Batteries not included.

Byline: BOB KEEFER The Register-Guard

THOSE CHEAP Harry Potter knock-offs already getting you down? Can't quite get into the corporations-R-us toy mentality this year? Had it with boring $19 games that require a $1,900 computer to play them on?

It may be time to think globally and buy locally. Here are a handful of Eugene-area toy makers, whose products you generally won't find at the local Toy Depot or in the latest slick catalogs clogging up the mail system.

Instead, you'll find these toy makers and others like them selling their hand-made wares at Holiday Market, the Saturday Market version of a Christmas sale, which goes on at the exhibit hall at the Lane County Fairgrounds from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. every Saturday and Sunday between now and Christmas, and daily from Dec. 21 through Dec. 24. Admission is free.

The Dolly Mama

Reba Sehy makes "dolls from any culture" that sell for between $23 and $125, the latter price getting you a "collector doll with big fairy wings."

Sehy, 30, has been making clothes for her own dolls since she was 8 years old. Now she sells them at the annual market, where she began selling clothing before moving into dolls two years ago.

"When I did this it felt right," she says. "This feels like the natural thing for me to be doing. I love it. There are so many junky toys. A great toy would be something you can play with for years and years and never get tired of. Something durable and lovable. A great toy is something where you really use your imagination and the game changes every time you play with it."

Candle-powered boats

Dean Still, who in real life is the appropriate technology coordinator for the Aprovecho Research Center in Cottage Grove, makes wooden boats with pulse-jet propulsion powered by a candle flame.

Imagine a small wooden boat with a coil of copper tube suspended above the deck. Both open ends of the tube stick out the back of the boat, under water.

"Now that is your engine," Still says. "That is a real pulse-jet engine. You put water in the tube and when you put a flame, like a candle flame, underneath the coil we have made, the water explodes to steam, it shoots out both the tubes at the same time, makes a vacuum and pulls water back up that re-explodes."

The boat basically putt-putts around your bathtub. Still once created a much larger version that he took out on Dorena Reservoir. The 16-foot rowboat held eight people and was powered by a wood stove and eight tubes.

Large or small, pulse-jet engines are fascinating.

"There's a lot going on to learn about: phase change and vacuums and how powerful steam is, becoming a thousand times the volume of water. That's why you get really powerful blasts out the back to move the boat."

Still, who also makes a small geodesic sphere he calls Rotegrity, sells the toy boats for $7 to $12 each.

Mary's Softdough

OK, it looks a lot like that other soft, non-crumbly modeling dough from a large manufacturer you've probably heard of, but Mary's Softdough is made right here in Eugene by Mary Newell, whose secret identity is that of a mild-mannered credit union clerk.

Newell's been making dough here since 1988, when she was still in college.

"I was working in a day care and I made this stuff for the kids there," she says. "I thought, `I could sell this.' And I'm still doing it 13 years later. I went down to Saturday Market, had no clue what I was doing. I'm still selling it."

Along the way, she hooked up with the Lane Community College Small Business Program, about which she raves. "That helped me stop fumbling in the dark as much," she says. "They have a little more know-how and got me away from Saturday Market kind of selling and into more professional marketing. My product hasn't changed over the years. What's changed is the marketing and packaging."

Now Newell has wholesale and catalog accounts that provide the bulk of her business. But she still loves going down to Holiday Market.

"I don't make a whole lot at the market for the volume of time I go down there," she says. "Doing wholesale, it's a whole other market. But one of the things I miss is I don't have the contact with the kids selling wholesale. It's so nice to come down here and watch these 3- and 4-year-olds play with the dough."

You can buy Mary's Softdough at Holiday Market and at Elephant's Trunk, Made in Oregon and Down to Earth. Large, 18-ounce tubs cost $7; small, 3-ounce tubs are $2.50.

Dress-up play

For 14 years, Carol DeFazio - no relationship to the congressman - has been making fairy wings and starred capes and princess hats and other head gear and selling them at the Saturday and Holiday markets.

"I do all kinds of things like that for children's dress-up play," DeFazio says. "I was one of the very early people who saw the place for that sort of play thing for children. It's grown in popularity over the years. I have tried to create things that are more of an accessory for the child's imagination than a definite, `This is who you are.' The child's imagination should be free. Too many influences from the media and so on are coming in to shape and form that imagination. It's healthier to let them have more freedom. And more fun."

Her creations sell for between $3 and $36.

Sock monkeys

Tara Reaves makes sock monkeys large and small. "They're traditional ones," she says. "They are brown and their heads and bottoms of feet are tan, with a red mouth and red stripe on the butt. One of those things that grandmas and great grandmas make. I have people stop me and say, `My grandma made those.' '

She took up sock monkeys three years ago, expanding from her business of selling women's clothing. The large monkeys, 18 inches to 2 feet long, are $15; the smaller ones, at 12 inches, are $8.

"I have branched out," she says. "I make them out of traditional socks but I have also started making them out of other colors. I actually made tie-dyed ones last year."

Inlaid wood puzzles

Ex-trucker Tom Savelich fashions the alphabet and numbers into simple but elegant puzzles for pre-schoolers, decorating them with animals and butterflies. He's been at it 14 years and sells strictly through the Saturday and Holiday markets.

"Way back I was laid off at one time," he says. "My girlfriend got me into doing it. Kind of shoved me into it. And it went from there."

The puzzles run from $14 to $21.

Oregon finger puzzles

Bev Schneider makes three-dimensional puzzles from local woods, cutting the pieces herself on a table saw. "I played with puzzles like these as a child at my grandparents' home," says Schneider, who is grandmotherly in age herself but declines to be much more specific.

She even labels her puzzles with local names, including Willamette, Oregon Trail, Mount Hood, Crater Lake (which she says is the hardest to make) and Sisters, the largest. Prices run from $5 for the Willamette to $15 for Sisters.

She sells them with no finish because some people are allergic to oils and waxes.

"I ask that people who can, oil them with linseed or baby oil. And the wood grain comes right out."

More wands

Kirk Houser, who ordinarily makes and sells jewelry through Saturday Market, sells a lot of whirling wands in December. "My jewelry doesn't move this time of year," he says. "It's toys and Christmas."

Houser, 49, makes his wands from mostly recycled materials, sifting the bins at BRING Recycling for old yogurt and cottage cheese containers and finding beads at thrift shops.

The resulting wands are, well, magic. "Everything goes around and it all whirls and somehow it's fun," he explains.

Houser offers two models: The Speedo, with one pair of loops, is $7.50; the Cruiseliner, with two, is $12.

The Eugene Game

Kent Forrester, a retired professor of English literature from Kentucky, makes a board game "based on Eugene facts and figures" that he sells for $30.

"You race around the board answering questions, going backwards and forwards," he says.

Kind of like the Eugene City Council.

Forrester also makes art puzzles, which he sells for $40 to $100. "I just finished dinosaurs marching across a field with a little story connected with it, concerning an alien and a comet and the end of the world," he says. "And a rebellious son. What the person gets is a puzzle with dinosaur and a story that goes along with the puzzle."

No computer required.

Features reporter Bob Keefer can be reached by phone at 338-2325 and by e-mail at [e-mail].

CAPTION(S):

Siblings Dustin Schneider, 10, (left) Logan Schneider, 10, and Kaytlan Schneider, 7, play with dress-up items at Carol DeFazio's booth at the Holiday Market. Dean Still displays a sphere, a candle-powered jet boat and a hot-air balloon. Mary Newell plays with her dough. CHRIS PIETSCH / The Register-Guard Bev "The Puzzle Lady" Schneider makes handcrafted wooden puzzles. Toy maker Kirk Houser plays with one of his whirling wands.