C. Carey Cloud » Cracker Jack » Plastic Dangles in Amber and Ruby


In 1957, C. Carey Cloud created the transparent Plastic Dangles in amber, ruby, and sapphire for Cracker Jack. He made 12 different dangles in this series, including a butterfly, a deer, an elephant, fish/dolphins, a horse, a horse and rider, owls, a pan, a parrot, a poodle, a rooster, and a swan.

Four years earlier, 1953, this series was produced with opaque plastic, and can be seen on the webpage Plastic Dangles.

Carey Cloud made the initial molds for this toy using clay. To create the bumps he used carpet tacks pressed into the soft clay to create the bumps that cover these dangles.

From his autobiography, Cloud Nine, "I had ten different subjects in the set which had to be modeled four times larger than the finished product, then engraved down to 1 3/4 inches by engravers. I had never touched clay for modeling, nor had I ever used a knife for wood carving. It was all new to me. I purchased a book on carving and on sculpturing. I decided to try clay modeling. With much experimentation and some difficulty, I succeeded in turning out the models. However, I found one disadvantage in using clay: it shrank. On future orders, I carved my models in basswood."

Below are 8 or the 12 Plastic Dangles in amber, ruby and sapphire.