A Schoenhut doll with previous 'repairs'

This is 'Barbara'.

She was made by the Schoenhut company and is about 100 years old.

She has arrived for a complete renovation.

This is Schoenhut's 'Miss Dolly' model.

She is suffering from peeling/chipped paint. She has had a very thick repaint somewhere along the way. Both her original paint and the repaint are having issues.

UV light can show different details.

Here UV light shows the repainted areas as darker than the original paint and bare wood.

This is under UV light again and here some of the repaint has been removed from the middle of the torso.

Here are Barbara's legs after the overpaint has been removed. Happily that is a lot of her original paint that has been uncovered. The yellowish areas are patches where her original varnish has yellowed with age.

 Here is her face without the overpaint and wads of old wig glue. That is her original eye colour now and you can see remnants of her eyelashes and lip colour.

The nails in her head are the tacks that the factory used to tack on her wig. They can be re-used to secure her new wig. No more glue! Ever!

After all her repaint is removed she gets her bare wood parts sealed. I use a clear gesso for that.

Here Barbara is part way through getting her missing paint and gesso filled in.

I use a flesh toned epoxy putty for that.

Barbara has completed her paint job.

And here she is modelling an old human hair wig that suits her quite nicely.

She heads back to Arkansas like this.

Here is Barbara back in Arkansas with a lovely new dress and hair bow. 

The return of a Maplelea doll

This is 'Jenna'. She is a Maplelea doll who had her left hip repaired a couple years ago.

Now she has a total avulsion of her right hip.....ie the whole hip joint has torn off.

A painted bisque doll gets repairs

This doll has arrived to be restrung and to get some repairs.

Her first obvious issue is that she is missing her stringing hook from her right leg. Someone has drilled holes in the leg to tie it back on her body.

Her head is 'painted bisque'. This differs from traditional bisque in that the colour was not fired on.

You can see where the paint has been pulled off the bisque by the wig glue.

Her wig didn't look too bad from the front but the back looks a little deranged.

A jumble of old elastic and stuff was rattling around in her body. That is the missing hook from the right hip in there!

Her body is cardboard covered with a gesso and then painted. Here one foot is crumbling and there are weird stains running up the leg.

Her posterior is missing quite a bit of the gesso. This doll might have encountered some liquid at some point in her life? Traditional gesso does not tolerate getting moist.

To start, the bit with the hook that had fallen out is epoxied back into the leg and the crumbling foot bits get glued back together.

Once that all dries, the exposed bits of carboard and the deteriorated areas of gesso get painted with a sealer. 

An Ashton Drake doll with a wobbly head

This is a small doll named 'Josie' from the Ashton Drake Galleries.
She has come to get her wobbly head fixed.

Her head wobbles because the elastic holding her head to her body has disintegrated.
Elastic is often the first thing that fails in a doll.

Josie's head is attached via the elastic to a shoulderplate which is sewn on to her cloth body.
For the best results, her shoulderplate needs to be removed and her wig too.

Here we have all her bits dismantled. The elastic has been removed.

To restring her head some new elastic gets threaded through the loop that was inside her head.

Then the loop goes back into her head with the ends of elastic coming out of her neck.

The elastic goes through her shoulderplate and is tied off around the wire gizmo.

And then her head gets resewn to her body.

She is ready to get dressed and go home.

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.

Eye problems of a hard plastic doll

This doll was made by "Pedigree", an English company. It likely dates from the 1950's.
It has an eye issue to sort out.

In humans, this drooping eyelid is called ptosis and is often caused by nerve damage.
But what causes it in dolls?

This doll has interesting eyes in that they open and close and move side to side.

After the usual "off with her head" start to doll repairs, I can see the eye mechanism.
Someone has tried a repair previously. There is old yellowed glue on the dysfunctional eye.
What is worse is that the bracket that holds the eye in and that is supposed to slide out to release the eyes has been solidly glued back in place.

Here is the good eye showing the pivot that allows the eyes to move side to side.

Here is the dysfunctional eye.
The lower pivot is broken off and the eyelid no longer coordinates with the eyeball.

After several failed removal attempts and much grumbling about the person who glued the eye bracket in......success! The eyes are out.
Now to recreate a pivot....

Here are the eyes ready to go back in.
They have new eyelashes and a spruced up paint job on the lids.
The new pivot can be seen on the right.

Keener eyes than mine might notice a problem here?
The eye with the broken pivot was the doll's right eye. Here the repaired pivot will be on the doll's left eye.
I installed the eyes like this and only noticed I had flipped the eyes when I was poking around wondering why they weren't fitting on properly :-)

After a bit of fussing over the eye fit and a refresh on the mouth paint.....she is done.