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.