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In the window of Tail of the Yak in Berkeley, which tends to be filled with singular things, is a 19th century-style wooden Santos figure from Guatemala. It is dressed in a stiff green crinoline of crepe paper, with a cinched waist and an applique of bulrushes and three doves descending, and it has a quaint and regal air, out of another age.

Anandamayi Arnold cut the crinoline to her own specifications, and is something of an artist in paper. As often as not, she'll be wearing an outfit not too unlike the Santos doll's: long, flowing, cinched, with her hair piled up and wearing looped pearl earrings and goat-wool shawl from Kazakhstan. The effect is Proustian, to say the least.

The other day, she headed out to Tail of the Yak with a rush basket piled high with pomegranates, acorns and lumps of coal.

It was raining, which meant, because the fruit and coal were all made of paper, that she had to drive (and cover them with plastic wrap). Not that she has a car. "Usually, I'll walk," she apologized. "I have to borrow my parents' car today."

There are a few people who get up in the morning and proceed with a life that they have designed to their own specifications, and Arnold, 27, is one of them.

If you wanted to be brutally literal, you could say that she makes high- end party favors in her old upstairs bedroom at her family's house in Berkeley -- "my debris-filled pit," she calls it, with her customary exactitude. She also works at Tail of the Yak, a treasure house on Ashby that was given its name 32 years ago by a Nyingma Buddhist monk.

"I'm always collecting paper things," says Arnold, sitting surrounded by rolls of crepe and fingering plates of embossed silver and gold paper from Germany. "This has so much pressed detail. I hoard it when I find it."

In the chaos of her so-called studio, Arnold, a graduate of Brown University who majored in ancient studies (magna cum laude), has resurrected an almost-forgotten art, otherwise known as surprise balls.

The San Francisco floral designer Stanlee Gatti has became addicted to them, and like other collectors, has to have one of every series she makes -- not that easy, as they are made in groups of a couple dozen maximum at a time. So far, over the five years she's been making them, Arnold has produced about 60 variations, each more intriguing than the last.

"Luckily, I keep on having ideas," she says. She's not the kind of person likely to run out of them.

Arnold did not invent the genre, which was suggested to her by a small paper giraffe, made in Japan, that her mother gave as a present to her grandmother in the 1960s.

But it's safe to say that no one else today is making anything quite like it. Tail of the Yak sells the surprise balls for $18 to about $38, depending on the amount of work involved, almost as fast as she can make them.

What makes them so compelling is their almost hyper-real accuracy, not an easy feat in paper.

"I try to be fairly particular," says Arnold, with some understatement. "They have to have the right number of petals and pistils, and the right number of lobes. I don't like it just to be random."

Usually, the first thing she does when she picks a new subject -- a hydrangea, for example, or a bachelor button, is to go to the library or find a real specimen to see what it looks like.

Gatti ordered up a batch of cacti for his Thanksgiving party this year. "I had been experimenting with it," Arnold said. "You know, where it's one dark spike and a ring of little fuzzy things. I did one with every single black spike surrounded by its halo of little yellow spikes."

It took so long, she had to give it to Gatti as a prototype and cut a few corners for the final batch, which he presented to his assembled family in New Mexico at Thanksgiving, for a party with a Southwestern cowboy theme.

For several years now, he's ordered up a series at Christmas (this year, aqua and chartreuse tree ornaments and gold metallic fish); now he's thinking of doing every holiday.

"One of my friends always bestows these extravagant gifts on me," he says. "This year, there was a Hermes cardigan and a Hermes sweater, and these two packages from the Tail of the Yak."

He thought he had seen every Arnold creation, but these were a surprise: a biplane (the only one ever made) and a butterfly with appliqued wings, some secret and complicated tryouts Arnold had been squirreling away.

On her parents' Christmas tree this year (Tara Arnold is an expert in textiles, and her husband, Arjuna, a Sanskrit scholar), there was one cutout cardboard ornament, a tree with candles and angel, on the lowest branch, that Arnold made when she was 6.

Even then, she had figured out that if you took the gold paper from a Benson & Hedges cigarette box and used felt pen on it, it would come out with a beautiful sheen.

Arnold traces her interest in making such things to a paper rose she was given by the school secretary when the family lived in India ("which my horrible carpool mate threw out of the window"), and it is clear her training started very early. "I was always trying to make paper sandals that didn't work," she says.

"She will take a piece of flat, ugly paper, and in her hands, she can make it turn into anything," says her mother, who says she has sat up all night watching her daughter put together 18th century costumes of lace and ruffles for Tail of the Yak out of a blizzard of white paper and vellum. "I couldn't help it. I would just sit there, watching."

From age 11 to 13, Arnold was taken into San Francisco every Saturday to learn Japanese paper-doll making. She was captivated, from the very first day, just by the feel of the paper. Her final project, still standing with the others in the cabinet in the dining room, was a dynamic tableau based on the Bunraku play "The Love Suicides at Sonezaki."

At Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley, Arnold took a summer paper-flower class with one of the biology teachers. He, too, was very particular about being botanically correct. She started making ribbon flowers for the Yak when she was 15 and still at school.

She has made free-standing irises, with the rhizome as the surprise part, or a pansy attached to a dirt ball, but usually the surprise balls come in the kind of handy, all-in-one shape that makes them fun for pitching.

This takes painstaking labor. With the hydrangeas, she had to twist every floret into place. The acorns, a new series, come with a wired oak leaf, very William Morris. The leaf looks as if it would take years to cut out, but Arnold says it is the acorn cups, which come in overlapping scalloped rows, that actually take the time.

Improvement is constantly an issue. "I'll make a run of surprise balls, and then I'll revisit it," she says. The first one always takes the longest, but on the whole, they take 15 to 30 minutes each to make.

There have been animals also; lavender mouse heads, bluebottles with scored glassine wings, beetles and birds. The poodles, with frilled fur, cost $50 and just took too long to do, so hardly half a dozen were completed. Gatti's all-time favorite, this Halloween, was a jet-black raven with ragged wings, dazzling in its verisimilitude. "She's taken it to a whole other level, " he says.

The surprise ball presents its recipient with a terrible dilemma, as my two teenage daughters discovered this Christmas (one got one of the deep-red pomegranates, with a stiff and papery corona, the other a bright orange persimmon with ogival leaves).

It's like the gift of a bottle of wine: You have to decide whether to use it or lose it, a terrible choice. As one child put it: "I don't want to kill the birdie, but I do want to see what's inside."

To many people, of whatever age, the decision can be wrenching. Do you dissolve it into a heap of streamers because you can't wait to see what it contains, or keep it forever in its miraculous paper instantiation?

The unwinding process is full of twists and turns. ("Things come out slowly and sequentially," says Alice Hoffman Erb, one of the owners of Tail of the Yak.)

Each package contains secreted within it, almost organically, a precise selection of three stickers, three pieces of candy and four toys, one surprise at the end of each crepe streamer. They are chosen with care, some on Arnold's travels to Indonesia and Europe. "The Yak lets me sneak off," she says.

There are two small brothers in Rockridge (their mother has a whole mantelpiece of Arnold's hyacinths and lilies that regularly get mistaken for the real thing) who get one each whenever a new surprise ball comes out.

"One devotedly saves them," says Arnold. His 6-year-old younger brother does not, and has been captured on holiday videos, his hands shooting into the air, surrounded by tangles of streamers.

Because "he is often disappointed with the non-chocolate nature of the candy," Arnold has lifted her ban on chocolate in this one case (otherwise, the chocolate might get a little old). "I know they'll be opened within 15 seconds of receipt," she says.

Arnold also makes Halloween costumes for the boys, a dung beetle and praying mantis a year ago, a black king and white knight this year. When they come to fetch them, there are reference books everywhere.

"It's like a term paper to her," says their mother, Elaine Smith. "She does it from start to finish, without a break, for 10 days, and it always exceeds all expectations. All I can do is tell her how much it means to my kids. But every time, I think: This is the height of crassness to pay Anandamayi in money. It's as if she's from a different temporal and geographical space."

Arnold and her friend Aimee Baldwin will do murals on commission; they've done a bird-release shed in Olema, for example, as well as children's bedrooms in Beatrix Potter themes. They benefit from "permanent free food" from the Berkeley Farmers' Market and Phoenix Pastificio, for whom they do signage.

At the North Beach festival a couple of years ago, she won first prize for a sidewalk chalk painting of Christopher Columbus, in pork-pie hat, surfacing in the New World through a manhole in North Beach. She took a rubbing of a real manhole first.

These traces are all recorded in Arnold's scrapbook, photographed along with almost all the surprise balls. "There's a series of triumphal photos of me that my dad's taken, with especially ornery pieces of work," she says.

The staple of her existence (from Castle in the Air on Fourth Street in Berkeley) is German crepe paper, which comes in deep, saturated colors and holds up preternaturally well. They used to make fabulous printed crepe paper in this country in the 1920s, she says. She has some swatches from Dennison Papers that she found in a closeout sale, buttercup yellow, with a tiny chintz overprint.

The modern kind, however, she finds lacking. "The American stuff is like toilet paper," she says, although she does use it as padding inside the surprise balls.

Given the materials and the labor, and the fact that every surprise ball is sold through the Yak, you might wonder what exactly the margin is on this labor of love. But profit is hardly a motive here.

"I always feel it's very sneaky to do what I want to do and get paid," she says. "When I finish work, I go and finish a project that's only slightly different from work."

She knows it's ephemera, but that's the beauty of it.

Meanwhile, her grandmother decided last year that it was time for the original giraffe to go because it was so old and crusty. "She eradicates all excess," says Arnold. "And besides, he was worn out. She opened it, and there were all these old-fashioned little toys: a whistle, a die and a flowerpot."

Perhaps, in another 40-odd years, someone will be discovering her glittery space stickers and bobbing fish magnets with equal excitement, a little burst of flavor from the past.

Surprise balls are wound tightly, like a ball of wool, around their sometimes lumpy contents.

Anandamayi Arnold starts with a streamer and a particularly interesting gift for the final surprise, and sets out in paper cups the miniatures she finds at wholesale toy stores, Mr. Mopps in Berkeley and Chinatown (examples: miniature silver scoops she once found in Frankfurt, Germany, or paper-thin porcelain rabbit bowls from China).

By now, she has an instinctive sense of how to correctly place each addition so she finishes with the shape she needs.

The tangerines, for example, aren't spherical, but a little squat, and a pomegranate, paradoxically, has flat spots. Sometimes, if a persimmon, for example, starts to look more like a raccoon, she will put it aside for future reference.

When the last inclusion has been wrapped in regular crepe paper, she takes out the extra-fancy German variety for the outside coating, which is what gives these pieces their extra-sleek look.

Next comes a lot of cutting and shaping with scissors: The pomegranate calyx, for instance, is made from a double strip of dark red crepe paper backed with beige. One side is snipped into a crown, the other fringed straight and used to anchor the calyx to the fruit with more turns of crepe.

A cardinal principle in this final assembly (tip from Arnold's mom): Don't use too much glue.

Arnold, ever the perfectionist, will add extra layers of complexity, like the dried brown frizz in the calyx and a small round bump where the fruit was joined to the stem. At this level of detail, it's almost subliminal, but that's what makes these different.

Castle in the Air, 1805 Fourth St., Berkeley, (510) 204-9801.

Tail of the Yak, 2632 Ashby Ave. Berkeley, (510) 841-9891.

The Sewing Workshop, San Francisco, 2010 Balboa Street, San Francisco, (415) 221-7397, where Tara Arnold teaches classes, is holding an Open House from 11 a.m.-3 p.m. on Saturday. .

Aimee Baldwin, (510) 559-1003, aimee@theeel.com, www.theeel.com/~aimee/