Ideal composition doll

An Ideal doll loses it's scary look:

This poor doll has jaundiced eyes and many deep facial cracks.

He is a bit of a wreck....

His limbs are taped up with band-aids and a variety of sticky strips.

He is a sad looking doll!

He gets dismantled first.

His lifted/loose composition is removed to reveal some nasty underlying damage.

But epoxy putty and lots of sanding will fix those defects.

A base coat of flesh colored paint on everything....

Add some facial features, new eyelashes and he looks a lot less scary!

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.

Rebuilding of fingers

Many dolls are found with missing fingers. They are small and delicate and prone to damage.

 These are the hands from a ball-jointed composition body. The body is in great shape other than the 2 missing fingers.

The finish on the hands is cracked but filling the cracks would mean a total repaint. The cracks do not detract from a 100 year old doll so they will be left.

The fingers will be rebuilt with minimal damage to the original finish.

 The first step is to install wire supports for the new fingers.

The fingers have now been rebuilt with epoxy putty.

The new fingers are painted to blend in with the old hands. The original finish (and cracks) remain on the rest of the hands.

Victorian match-holder repair

Another not-a-doll.
My mother has an extensive antiques collection and occasionally has a mishap. This time she stumbled in the dark and knocked a Victorian plaster match-holder off the wall.

This dude had a bad nose fracture and only half of his nose pieces were found. Plus his pipe had been knocked off.

He needed to be pieced back together, have his missing piece of nose reconstructed and all the repairs painted to match the original surface.












Done :-)

Eatons Beauty repair.

This Eatons Beauty was brought in with a request to get it prettied up for her original owner who was now in a nursing home.
The request was for new hair and some clothes.

This doll has it's original slip, shoes and Eaton's banner. Her hair is original but very little remains.

Her head has been solidly  glued into it's socket...why?
Her eyelashes are mostly gone.

 After determining the head was undamaged, I figured it had been glued in because someone could not figure out how to restring the doll?
The glue put up a fight but I was able to remove the head. Unfortunately the socket came off the body in the process. But it is all reparable....

Here is the doll with the socket repaired, paint finishes matched and restrung properly. Her head now swivels again.
Oh, and she has new eyelashes.

 She is now decked out in a new synthetic wig. Mohair would have been preferable but the added expense was not in the budget.


















This is how she was presented back to her owner. Her original chemise is under the dress and her original shoes and socks were repaired and she wears them with pride :-)

Kid body repair.

This is a typical kid leather body with composition lower arms and legs
His body is in decent shape but the arms have issues. They have been taped up at the shoulders and elbows and the normal articulations  are missing and/or broken. A thumb is missing. The tape is dried out and the arms are leaking cork stuffing.

The plan is to remove the tape, dismantle the arms and then repair them closer to the original form. No tape allowed!
Leather can be repaired and patched. Tape is never good for repairing dolls.

The legs have some finish issues but are sturdy and free of chips. They will not be touched.

What the tape hid...

Smashed ball hinges at the tops of the forearms and a big hole in one shoulder.

Kid body shoulder joints often develop these problems. The zinc button holding the wire wears at the kid and holes develop. One original button was found inside the sawdust stuffing. The other was missing and will be replaced with a similar vintage button.

These are the arms with the kid leather patched. The composition arms have been rebuilt and the repaired areas have been painted to match the original finish.

The repaired arms have been reattached and have their proper articulations at the elbows and shoulders.

Madame Alexander Cissy

There are usually several dolls on the go at once here.
Cissy is a Madame Alexander doll from the 1950's.                                                                                                            

She is made of hard plastic with a painted finish. She unfortunately has a cracked head, a bad DIY face paint job and deranged hair. Oh, and is missing most of her eyelashes.

Cissy was a high end doll in her day. She would have sported an elaborate hairdo and very nice clothes.






So she starts her renovation...

This is Cissy with her DIY paint scraped off and her wig removed. That is a large crack!

This is Cissy with her crack repaired and painted.

 This is Cissy with new eyelashes and freshly painted facial features.

Cissy's wig has been washed and re-styled.

Almost respectable now :-)

Her owner wanted a dress made from modern sequined fabric. I  patterned the dress from some original Cissy dresses so she still has hints of 1950's glamour.