Antique Teddy bear repairs

This is an antique Teddy bear who has a few issues.

He is missing his eyes and parts of his nose and mouth.

Most of his felt paw pads are gone.

You can see what he is stuffed with here....this product is often called wood wool.

Because I can feel a voicebox inside his torso I want to get it out and see if I can get it working again.
That involves opening up his back seam and rummaging around in the wood wool.

Here it is. A rather petite voicebox.

The cloth that forms it's bellows has disintigrated which is why it no longer works.

Here are the parts of the voicebox and a strip of cuckoo clock bellows fabric that I will use to replace the bellows.

It takes some inventiveness to deal with that spring while waiting for glue to dry.

Success!
Many Teddy bears have growler voiceboxes.
I gather some had squeakers too as this is no growler......

And now I need thread to do some serious sewing on this teddy. But the one fabric store in town is closed due to COVID.

Canada is not well supplied by online businesses.....the shipping costs are nasty!

So I wait for a store to open that might have the thread I need.......

And finally the store opens.....only to find empty slots where my favorite thread sat!

So, back to online ordering. Thread found. Order done....wait, wait, wait. Poor old Canada Post takes 3 weeks to get me a packet from a location that is a 2 hour drive away. Things are still very abnormal out there....

But, finally, progress is made.

Teddy's squeaker is reinstalled and he is midway through getting his paw pads replaced.

And then poor Teddy is done!

He has new glass eyes, new wool felt paw pads and a filled in nose/mouth.

Restringing issues of some smaller composition bodies

Here we have a little antique doll made by the G.Heubach company.

He needs to be restrung.

His body is original to him.
But his body was made cheaply with no allowances for future restringing.
Things were made cheaply and quickly back then too!

There are no stringing hooks.
The body was put together by fastening elastic into the limbs with glued in pegs.

On the outside the ends of the pegs and elastics were painted over.

Someone has tried to tighten up the legs using wire.

The arms have had some repairs and then have been attached to the body with string.











To restring a doll body like this I carefully drill out the old elastic. This leaves a hole through the limbs as the elastic was fastened from the outside by the pegs.

So one option for restringing is this:

This is another doll with the same style body.
The new elastic is threaded through the holes and simply knotted.
If you don't mind the knots this is a decent option that leaves the doll as original as possible.

As the other doll had damage on the arms that I was going to repair, I went in another direction and installed stringing hooks.

The holes where the old elastic was got filled and painted to match the body finish.

So the end result is this.....no knots.