers and melted into the artistic imagination. The cloth tiger made by Jieshi people is majestic, with black velvet mesh, yellow body and purple flowers, green eyebrows and red mouth, which form a sharp contrast in color. Regardless of size, it is exaggerated and naive. In addition to cloth tigers, people also make tiger-shaped toys such as tiger shoes and tiger hats for children in order to make money.

198 1 year, the first town-run toy factory was built in jieshi town. The local government took advantage of the trend and issued a series of encouraging policies to guide the structural adjustment of the toy industry and encourage the masses to engage in toy processing, which made the toy processing industry quickly catch fire. Today, jieshi town has become a veritable "No.1 Toy Town in Jiaodong", earning nearly $30 million in foreign exchange through export.