More Wiggings

I've gone through several 18 inchers over the last year but realized I had to cut back on them, so I settled on having Sunny and Meriel, and two Our Generation girls from Battat. The first was Winter Rose.

Sunny and Winter Rose

Our Generation girls are noted for their bad hair. So first I tried cutting it.

Merry with her curls and Winty with her bob.

It was actually pretty cute. Then I got Haila, a blonde Our Generation girl. Apparently I didn't take any pictures of her with her original hair. Basically, she looked like Winty only with blonde hair. After I rewigged Merry, I got the urge to rewig more dolls. So I took the two wigs I got from the Doll Parts place and tried them on Winty and Haila. A new type of Dolly Fever was born -- Dolly Wigging Fever!

These clothes are all tagged Battat but they seem a bit tight.

I had to cut off their hair close to the scalp, because they had rooted hair, not wigs.

As an added bonus, Auntie Berman repainted their lips a more pleasing color.

Now I took a good look at my 14 inch hard plastic girls. We had been picking up wigged porcelain dolls when we could and had quite a collection.

Sally before

Sally after

Noelle before

Noelle after

Penny before

Penny after

I am keeping my eye out for another wig for Penny. I like this one except it had a circlet of roses glued on it and when I tried to get them off (heating the glue with a blow dryer), a lot of the glue just melted and got caught in her hair. But I like the style.

And now for my two masterpieces. We found Caroline at the Salvation Army Warehouse, dumped in with a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. Even though she's not my usual type, being vinyl and from the 60s, I had to rescue her.

Caroline before

(She has a bad case of Green Ear, but we try to ignore it.)

She was dressed as a bride

Well it seems Caroline was really meant to be a blonde!

Bouncy blonde curls!

Later, we found Juliet, I think at Goodwill Bargain Bin. She was dressed as a bride too.

The rejected bride

She has jointed knees

She is also made of vinyl, and from the markings on the back of her neck, I found out she is a Valentine Doll and is a ballerina. She has a tiny touch of Green Ear, but nothing like Caroline has. Her transformation was amazing.

This is the True Me!

And then there was Baby Barry, now named Gwennie. I wasn't real crazy about her but now I like her a lot.

"Help! My hair's coming off!"

"I like my brown hair."

And that is all the wiggings I have done so far.

The Joys of Re-Wigging

The first doll I re-wigged was Peggy, my first hard plastic doll. I bought her at a yard sale for $2. Her hair was pretty bad.

Peggy, formerly known as Marley

I don't remember why I removed her hair (possibly it fell off), but she was bald for quite a while.

I made her this nice satin underwear

I had her restrung at the Doll & Teddy Bear show and the lady who did it told me she couldn't put her head back on until I got the crack in her forehead fixed.

That's Peggy on the left, holding the jack o'lantern.

So for a while she was headless, until I persuaded Husband-Like Person to fix her. I don't remember exactly what he used. Some kind of filler . . . Then I put her head back on and meanwhile, I got a wig for her on eBay.

Yes, I know the wig is too far back.

Auntie Berman once worked for a school psychologist who had a receding hairline. One day a little girl asked him "Why do you wear your hair so far back on your head?"

For some reason I never glued the hair on, until recently. I discovered The Joys of Re-Wigging! I think it came about because we found an American Girl at Goodwill Bargain Bin.

Ratty, ratty hair!

Back view

Someone had apparently tried to use a curling iron on this poor girl. We had to get her, to save her from the landfill. I began googling info about re-wigging. I found out how to remove her wig (I was greatly heartened by someone who said she had never met a wig that didn't respond to brute force). The offensive hair was soon removed. We named the dolly Meriel, Merry for short.

She remained cheerful throughout the ordeal.

Meanwhile, Lorraine had had a terrible tragedy in which her arm suddenly fell off while I was dressing her. The plastic had actually broken. I was horrified. Lorraine was horrified. When I searched for a solution, I found out about doll screws, which are curlicue shaped. (By the way, if you search for "doll screws" on google, be sure your Safe Search is on. Otherwise you will get some very unpleasant results.) I ordered them and some doll-stringing elastic from a doll parts store. They were very cheap but I had to get $25 worth of stuff to order from them, so I decided to order two wigs, one red and one blonde, because I was thinking of giving Sunny a new wig, since her hair was kind of choppy. A few days later the doll store person called and said they were out of red and that particular blonde, so I went ahead and got auburn and a different blonde. When they arrived, I didn't like the auburn (it looked brown to me) or the blonde.

Just okay.

I had a half-wig that I liked (it was half a wig cap with lots of hair).

Maybe the curls are a bit much.

I left that on her, because now I had my little green-eyed girl with red hair, but I didn't glue it on (and here I should mention that Auntie Berman does all the gluing, because she is the Glue Queen). I was hoping to find something better.

And I did. It occurred to me that all those porcelain dolls we find at the Bargain Bin and Salvation Army Warehouse are wearing wigs! The dolls are usually broken, but their hair is perfectly good. Of course once I thought of it, we couldn't find any porcelain dolls--at first. But then we did!

Perfect hair!

So Merry is now decently wigged and very happy.

I will have to continue this later, because I have lots more wigs to talk about and no time to do it now.

(And we did get Lorraine's arm fixed, but she wouldn't let me photograph her and doesn't want to talk about it.)

When you haven't blogged for a while, it's best just to plunge back in

So I'm going to start with Maria, who is a Sasha doll.

Lulu and Maria

A year ago I found a Sasha doll at work. I didn't know who she was but I knew she was Somebody.

A White Dress Sasha

I brought in Auntie Berman, who immediately recognized her but couldn't remember her name. We called Biggie Sis and she informed us it was Sasha. So we got her. She was wearing her original white dress (that caused her to be called a White Dress Sasha). I realized after a couple of days that she was rather odd. I think it was her tan, which didn't really go with her red hair. Biggie Sis belongs to a Sasha group and she suggested we sell the doll. After much finagling (the burden of which fell mainly to Auntie Berman), we sold her for $160! Not bad for a $2.00 investment.

I never gave Sashas another thought until a few weeks ago when we were at Salvation Army Warehouse. We hadn't found much of anything and I wandered over to the big bin of stuffed animals they keep in back (but no more bears, I told myself). I almost didn't look in the back of the bin, because there were golf bags and clubs piled around it but since Auntie Berman wasn't ready, I shoved my way back and dug around and saw a brown arm sticking up. To my amazement, it was a Sasha doll! She was rather floppy, desperately needing restringing. She was naked except for her ID tag on her left wrist (it's supposed to be on her right but it's tied on and I don't want to try to change it). It says Sasha on one side and Made In England Serie on the other.

Posing in front of the snapdragons

Our next stop was my Savers store, where we bought a small bag of doll clothes and put the pink flowered dress in the first picture on her. I really liked her a lot better than the first Sasha doll, I think because her skin tone was a better match for her hair. Lizzie told me she thinks they have an alien look about them, and I totally agree! Although I had visions of dollar signs when I first found her, by the time we got home I had bonded with her and knew I couldn't give her up.

I decided she is Mexican, because many of my coworkers are and I named her Maria because one of my favorite coworkers is Maria and also I had just finished re-reading Three Without Fear by Robert DuSoe, which is a great children's book, if you can find it, which you probably can't because it's out of print.

I found more clothes for her as well as some Battat shoes that fit.

Eskimo dress

I also restrung her, although that was kind of scary. Someone had tried to repair her using a giant rubber band. Fortunately I had good doll-stringing elastic. It was a success and look at her now!

Maria Ballerina

Then I had to make her a new dress.

New dress

Last week I found a Mrs. Santa type doll (what was left of her) with a styrofoam head at Goodwill Bargain Bin. She was wearing a nice red dress so I relieved her of it and gave it to Maria.

A perfect Christmas dress

That's all for now. I will be back with more exciting finds, like the Tonner fashion doll I just found!

Ceddie Has a New Sister

I had been keeping an eye out for a sister for Ceddie, even though I knew I could never find anyone as adorable as Ced. Day before yesterday, though, I noticed a new doll sitting on the shelf in the Girls Toys section who was unusually pretty. She was all vinyl and on the back of her head was 2000 Unimax. I had never heard of Unimax. I thought about her all day. I told myself she was just a vinyl doll, nothing special. But she was awfully pretty. At one point she disappeared and I thought "Good, someone bought her," but a little later I found her dumped upside down into a rolling cart across the store. I took her back to the Toys section and put her underneath the stuffed animals where no one would find her.

She is wearing a dress that was obviously not made for her, but it looks very
nice on her. It has matching bloomers.

Now I had to decide if I should try to buy her that day or wait until Friday when the Good Supervisor was working. The supervisor that day was a new one who is trying very hard to follow all the rules, and one of the rules is that employees have to wait 2 days after a product is put out to buy it. I just knew someone would find and buy my dolly so I decided to give it a try. The NS (New Supervisor) balked at letting me buy anything, because we aren't supposed to buy things during our shift. But the Former Supervisor told her that evening shift people were allowed to buy on their breaks, because they couldn't very well buy things after the store closed. So she said okay and luckily never even thought to check the date, which is coded and requires some thought to decipher.

Ceddie seems to like his sister. She is obviously older than he is so he's still the baby.

"Look, we both fit in this basket with our teddies!"

I think I am going to name her Alexandra but it's not definite yet.

After much Googling, I have determined that she is an Anne Geddes Daffodil Baby or Bee Baby. I am glad she wasn't wearing either outfit or I might have dismissed her out of hand when I saw her. She has very nice glass eyes.

With her bent knees and arms, her body has Ceddie's "frog" look.

Meanwhile, I have not neglected (very much) Sunny. We found two raincoats for our girls at one of the thrift stores.

"Sunny, what are raincoats for?" "I don't know, Mendoza, but Auntie
gave me this wonderful apron."

It's not likely they will ever need them, but it never hurts to be prepared. We are going to set up a scene in Auntie Berman's shed where they can have their own furniture and toys.

You know how I wasn't going to get any more bears? Well, what would you do if you were in the Goodwill Bargain Bin and Auntie Berman spotted a Paddington? And the very next week at Salvation Army you found another Paddington? I think we know what you would do.

The first is an older Eden Paddington from 1975, still with his original tag (but missing his hat). The second is also Eden brand but from 1983. (Paddington put on a little weight between 1975 and 1983.) We have lots of felt and can make them new hats. The second Paddington's hat is torn and has autographs written on it.

The older one is unable to stand on his own.

And then I saw a couple of other bears that needed rescuing.

The right-hand bear was obviously much loved.

Now I must get ready for work, because who knows what (or who) is waiting for me there!

American Girl Fever

A while back I got Barbie Fever, after thinking it could never happen to me. Now I have American Girl Fever, again after never thinking it could happen to me. It just goes to show: Never say never!

It started a few weeks ago when I found a Josefina American Girl doll at work, complete with her clothing (except for her shoes). I knew Auntie Berman liked her and had the Mini American Girl version of her. So I called her and asked if I should get her and of course the upshot was that I should. I think I got her for $1.50. Auntie Berman named her Mendoza, after the heroine of books by Kage Baker. I keep accidentally calling her Mendez.

But I like going barefoot.

The next day we had to go out thrifting and at a small shop, sitting on the bottom shelf of a bookcase, was a Kirsten doll! Auntie Berman used to have a Kirsten and I quickly talked her into getting her (for $1.00). Her legs were a bit floppy and her hair had been cut. I kept looking at her and thinking how pretty she was and decided that I, too, wanted an American Girl. So then we had to go to several more stores but couldn't find any AG dolls. The next day Auntie Berman went on an expedition of her own to try and find one, but with no luck.

My birthday was approaching and Auntie Berman, after realizing the futility of finding an AG at such short notice (and possibly realizing how daunting it would be to adopt two girls at once), made the sacrifice and decided to give me the Kirsten doll. When she first got the Kirsten, she had immediately sent off to ebay for a lovely pink dress with pinafore for her. Then, under the pretext of going to see a neighbor who was moving, she took the doll and went to her hairdresser, who trimmed dolly's hair, put it up in rollers, and fastened a lovely flowered barrette in her hair where the hair-chopping could not be fixed. And the hairdresser didn't charge her a thing, since it was such a fun project.

Look at my hair!

While I was at work, Auntie Berman came over and put the dolly on the shelf with my other dolls (not easy, she said--there was hardly room). Then she waited. I came home and went into my room a couple of times but simply did not see her. Auntie Berman had to suffer all evening, waiting for me to find her. At last, when I went to bed around midnight, I saw her! I was overwhelmed with her cuteness but it was so late I didn't call Auntie Berman. When I woke up in the morning I was again delighted, but I didn't know for sure if she was mine. I thought maybe Auntie Berman had just set her there to remind me that we were going to restring her legs. Auntie Berman said indignantly that she would never be so mean.

Best friends

Now I had to think of a name. Of course it had to be Scandinavian, since AG Kirsten is Swedish. When we were in junior high, we had a Norwegian PE teacher named Miss Skaarstad. She was called Sonny by her peers. A little googling revealed that her first name is actually Søgnhild, so that is what I named my dolly and we are calling her Sunny (because I like that better than Sonny). However, we still don't know exactly how to pronounce Søgnhild and if I ever have to yell at her, I won't quite know what to say.

(In case you are wondering what ever happened to Sunshine, the relentlessly cheerful doll, well, she had a leg operation that was not a success and she has gone to that great Dollhouse in the Sky.)

Now for the operation. I found instructions here. We assembled the parts and began. First we untied her neck strings and removed her head.

Then I pulled out all her stuffing. There was a lot.

We did not want to totally remove all her parts and use new elastic, so we decided to put the brass inserts over the ferules that were already there and then crimp them. They were very hard to crimp. I had to wait until HLP came home and have him do it. I wanted to tighten up her arms, too, so I used zip ties (an idea we got from another website) as inserts on her arm elastic. Then I restuffed her and tied her neck back on.

In the Recovery Room

Unfortunately I didn't tie her neck tie tightly enough and as I was picking her up to show Auntie Berman, her head fell off, which was a bit unnerving. Auntie Berman retied it for me.

Able to sit up and take nourishment

Mendoza and I can have a tea party!

I forgot to mention Auntie Berman's doll Delilah. She is a Fancy Nancy doll I found several months ago at my store. She had her original outfit on too.

Delilah in her butterfly dress and polka dot pants

Now we are all exhausted, but happy.