If you had walked into Ione and Don Adams’ Kaneohe home Wednesday, the only hint that it was not actually Christmas would have been the unusually high temperature and humidity outside.

Their home was festooned with dozens of fully decked out, elaborately costumed Santa dolls, Papa Klaus (Klaus is the Adamses’ preferred spelling) and Mrs. Klaus dolls, intricately trimmed Christmas trees and Christmas stockings and holiday-dressed ball-jointed dolls, each bearing a different theme.

Seeing the entire collection all at once was jaw-dropping.

The Santas and Papa and Mrs. Klauses range in height from 25 to 28 inches and are dressed in costumes hand-sewn and adorned by Ione, though she is quick to credit her husband for his part in her work and for transporting the sizeable collection to her sales events.

Likewise, Don is quick to say how impressed he is with his wife’s creativity and the quality of her work.

Her name, taken from Greek mythology, is pronounced "Eye-OWN," as if one were claiming ownership of something — as she does with each of her creations.

"As long as I’m happy with it, it gets added to the collection," she said.

A casual creation in 1994 led to her company, Over the Koolaus, in 1995.

It should probably be noted that her home is not always decorated for Christmas, but in September she sets up private appointments with customers and then has sales that are open to the public.

Adams works from January through August on her new creations, and each Santa or Klaus doll takes between 50 hours and 150 hours to finish.

Every crafter will understand exactly what Adams meant when she said it looks as if an explosion occurred in her work room. That is not evident in the rest of her home, however.

The dolls are categorized according to their costumes, from Chinese and couture to Filipino, Hawaiian, Japanese, Korean, Okinawan or more European designs. The faces don’t reflect the different ethnicities, but the costumes do, in elegant and elaborate fashion.

The porcelain heads for the Santa dolls come from the Midwest while the heads for Papa and Mrs. Klaus, made of the same material used at the world famous Madame Tussauds wax museums, come from a former Hawaii resident who now lives in Colorado.

"They come bald," Adams said, so she creates luxurious mohair beards and hair by hand.

Adams was a buyer for the Crest Room at Liberty House as well as the fine apparel manager at Neiman Marcus, so she knows fabrics and luxurious textures.

She generally avoids making the traditional red Santa suits with white trim; rather, she designs each costume based on fabric "I love," which has been purchased during her travels or locally.

A Mozart-themed Santa, for instance, incorporates items Adams found in Europe as well as a commemorative ceramic bowl she found on Oahu.

She goes to Japan annually and finds all manner of Japanese textiles, including indigo-dyed, shibori, yukata, kimono and rich-looking obi fabric. Some of her velvets have come from New York, while other fabrics and embellishments have come from trips such as a cruise along the Danube.

Adornments such as lace, sequins or gilded trims, Japanese-style embroidery or hand-sewn beadwork are found on each costume, and the dolls are accompanied by Christmas trees or garlands, each decorated as intricately as the dolls.

Most if not all the Santas or Papa Klaus dolls have a hat, hood or haku lei, and many have lights built in to the design to add twinkle to the sparkle extant within each design.

The dolls that make up the main part of her collection range in price from $495 to $1,000, and Adams has an assemblage of collectors who have purchased her dolls for many years. Some keep the dolls for themselves, some give them as gifts, some display her dolls year-round, and others have placed custom orders for specifically themed dolls. Adams said she has shipped orders as far away as Japan.

The large dolls are her focus but, since fabric remnants left from that work are not always large enough for another Santa doll, she created a line of decorative Christmas stockings that range from $195 to $325.

Even smaller fabric remnants get used to decorate her wooden, ball-jointed "Diva Dolls," which she created since their small scale can add Christmas decoration to small spaces, such as a bathroom, she said. The Diva Dolls range from $125 to $145.

Adams also makes decorative Christmas trees upon request, which sell for $225 to $325.

For those on a tighter budget, she said it’s easy to make a fun Christmas tree using a Styrofoam cone or perhaps some felt from a craft store, and big, funky, 1980s-era earrings or other inexpensive jewelry pieces. It could be a good way to use single earrings whose mates have long since disappeared.

“Buy Local” runs on Aloha Fridays. Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com, or on Twitter as @erikaengle.