Marjorie

Marjorie is a composition doll who has made the journey from Canada to my workshop in Florida to have a make-over.

She has had some work done previously.                                                                                                                                                      

It is time to peel back the layers to reveal her true beauty.

Well, several layers have been peeled but she is no beauty yet.
She reveals a traumatic history....significant skull fractures. Apparently someone threw her down a flight of stairs many years ago! Composition was once advertised as 'unbreakable'. It is not unbreakable.....

Torso is cracked and almost in 2 pieces.

The full extent of the head damage is more visible here. The white material is an old repair compound that has gone soft and will have to be removed.

Maybe it does not look too different yet, but the old repair material has been removed and replaced by a good epoxy. Next will be the filling of defects and recontouring of the missing areas.

Looking a bit better?

Better now?
Flesh tone has been started. Her eyes have been rejuvenated and she will get new teeth.

These are the eyes before rejuvenation.

These are the eyes after rejuvenation.
You can see the teeth better too. Marjorie came toothless but originally had teeth. I am replacing them with one of the more typical arrangements of the time.....two upper teeth with a red felt backing.

Getting better?
She still needs eyelashes and eyebrows painted but progress is being made.....

Well, the eyes put up a fight! The mounting bar was rusted shut. It needs to expand across the inside of the head to hold the eyes in place. A couple days soaking in Liquid Wrench and a bit of muscle power made it functional again.

Next I need to recreate the internal head bar that the stringing elastic hooks into. It has gone missing somewhere during Marjorie's escapades!

 Here is Marjorie back together.
She needs some clothing now!

Marjorie has come a long way.
Time for her to return home......

German bisque doll repair

This doll needed a few tweaks.
Arms repaired and re-attached, eyes reset and head re-atttached.
It also needed a cleaning and a wig.

Done....

"Jeannie"

This is Jeannie.
She survived getting her fingers nipped off by a horse in the 1940's and getting her heel burnt and water damage in a house fire.
Her owner wanted her restored to her former beauty.

Jeannie's eyes had loft much of their colour. I have never seen that before.

 Her torso was split down the side and at the bottom.

The charred heel looked minor, but when I started scraping off the burnt composition, I found more extensive damage. 

 Here is the heel with all the burnt composition removed.

This is Jeannie dismantled and all her loose paint removed.

Next, her missing parts get rebuilt....lots of resurfacing and sanding. 

Jeannie's eyes were a puzzle.

How do I get their colour back?

A bit of experimentation showed that painting them would work.

The slots on top of the iris are where her eyelashes were. New eyelashes will get glued in there. 

Now Jeannie has been filled/sanded and primed.

Many layers of filler/primer were needed. 

Then starts the usual applications of skintone paint and facial features. Here she is mid paint job.

Jeannie finished and dressed.

Hard Plastic Doll Problems

This post is about the hard plastic dolls of the 1950's and 60's. Plastic does not last forever. The early plastics, in particular, are prone to degradation that shows up in various ways. You might find white/gray stuff on your doll.

This is not dirt or mould.
This is leaching plasticizer....a sign that the plastic is breaking down.
Degrading plastics can get sticky, they can get coated in a variety of weird substances and they can get a funky smell.

Degrading plastics can become brittle and fragile.
The degradation process can not be stopped.

I can clean the leached plasticizer off your doll but I cannot tell you how long it will last.











So your doll can go from this:

To this:

But I cannot tell you how long the cleaning will last. The plasticizer will reappear at some point. It might be 1 year, 10 years...who knows.
If you keep the doll away from extreme temperatures and humidity, it will slow the degradation process down. It is also important to keep the doll away from other vintage plastics as some degradation processes produce gasses which will adversely affect other plastics.

Ideal composition doll

An Ideal doll loses it's scary look:

This poor doll has jaundiced eyes and many deep facial cracks.

He is a bit of a wreck....

His limbs are taped up with band-aids and a variety of sticky strips.

He is a sad looking doll!

He gets dismantled first.

His lifted/loose composition is removed to reveal some nasty underlying damage.

But epoxy putty and lots of sanding will fix those defects.

A base coat of flesh colored paint on everything....

Add some facial features, new eyelashes and he looks a lot less scary!

Effanbee Lovums

I spend my winters in Florida and I bring along several doll projects of my own to work on. I wanted to try out some new techniques and looked for a doll here who needed serious tlc. This poor doll had been sitting on eBay for ages. I felt sorry for her....no one wanted her looking like that? So I bought her.

She is a nice large Lovums doll from the Effanbee company.

Unfortunately she has had a full repaint done...it is not a good repaint!
She has celluloid eyes that have crazed and yellowed. She has her original caracul (lambskin) wig.

She came with a shredding baby dress and tights that were made for a human baby and did not fit her. They went into the trash. Some things are not worth saving!

Now for the dismantling...

Her head is off and her wig is removed.
Lovums dolls were sold as painted hair or wigged dolls and it is typical to find molded/painted hair under the wig.

This is the inside of her head. I have never seen a mouth structure like that.

This is the mouth structure removed....an interesting visual!
The teeth are celluloid and are mounted on a tin mouth plug.

And her eyes come out...

The nasty paint is removed with acetone.
This reveals many problems with the skim composition coat. it is cracked and lifted off the base compo in many areas.
The lifted layers will have to be removed.

 
Well....this is the head with the loose and lifted layers removed. This leaves just the base composition layer. Fortunately the limbs did not have to be taken down this much.

     This is one arm 'before' with it's not-so-ideal paint job and the other arm after getting the paint removed with acetone. The skim layer of composition remains in good shape and does not have to be removed.

All the parts are ready for rebuilding now.

Back to the eyes....as soon as I started to work on the eyelashes, one iris broke into many pieces. So an iris transplant is the best option now. Here are the eyes with the old crazed irises removed.

Now the eyes have new irises harvested from a set of acrylic eyes.
The sclera have been whitened and the eyes just need some eyelashes to be complete.










Where does the time go?
We are heading back to Canada. Lovums will have to wait until the Fall for any further work.