Schoenhut doll repaint.

 This doll has arrived after a harrowing trip through Canada Customs.

She has had her head repainted in the past.

Much of the carved detail in the hair is lost.

Is it buried under the repaint?

There are some odd contours around her eyes.

A chunk is missing from her neck.

Someone has tried to remove her overpaint already. This reveals several different layers underneath and patches of bare wood.

The doll's body is in rough shape.

Likely the head is in equally rough shape under the overpaint.

Rusty hardware and a chunk of wood missing from one shoulder attest to a hard life.

The feet were painted brown during one of her previous pant jobs.

A partial pinkie amputation.

More evidence of a hard life......the hardware in her 'good' shoulder is shortened due to a fairly ingenious repair. These hardware bits can be hard to repair so whoever did this has my respect!

This is what is left of her original paint.

Her shoulder is getting rebuilt.

Rebuild done and arm re-installed.

And a new pinkie.

It was decided to leave her worn and well-loved body paint as is so her new pinkie gets a distressed paint job to blend in.

Here is her finished look.

Her carved braids.

Other side.

And her bow.

Interestingly this bow did not have much carved detail.

Teddy eyes and voice boxes

 

This teddy arrived with the huge bisque headed doll for a bit of sprucing up.

He is made of mohair and is stuffed with excelsior (wood wool).

He has plastic eyes that are replacements.

He almost certainly had glass eyes originally.

His torso shows hints of a voice box but he is silent.

Once I open him up, I find he once had a voice box but it has been removed and the cavity has beed stuffed with shredded foam.

This foam should be removed as foam does nasty things as it ages.

Now he has an empty spot.

That empty spot can be filled with wood wool and he can stay silent or he can get a replacement voice box.

He is petite Teddy and will need a petite voice box.

This vintage squeaker will fit.

Ready to go home.

Bisque doll eyes....again.

 

This little doll arrived for a simple restringing and a wig spruce up.

Sometimes, what was supposed to be simple, turns out not to be.

Someone has glued the head onto the body. It is supposed to swivel.

The head gets removed successfully.

The wig comes off next.....and out falls a metal doodad.This doodad is the metal part of an eye rocker. This doll once had sleep eyes.

The eyes have been glued into their sockets, probably after the eye rocker broke?

Why not try to get the rocker fixed so the eyes can sleep again?

Fortunately, the glue used was water soluable. So with some water applied, the eyes could get removed.

One of the eye plasters got dislodged during that process though.

After a few tries and a lot of fiddling, the eye rocker is back together.

Then the eye rocker gets installed into the head.

Next several hair extensions are added to her original wig.

She is ready to go home.

Bisque doll eyes

 

This is a very large doll whose eyes have fallen out.

She was made by Heubach Kopplesdorf in Germany. She likely dates to the 1920's.

She has sleeping glass eyes and one glass eye has broken off the rocker.

That red blob is actually a molded tongue.

Her wig is quite the matted mess.

A bit of time with a pick and the matted mess reveals that it was once a short, side-parted bob

This wig was not a higher quality wig. Higher quality wigs had the hair woven into wefts and then stiched onto a fabric wig cap.  Lower quality wigs were 'topknot wigs'. Which means they were made by stuffing a handful of mohair in a hole in the top of the head or pate....and then gluing down and styling the mohair. They were quick and cheap to make. It is common to see topknot wigs on small dolls. Less common to see them on a doll this big. It is a wonder it survived at all!

But back to the eyes.....

Sometimes, with a bit of fiddling, you can glue the eye mechanism back together while it is in place inside the head. That saves the original eye plasters.

These eyes took a couple of tries but success!

She is back together and waiting on her clothing to be cleaned.

Teddy repairs

 

This Teddy has arrived to get new eyes and paw pads. And, a smile recreated

His paw pads were made with Rexine or oilcloth.

This pad has been covered up....who knows how bad things are under it.

Teddy has a squeaker inside that no longer squeaks. To fix that one has to extract the squeaker.

Every stuffed toy has a final seam that was often hand stiched closed.

Teddy's final seam was in his back. It got opened.

After a bit of rummaging around in his wood-wool stuffing, the squeaker is extracted.

This is a typical squeaker problem....tears in the bellows cloth.

Here is the squeaker with new bellows cloth.

It works!

Teddy's one paw padcovering gets removed.

It is really not too bad!

His lower paws get recovered with an antique cotton that is then painted and waxed to mimic his original paw pad fabric.

Done.