Bernadette, the composition doll.

This is Bernadette, a family doll who has had much loving! She ha s arrived to fix her eyes and get beautified.

There is something very wrong with that right eye. Those eyebrows could use some work too!

After the usual decapitation I can extract her eyes. They are constructed by glueing celluloid caps onto wood globes. The right eye cap had come loose and had rotated backwards. An inventive person had drawn a replacement eye onto the bare wood globe. This makes an easy fix as I can just reglue the cap and re-insert the eyes.

Now that her eyes are done, I can contemplate what to do with her very sparse mohair wig. There is not enough left to style so one option is a bonnet.

Another option is a full new wig. Bernadette is a big doll. Large mohair wigs are hard to find and expensive. Synthetic wigs are cheaper but less appropriate for her age.

Yet another option is hair extensions. 

Her owners are consulted and extensions are decided on. Mohair can be obtained in wefts and sewn into her existing wig. That is what she gets.

 

She goes home like this.

A Japanese gofun doll

 

This doll has arrived for repairs.

She is a Japanese doll from maybe the 1930's.

Her head was wrapped separately from her body as the connection had broken.

Her nose needs fixing.

This doll was finished with 'gofun'. That is a ground up oyster shell product.

There are issues with the doll's limbs.

All the limbs have silk upper parts stuffed with wood wool. The silk is shredding.

Silk is not available locally so I have found the next best fabric to use. This is a rayon fabric that I will use to wrap the shredding silk parts. I dyed the rayon to turn it from the bright white into a more subdued and antique looking colour.

Here are her legs wrapped in rayon.

No more wood wool leaks.

Her arms get a similar treatment.

Her nose is filled and the repaired area is getting the colour tweaked to blend in with her original surfaces.

After a bit of reseach, I find out that the head is connected very simply. It is mounted on a stick that gets pushed into the wood wool inside her torso. That allows the head to turn.

So, I replace the broken stick with a bamboo skewer.

A vintage voicebox squawks again

 

This vintage plastic doll has arrived with a few requests.

She needs lip and eyebrow paint as her originals have long won off.

She needs restringing as her legs are attached with hooks and elastic. The elastic has stretched out with time. The elastic seems a bit odd as her arms and head are attached with more typical flange joints but, it is most certainly original.

More troublesome for me is that her voicebox is broken and silent. I have never tried fixing a plastic voicebox like this.

Off come the legs and out comes the voicebox.

I still cannot see how the elastic attaches.

After she gets beheaded, the elastic attachment is exposed. It is a simple nail holding the two ends.

Back to the voicebox.

I can see the weight inside but I need to get it out to analyse why it does not make noise any more. It will not fit out through the broken top and the top has been solidly glued onto the body.

The only option is to saw open the body of the voicebox.

Here is the weight freed from the voicebox.

How does this make noise?

Flipping over the weight reveals the reed. Blowing air through it makes it squawk so it is not the problem.

The weight has a latex gasket held on by a cardboard ring.

The gasket seals against the sides of the body to push air through the reed in the weight as the weight moves back and forth.

The problem is likely that the gasket has lost its flexibility so replacing it should work.

Here is the gasket.

Before I tried to make a new gasket I sawed open a brand new voicebox that was too long to fit in this doll. Inside was an identical gasket. I swiped it and installed it in this voicebox. It worked!

Here is her new facial paint.

And here is her repaired voice box that actually works!

Broken celluloid

 

This celluloid doll was made by the German company Schildkrot.

He has an obvious issue. 

The top of his head is in several pieces. The enveplope contains a handfull of very small pieces.

A less obvious issue is that his arms are hanging and loose. The elastic needs replacing.

At one point some of his head pieces were taped together. You can see old tape residue along the edge here. That needs to get cleaned off before reassembling the bits.

Some of the pieces have cracks.

Some of the contents of the envelope.

This is going to be a persnickety jigsaw puzzle!

One nice thing about celluloid is that you can fuse pieces together with acetone. So, once you figure out where a piece goes, you hold it in place while running a fine paintbrush dipped in acetone along the crack.

Here I have pieced some of the smaller bits into their spots.

The darker peach is a permanent colour change caused by the adhesive tape used in that previous repair.

Gradually he gets back together.

All the pieces are back together although the top of his head has not been fused on to the bottom yet. I am contemplating what to do with three small chunks that are missing.

His head is fused together now and I have filled in the holes with a tinted epoxy.

Now to see if I can minimize the scars and even out his colour.

He aslo has a nose dent that I would like to try to make less obvious.

One of the things I am trying is an epoxy paste that I have tinted.

The paste makes gives his nose a better contour.

Lots of trial and error to get to this point!

His arms get restrung and he is ready to go home.

A broken bisque baby

 

This doll has arrived.

She is a vintage bisque head doll who has met with a grievous injury.

Most of her bits have arrived. Apparently some were in smithereens and were not saved.

Step one is to glue the pieces together.

That reveals where the missing pieces came from.

With bigger defects I like to put a in a base to support the sculpting epoxy. This is a small piece of automotive mesh that I have glued under the hole.

I forgot to take a picture of the epoxy putty in place but here it is smoothed and painted to blend in.

Another Schoenhut doll's restoration

 

This doll has arrived to be restored.

She did not always look like this. She had a total head repaint when her owner bought her. 

She once looked like this.

This is Schoenhut's model 105.

She had been repainted but did not look like she should.

So, off came the repaint!

Here she is part way through the repaint removal.

Sometimes, when removing repaint, you find nice original paint underneath.

Unfortunately this was not the case here.

There is little original paint left.

Her owner took off most of the overpaint and decided to send her to me.

Here is where I start.

There is white filler here and there.

There is some original skintone paint left.

There are two colours evident on her headband....which is the original?

I like to remove old fillers as sometimes they are obscuring original details. Here the filler is giving the carved bow a too high profile and a too smooth surface.

After a bit of poking about with magnifying glasses, I find out that the blue is the original colour of her headband. 

Here, I have removed the pink paint from her headband and much of the previous filler from her face. This does reveal a large hole in her nose. What caused that is anyone's guess!

Here is the bow after the filler and pink paint layers have been removed.

Now I contemplate the very dark hair colour. Is it original?

Almost certainly this doll had a factory repaint. The Schoenhut factory offered repaint services to dolls that had been played with and needed their paint refreshed. That would mean she was originally made with a blue headband and had it changed to pink during the return to the factory.

Was her very dark hair colour also a change from her original?

After a bit more poking with magnifying glasses, it seems like there are remnants of a medium brown hair colour under that dark. So.....off comes the dark brown.

Here she is minus fillers and later paint layers.

She is ready to have wood hardener applied and the on to fillers and contour correction.

A back view.

After some fillers she is starting to get her fleshtone colour applied.

Finally she is finished.