“After 41 Octobers, I’m Putting Down the Brush” – Massachusetts Craftswoman Marguerite Doyle (71) Is Releasing the Last 412 of Her Hand-Painted Witch Lanterns at a Farewell Price

She was the only woman in the pattern shop of a Lynn foundry. For four decades she has poured, trimmed and hand-painted the same Halloween piece in a garage in Marblehead. This is the final batch – and when it’s gone, there is no next year.

Marblehead, Massachusetts. The garage smells like acrylic paint and coffee that has been on the burner too long. A radio in the corner is playing a Red Sox post-game nobody is listening to. On the bench: a row of rubber molds, a jar of brushes standing in water, and eleven witches in a row – freshly painted, skirts open, waiting for their lanterns.

Margie Doyle picks one up the way other people pick up a coffee cup. She turns it into the light from the open door, finds something on the hem that only she can see, and goes over it with a brush that has maybe six hairs left in it.

“That’s the part nobody notices,” she says. “And that’s exactly why you have to do it.”

She is 71. She has been doing this since Ronald Reagan’s second term.

“Everybody buys the cheap one once”

Ask Margie why anyone should pay for a handmade Halloween piece when the big-box store down Route 114 sells a light-up witch for eleven dollars, and she doesn’t get defensive. She laughs.

“Everybody buys the cheap one once,” she says. “Hollow, light as a paper cup, a seam right down the middle of her face. You put it out, it looks fine from the street, and in January you find it in the garage with a crack in the base and the little light rattling around inside. Then you buy another one. I’ve got customers who did that for ten years before they came to me.”

Hers is solid. Each witch is poured by hand from cast resin, a few at a time, into molds Margie makes herself from the original she carved in 1985. Then the real work starts: every one is trimmed and sanded by hand, every opening in the skirt is cleared out with a hobby blade, and every inch is painted by hand – a dark base, a wash worked into the recesses, the high points dry-brushed until they catch the light like old bronze. The skirt carries a bare-branch pattern she drew on the back of a foundry invoice and has never changed. Behind it sits a hand-tinted amber panel. When the light comes on, the branches go black against a field of glowing amber and the whole skirt reads like a winter treeline at sunset.

“People send me pictures every October,” she says. “Always the same picture. Never the whole witch. Just the skirt, lit up.”

“I fought him on the solar panel. I lost.”

There is exactly one thing about the witch that Margie didn’t come up with herself, and it sits between her shoulder blades.

A few years ago her nephew talked her into fitting a small solar panel on the back. “I fought him on it,” she admits. “I thought it would make her look like a gadget.” It doesn’t – you only see it if you turn her around. Margie seats and wires every panel herself, the same way she does everything else.

Set her somewhere she gets a few hours of daylight – a sunny windowsill, a porch rail – and she charges herself during the day and glows through the evening. No cord across the doorway, no hunting for an outlet, no batteries to buy.

“Now I get letters from people who put her on the porch steps, on the potting bench, on the table by the back door,” she says. “I never could have sold them that with a cord. Fine. He was right. Don’t print that.”

One woman, 62 steps, no two alike

Margie learned her trade the unglamorous way: 1974, a foundry in Lynn, the only woman in the pattern shop, carving the wooden masters for pump housings and valve bodies that the men downstairs would cast in iron. Eight years of that before anyone let her near anything decorative.

“They gave me the fussy work because they thought a woman had the patience for it,” she says, entirely without bitterness. “Joke’s on them. The fussy work is the good work.”

Pattern making is the craft behind casting: you make the original, perfectly, so that everything poured from it comes out right. The witch started in 1985 as a gift for a neighbor’s porch – carved by hand, cast by hand, painted by hand. By 1991 she had left the foundry and was working out of the garage full time, selling out of a booth at fall markets from Marblehead to Portsmouth.

The molds wear out – after a few dozen pours the fine detail starts to soften – so she pulls a fresh one from her original every couple of weeks. “Most people would just keep pouring from a tired mold,” she says. “You can see it in the eyes. I can, anyway.”

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“I’ve made about 12,000 of these. I’d like one October off.”

This is where you expect the sad part. Margie isn’t interested in providing one.

“Everybody wants me to say my hands gave out,” she says. “My hands are fine. Slower. Fine.” She holds them up, flat, steady. “I’ve made about twelve thousand of these. My granddaughter is eleven. I have never once been at her Halloween parade, because every October of her life I’ve been in this garage until two in the morning packing boxes. That’s the reason. It’s not a tragedy, it’s arithmetic.”

Could someone take it over? She shrugs.

“I had two people try to learn it. Both good. Both quit inside a year – and I don’t blame them, it’s sixty-odd steps and you don’t make real money until year four. Nobody’s coming to save the trade. That’s just true.”

Rather than sit on the last of the run, she made a decision her nephew – who handles the website, badly, by her account, and is apparently also right about solar panels – had been pushing for anyway: put the whole final batch out at a farewell price and let them go to people who’ll actually put them in a window.

“I’m not doing this to clear money,” she says. “I’d rather 412 porches have one than have them stacked in my garage while I’m at a Halloween parade.”

What her customers say

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The one gift that doesn’t get returned

A surprising share of Margie’s orders each fall are gifts – and not for children.

“It’s daughters buying for mothers, mostly,” she says. “Or somebody who just moved into a house and wants one thing on the porch that isn’t from a big-box store. Halloween is the one holiday where nobody has an opinion about how you decorate. There’s no wrong way to do it. People like that.”

She is aware that after this year, the piece becomes something else. “They’ll be out there for years,” she says. “Somebody’s going to find one at an estate sale someday and wonder who painted it.” She goes back to the brush. “Good. Let them wonder.”

Try it risk-free: 30-day money-back guarantee

Put her in a sunny window. Let her charge for the day. Look at the way the light comes through the branches when it gets dark. If it isn’t what you expected – the weight of her, the paintwork, the light – send it back within 30 days and you get your money back. No arguments, no restocking fee.

Disclosure: This is a paid advertisement. Quantities stated reflect inventory at the time of publication and may change. Customer statements are individual experiences. Solar charging time and glow duration depend on sunlight and placement. Delivery before October 31 applies to orders placed while stock remains.