Hip repair for a Maplelea doll

This is a Maplelea doll who has come in to get her dislocated hip fixed.

Her left leg is dangling because the stitching that held her hip  socket into her body has disintegrated or come undone.

To resew the hip socket, I need to detach her leg from the hip socket, remove her head and unstuff her body.

She is now in pieces and ready to be reconstructed.

First her hip socket gets sewn back into the cloth of her body.

And then her leg gets reattached. This doll's limbs were attached to the joint sockets with knotted elastic. She needed new elastic for the one leg as the old elastic did not survive the unknotting.....that was one tough and stiff knot!!!

But, finally, she is back together.

A box of doll pieces arrives....

This is often how dolls arrive into my workshop.

















They get inspected for missing parts and damage.

Then it is cleaning, repairing and restringing.

Time to get packed up for their return journey.

A drink and wet doll

Here is a small composition doll who arrived in pieces for re-stringing. She has a feature that was a novelty for a while. Check out her mouth....

There is a tube going from her mouth....

and down into her body. The tube has stiffened and broken with time.

The other end of the tube ends in her bottom.

This was a 'drink and wet' doll. Children could feed their doll a bottle of fluid which would travel through the tube and wet the diaper.
But this is a composition doll. Composition does not like water! Many of these dolls did not survive their feedings.
I will re-plumb the doll as I re-string her but no feedings allowed!

Cloth body renewal

This little doll has arrived to get her body issues addressed.

Her arms and legs keep falling off.

There is sticky stuff  embedded in the cloth around the top of each limb.

Off with her head. Out with her stuffing.
And here is the source of the problem.
The limbs were attached to the cloth body by elastic bands that have long since lost their elasticity. Elastic deteriorates by getting stiff and brittle or melting into a gooey mess. Unfortunately for me this elastic went the gooey route and now I have to get the sticky mess out of the cloth body.

Once totally unstuffed and the limbs are extracted from the goo, the cloth body can be soaked in a variety of cleaning solutions. It takes days and several changes of soaking solutions but the goo is gone and the body seems to be cleaning up nicely.

Now she has a cleaned body and her limbs are attached with cotton cording. No more rotting elastic!

Ready to go home......

Re-assembling a German bisque doll

So, now we have a small German bisque headed doll.
It needs it's head re-attached and it's wig prettied up.

This type of doll does not have stringing hooks. The elastic was glued into the limbs with no thought to eventual elastic replacements.
But here, someone has already replaced the old elastic. They drilled out the old stuff and jury rigged elastic bands to replace the stringing.
Pretty inventive, but now the elastic bands are rotting and need replacing.

Here the elastic has been replaced with fresh stuff.

 The wire piece that arrived with the doll is part of it's original stringing system. One end hooks around the elastic between the legs and the other end hooks over the rim of the head.

Prettying up the wig will take some work. It is missing a chunk of mohair.

A few extensions added and she looks better.

This is another topknot wig. These wigs were made by stuffing a wad of mohair into the top of the head....in this case it was stuffed into a cardboard pate. Then it was glued to the head and styled. They were never meant to be combed out. If you try to comb out one of these wigs, half the mohair will fall out.
The topknot wig was typically seen on the lower priced dolls of the time. A hat was usually part of the doll's ensemble and disguised the sparseness of the wig.

How about this hat?

A return to the beat up Schoenhut.

This is the beat up Schoenhut doll who got her arm fixed and then she sat while I decided how much restoration, if any, to do to her.

Well, she kept looking so pathetic I decided she needed something done.
So she got her dings filled with colored epoxy.
And, she had already had her dark lipstick removed,

so that made her look like this......

She once looked like the saddest doll on this shelf but after her dings got filled she started to outshine a couple of the others.

Finally, I got around to disguising her patches and getting her dressed.
I wanted her to still look old and played with so this is her final look.

She wears an antique dress and shoes and looks like an old played-with doll.

A 'patent washable' doll

 This type of doll is sometimes referred to as a 'patent washable' doll. They were made in the 1880-1915 period and have a cloth body with papier mache head and limbs.
Most of the problems that plague this type of doll are about to be seen here....

The area around the eye is prone to damage.
Her one eye socket is chipped and the other......well the whole eye is gone.
Something is rattling around inside the head. I hope that is the missing eye!

The cloth used for these bodies is typically a very thin cotton prone to fraying and ripping.
The arm cloth on this doll is almost non-existent. Actually her whole right arm is non-existent.

This particular doll has an interesting hole in it's side leading into a cardboard tube. I sense I am going to be finding some sort of mechanism inside.

The lower legs were being held on only by socks that were pinned to the upper legs. At least the lower legs are still present.

The back of the doll's head looks quite damaged under all that cloth and string.

Sure enough......lots of damage was being covered up by that cloth.
Happily the missing eye was inside the head!

This papier mache is quite thin and is obviously easily damaged.

Further disassembly finds the mysterious mechanism that the hole led to.
The doll once had 2 strings coming out of that hole. Pulling the strings operated a bellows type mechanism to produce a sound.

This is what was considered hi-tech at the turn of the 20th century!

The head is making progress in that the pieces are back together.
Now on to disguising the scars.....

So far she has gotten her voicebox repaired and re-installed, her feet mended and re-attached. Her replacement right arm is taking shape too.

Disguising the scars involves spraying sealer....which should  not get onto the glass eyes.
And, this doll's hair is not removable without destroying it.
So, she gets a head-wrap to protect her hair and lovely blue goggles to protect her eyes.

Her current backside view.

She is now cleaned up and her scars are disguised.

Next is contemplating what to do with her hair. It is mohair and original to her so it would be nice to keep it.

This type of wig is sometimes called a 'topknot' wig. It was made by stuffing a handful of mohair into a hole on the top of the head. The mohair was then spread around the head, glued down and styled. This type of wig is very prone to losing mohair and often end up looking sparse and straggly.

I could resort to what many folks do on a bad hair day.....put on a hat.
Or, maybe extensions would work? I install several extensions by gluing in multiple small clumps of a similar coloured mohair.

Then she goes off to the doll hair salon.

Here is one of her arms getting stuffed.

The piece of cloth someone had used to hold her head pieces on was big enough to make new upper arms. And, it was the same style of antique cotton.

The stuffing is excelsior, or wood wool. This was a common stuffing used in the era this doll was made. The body and legs are stuffed with excelsior so the arms, ideally should be too.

All back together and waiting for her clothes....