A Schoenhut carved hair girl

This girl is Schoenhut's model 105. She has had previous work done and has arrived to improve her appearance. On first glance she has some issues of her left face and has a squinty eye.

She has areas of missing paint throughout her hair.

How many layers of paint are on this doll?

There seems to be multiple layers.

How far down is her original paint?

Painting over surfaces like this will not be successful so I like to remove the layers until I find original paint if there is any left. 

I start by taking off the top most layer of repaint and some crumbling filler. this shows she has lost some of the definition of her left eye and there are  irregularities in the wood under the eye.

Iam also finding she has had 2 thick layers of gesso applied. maybe she was one of the dolls that got sent back to the factory to be repainted?

She has wood damage around and under her left eye.

The gesso layers on the back of her head were quite damaged so they all came off. This does reveal lovely hair contours.

The right side of her face is stable and may be original so the excavation stops here.

Now to repair the wood and countours on the left and get her painted.

First she gets some wood hardener applied and then some epoxy to fix the left eye contours that have been lost.

A bit of paint helps to identify contours that need tweaking. Here I see her left eye looks a bit droopy and her left lower lid doesn't look defined enough. I don't want to recarve her whole eye area as I am just fixing the original carving. I might be able to adjust the epoxied areas and the paint.

A bit later she has had some paint applied.

And then she is done!

 

A Schoenhut boy

 

This little guy has come to get his dings repaired.

He has dings on his face that have been given a coating of something. Probably a PVA glue. It needs to get removed to fill the defects.

He has more dings on the back of his head.

On first glance, his hair looks original.

But....

.....you can see paint speckles all over. That is not a factory hair paint. That is a newer airbrush job. 

You can even see overspray paint speckles on the body.

Sure enough, the dark hair paint wipes off easily with acetone. Factory paint does not remove so easily.

A bit more work with acetone shows that this doll has had some repair work done before. The yellowish area is filler. His current dings were caused by the filler failing. This filler needs to be all removed.

Out comes the filler.

In goes some new filler and then some paint.

His face dings get filled too. Here he is starting to get the filled spots painted to blend in.

Then he gets his facial features touched up and some new hair.

A 'Dolly faced' Schoenhut

 This is Schoenhut's model #307. It is their earliest 'Dolly faced' doll. She has arrived to refine her previous overpaints.

Under her wig is evidence of an earlier thick repaint. That dark brown hair was presumably done by a previous owner to make the doll look like a boy?

Removing the top layer shows more details of that hairdo.

Her owner and I agree to leave this layer untouched at the top of her head as a testament to her history. It will be hidden under a wig.

As the repainted layers get removed I find out not much is left of her original paint. Also, she had been given bright red cheeks that has stained into the wood.

Those eyes still have some repaint on them that needs removing.

There is some original paint at the sides of her head so at least I can colour match her skin tone to it.

After some contour corrections and multiple rounds of paint/smoothing, she is starting to get some features.

As there was almost no original eye paint left, her owner has reqested she get brown eyes. So here she is starting a fresh set of eyes.

And her final look.

A Schoenhut bonnet head

This is one of Schoenhut's 14" dolls. 

She has had her head totally repainted with oil paints. It is a nice artistic repaint but it does not really follow Schoenhut's painting style. Too many brush strokes, some colour issues and loss of hair detail are part of the problems.

The first thing to do is to remove the repaint.

Here I have done the first bits of removal. Some original paint is being revealed.

Eventually I find that her original eyes are intact and part of her facial gesso/paint is still there.

But, there is not much original paint left on her bonnet.

Gradually, she gets the bare areas repainted to blend in with her original bits.

Her bonnet needs an almost total repaint. Here she is midway through that process.

Finally she can show off her new look.

Doll eating bugs!

 A warning! This post contains graphic pictures of nasty bugs and munched dolls!

This lovely mechanical toy has 4 little bisque head dolls with composition bodies sitting on swings. It is a simple mechanism that when wound, rotates the dolls on their swings.

The dolls have become floppy and no longer sit upright on their swings.

One has even gotten so floppy she has become prone.

This one has quite the tilt.

The dolls are mounted on the swings by a metal spike going up into their torso.

The first doll has been removed from her spike leaving a little pile of sawdust.

Her leg has been reattached with Scotch tape.

Time to peel off the tape and find out what is going on with her body.

Her clothes were sewn on so a few stitches had to be snipped to remove them and expose her torso.

The first sign of trouble are some little holes in the outfit.

Then, with some more manipulations of the doll, a couple live bugs drop out. That would be the two larger specks near the top of this picture.

The bugs are immediately sealed in a jar and the dolls are sealed in a plastic bin.

What bugs are these?

I have poked at old dolls for over 40 years and have never found a live bug in one!

But, I have done most of my old doll poking in Canada and now I am in Florida. Are there different pests here?

My science background means I just happen to have a digital microscope handy.

So, here is one of the culprits.

This is his underside for everyone's enjoyment.

This bug is Lasioderma serricorne, commonly called the cigarette beetle.

It is quite fond of munching on tobacco products but is not too picky. It will also dine on a wide variety of materials including stored foods, furniture stuffing, bookbinding paste and papier mache.

It is a semitropical/tropical bug which means it dies when the temperature gets too cold. This might explain why I never met one in Canada? It also means that popping the infested item in the freezer will kill all this bug's stages. Fortunately the dolls are small and freezing them should not be harmful.

The dolls get wrapped in tissue and sealed in Tupperware and then start their 1 week chilly quarantine.

After doing their time in the freezer and then warming up again, the dolls get inspected further.

This is doll number one with multiple bore holes through her torso. The top of one leg is missing.

The two bigger dots on the paper towel are another two beetles that fell out of her torso. They are quite dead.

There has been a previous repair on one arm. That pink stuff is a type of putty. These dolls do not have their factory original stringing so likely the pink putty was applied during the previous restringing.

The beetles munched a bit on the legs too.

One of the holes in the torso is not quite empty. Fortunately this beetle is also dead. A few pokes with a pin and his bits are extracted.

Every hole gets inspected with my microscope and a fine wire probe to make sure all the bug bits are gone.

A syringe containing wood glue will be used next to inject glue into every hole.

Once the glue dries I can fill defects and rebuild missing bits with epoxy putty. I will even replace the old pink repair putty with new, less flamboyantly coloured putty.

Doll #1 is back together.

Doll # 2 was the floppiest doll and, on first glance, doesn't look too bad.

But, the bottom of her torso is missing. Could the beetles have caused that damage?

She too gets any suspicious hole injected with glue and then gets rebuilt with epoxy putty.

Doll # 3 has some bore holes in her torso but isn't too bad.

Doll #4 has issues with the bottom of her torso.

She had had matchsticks stuffed into defects in the torso to keep her on the swing.

Once the matchsticks are removed you can see that her torso has disintegrated at the lower end. There a few suspicious bore holes. The dark flecks in the backround are not bugs. They are bits of hardened elastic.

Here is her torso rebuilt with epoxy putty.

The little hole is where the spike inserts to hold her on the swing.

Finally the dolls are redressed and mounted securely on their swings.