The heads are made from powdered paulownia, kneaded into a paste. Iwatsuki festival dolls begin with that mixture formed into a head, which is then coated repeatedly with gofun — a white pigment ground from shell — and polished back between coats. Layer, polish, layer again: the result is a surface that is thin, hard and slightly translucent, and it cannot be achieved in fewer applications.

Workshops are scattered across the town rather than concentrated in one quarter, and the local museum lays the stages out in order, which is the only practical way to grasp how many of them there are. The head, the hands and feet, the costume and the accessories are each the work of a different specialist, so a single doll passes through several sets of hands before anyone sees it whole. Tōbu trains reach Ōmiya in about ten minutes, schools and hospitals are close at hand, and commuting into central Tokyo from here is entirely ordinary, so the craft sits inside a commuter suburb rather than a preserved district.

A doll's face is built up rather than cut away. The form emerges as the accumulated gofun is polished, which makes it closer to preparing a lacquer ground than to carving, and it means two heads taken from the same mould end up with different expressions. The variation enters at the very last stage, under a hand rather than under a tool, which is why it cannot be standardised. That is what the saying about the face being everything actually refers to: it is the part of the object that has been touched most, by the person who finished it.