Subtitle: How a Widow’s Creativity Turned Playtime into National Recognition

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Mrs. Royeton’s Button-Eyed Lambs

There lived in Oakland, California, a young widow named Charlotte Royeton, who had four children to support. She turned to a federal government agency and was given a job as a playground instructor, provided she could entertain many children and keep them coming back.

The children were from poor families and of mixed races. They didn’t care much for reading, couldn’t play outdoors all the time, and sewing was “out.” Desperately, Charlotte searched stores for ideas, discarding puzzles, dominoes, and embroidery projects, until she found a small pig outlined on cambric to be cut out and stuffed.

She worked almost all night to assemble the pig, and the next morning Piggie appeared with a black cutaway jacket edged in yellow, a curly tail, and a rakish black hat slanted over one pink ear. Charlotte’s children voted him “a knockout,” and the playground children were eager to make one themselves.

With little money, Charlotte bought four yards of material and as much kapok as she could afford. She made seventeen pigs but ran out of kapok, so the children brought discarded stockings, which were cut up to stuff the rest. Over time, she added more animals, designing some herself, until there were fifty varieties.

The children brought every scrap of fabric from home. Two Chinese girls contributed unneeded sheets, Antoinette’s father’s old striped trousers became elephants, and Kitty McCarthy’s green chinchilla jacket turned into woolly dogs with green bead eyes. By the end of summer, over two hundred animals were made by a class that had grown from fifteen to fifty children, much to the playground director’s amazement.

Here’s where the fairy tale begins: one night, while designing animals for the next day’s session, Charlotte created a white muslin lamb with black hoofs and flat black button eyes—the most innocent-looking lamb imaginable.

Unknown to her, the lamb was selected for a National Exhibit of Handicraft in Washington, D.C. There, a toy buyer from Saks & Company’s Fifth Avenue store in New York fell in love with it at first sight and placed a large order, requesting more lambs.

Charlotte and her children set up a basement workshop. She expressed her joy, saying: “I feel like a flower about to burst into bloom.” She hoped to soon stay home to care for her family while earning a living. Even if she didn’t sell a million lambs, all signs pointed to her making at least a thousand.

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