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NORTH POLE — Judi Wellnitz was a quilter, but she had married into a family where there was already a quilter and there didn’t seem room for two.

So she was thinking about taking up something else in 2001 when she was standing in Michael’s, a craft store, and glanced at the cover of Soft Dolls and Animals! magazine.

Staring back at Wellnitz was Leftover Lucy, a rag doll with blue eyes and long braids piled high on its head.

“Something just drew me to want to make it,” the 52-year-old said. “There was something on the cover that made me just fall in love with it.”

Wellnitz bought the magazine, followed the pattern and made a Leftover Lucy doll. She took some doll-making classes and graduated to art dolls, elaborate creatures with wise faces and frilly costumes.

Wellnitz now teaches doll-making and manages the doll-making Web site www.dollstreetdreamers.com, and her work has appeared in magazines, including the December 2007 cover of Doll Crafter and Costuming. Wellnitz sells her dolls — prices range from $60 to $350 — and doll designs through the Web site www.artdolls.info, where she also blogs about doll-making. Her work, including severed-hand pin cushions, is sold at the downtown Fairbanks gift shop The Stash.

Rachael Brechan is part-owner of the store and said the severed hands are a popular item.

“They have nails on them and they are decorated to look like these fancy hands,” she said. “They are getting a lot of attention. They are cool.”

Wellnitz works from three rooms in the lower level of her split-level home. One room is for sewing, another room is an office where Wellnitz runs her business and a third room is for painting and gluing.

The sewing room, with its yellow walls, is Wellnitz’s sanctuary.

“That’s my happy space. It’s bright. It’s cheerful. It’s got all of my dolls,” Wellnitz said.

There’s The Stump Sisters, Ingrid and Emmaline. Wellnitz named the dolls The Stump Sisters because they have no legs, just long dresses that flow past their feet — if they had feet. There’s The Last of the Fairies, Wellnitz’s favorite doll, a final project for a design class. The doll, about 2 feet tall and slightly bent with tattered wings and chalky skin, is an old witchy-looking fairy.

“She’s one of the best pieces I’ve done,” Wellnitz said.

An unfinished, unnamed doll wears a tin foil bustier and is covered in bruises, making her look like a battered wife. The doll was inspired by Wellnitz’s daughter, who had gotten into a car collision.

“She was black and blue from the air bag,” Wellnitz said.

Wellnitz also has a mermaid series. The dolls lay on their bellies with their arms outstretched and their tails curled up behind them. Wellnitz slipped her business card into one of the mermaid’s arms to show the dolls are also business card holders.

One of the mermaids was featured on a magazine cover last year.

Patricia DuChene was the editor of Doll Crafter and Costuming magazine when the time came to choose a December cover. The magazine usually puts a Santa doll on the December cover, but none of the submitted Santa dolls appealed to DuChene. She saw Wellnitz’s fur-trimmed mermaid doll on a Web site.

“The doll’s playful personality was something I thought readers would enjoy,” DuChene said in an e-mail from Wisconsin, where the magazine is published. “The fur framing of the face called out, ‘This is winter,’ and the doll could be posed to really look at the reader.

“There was some concern that using a mermaid on the cover instead of Santa would result in lower newsstand sales. It did not. The arctic mermaid sold just as well as the two previous Santa covers,” DuChene said.

Wellnitz was born in London and moved to New York when she was 6. She is the oldest of two children. Her father worked as a font designer, and her mother was a homemaker and later a store manager. The family eventually moved to an area near Los Angeles. Growing up, Wellnitz quickly realized that she liked working with her hands. She taught herself cross stitching and macramé. In her 20s, Wellnitz taught herself to sew.

“I was belly dancing, and I needed costumes,” she said.

Wellnitz spent three years in the U.S. Army, then moved to Anchorage with her husband at the time. Two years later, the couple moved to Fairbanks and eventually split up.

In Alaska, Wellnitz took up quilting, joined the Alaska Air National Guard and became a Golden Heart Dancer, performing every July during Golden Days. She retired from the dance troupe after marrying a second time. Wellnitz’s husband, Loren, is a civil servant and knife-maker. He has made props, such as a bow, for his wife’s dolls.

Wellnitz retired in 2003 from the Guard and got a part-time job at the Snow Goose Quilting Shop, which is now closed.

“I was the resident doll-maker,” she said.

Wellnitz started a local doll club, So Bad. When the club dwindled and eventually became inactive, she bought www.dollstreetdreamers.com from an Outside lawyer who had grown tired of running the Web site. The site is a platform for an online doll-making club and offers doll-making classes. Wellnitz makes money from it, although not much when she counts the hours spent administering the site.

Wellnitz teaches workshops and has traveled as far as the Kenai Peninsula, where she taught doll-making at a quilting show. She would teach more, but traveling from Fairbanks takes too long, she said.

“Some of the professional teachers that I know, they are never home,” Wellnitz said.

Wellnitz gets inspiration from just about anywhere. A Tundra comic by Chad Carpenter inspired the mermaid dolls. Another of her dolls has a Brillo pad for hair.

“Sometimes I have no idea where I get ideas from. They just come to me,” Wellnitz said. “You learn to look at everyday items in a different way.”