A Fine Early Voit Doll Gets a Careful Cleaning

When Dixie and I were together in New Hampshire a time back I purchased a very large early doll by Andreas Voit dating about 1840. The doll has had very little modification that I can see other than probable leather arms added. We will not know what other outer clothing she may have had, as her dress is generic. It may or may not have always been with her. Far be it from me to take it away. Her finish is worn but not touched up and she retains her tiny eye lashes. Her bright glass eyes shine in imitation of life and mischief. 

Patiently but with an earnest and pleading expression, the doll has been waiting a long while for me to provide hands and freshen her clothing. I began by softly dusting her red dress which I bought from the Velma Driscoll collection. A nice puff of poly stuffing is a good duster for doll clothing. Not so for her head and shoulders, as her gesso finish over the papier mache is lifting and has deep craze lines. This would be easily flicked off by careless handling. It is my responsibility to protect the doll from significant changes in temperature and humidity in the future. 

She came to me with one leather arm hanging by a thread and the other torn and laying in her lap. I have a strong doubt that the kid arms are original to the doll body. The upper arm fabric looks right, but the way the leather was fastened below was surely a late make shift with modern glue and coarse stitches.. She may have started her existence with these or other leather arms, but my feeling after handling many early cloth bodies on old Voit dolls is that she is just as likely to have had cloth hands with separately stitched long fingers, all made with small neat hand stitching like the bodies themselves. I have a Voit boy, Heine, who has such fingers.

  

One solution would be to cover each arm completely in tan or ecru netting. This can still be done by someone else in the future as I took away not a bit of the cloth upper arms, and will sew the torn leather ones in a little cloth bag within her full petticoat. This is in accordance with the guide line to avoid making any change that is not reversible. I abide pretty well by that most of the time if the doll is of merit and has much of her originality like this one. 

  

Having no net that is right, I chose for now to add worn old cloth hands and span the missing arm length with tan linen. I expect to add sheer long white under sleeves.

As I undressed the doll, I was sad to discover how soiled her underclothing was. She has had a mouse for a close friend once upon a time, as in the waist area where thick folds of clothing held and hid it, I found  many wee short hairs of a mouse as well as other animal hair, along with stains from the mouse. This was unpleasant so I shook out the undergarments and placed them to soak in detergent, while I brushed the doll’s body out in the yard with an art brush to banish more of the animal hair and evidence of insects in the past. Then I changed MY dress! 

Washing the undergarments gave me an opportunity to examine them and admire the tiny stitches which I can barely see with my glasses on. Petticoat, pantalets and chemise are the expected items. The pantalets are ankle length, as would be the petticoat if it had not had a later tuck to raise it more than two inches. Interesting. The petticoat exactly fits the dolls’ waist and seems surely to have been made just for her. Pantalets not so much, and the chemise could have belonged to a human infant. Beautiful perfectly fitted hand knit socks cover her stitched toes and I feel were made just for the doll. Her shoes are a later concoction but are part of her story. I have left them now but I do have better which she might like to change into.

Her early dress is a frail cob web, which once was pink. It is a mid nineteenth century child’s dress which is proper on the doll but is disintegrating. I have kept it on her anyway, as it is part of her story also. Redressing the doll felt like dressing a small child. Over the fragile one she came with, I added a marvelous (and ridiculously costly!) rust red calico dress. I think I will call her Mollie, after my Great grandmother. Now she sits in her chair again, cared for as she should be.

a Bib or Apron for a Toddler

Here is a link to my blog that shows how to make this simple apron. Enjoy!

http://www.edythoneill.blogspot.com/

Collecting Antique Dolls in the 1950’s

Things have really changed!   I was a young woman living in West Texas on a ranch in Comanche county then.   Living nine miles from pavement  I was relatively isolated.  My parents  lived in the large city of Dallas  120 miles away, and I would load my two little girls in the car and make that drive on slower old roads over the hills and through the woods to grandmother’s house every few months.   What an interesting grandmother she was for them!  My mother loved old toys and old dolls and miniature rooms and doll houses which she made with assistance from my father.  A trip home for a visit always included involvement  in her latest project.  Once I returned to the ranch with a fine old Teddy bear to mend, a find from the Goodwill store where mama loved to dig and search.  On another of these trips Mama offered me a doll she had found, needing a wig and restringing and clothing. By taking her home, I was hooked!  

To buy doll elastic I sent for a Mark Farmer’s catalog as advertised in Hobbies magazine. Soon I was reading the doll pages of Hobbies mag each month and sending the required SASE for mimeographed listings of dolls and parts for sale.  Buying from these lists sight unseen with very few of the items pictured was almost a shot in the dark.  In order to describe the item offered, the seller would cite page and book for illustrations from the few doll books available. Claire Fawcett’s Guide was a popular reference.  Collectors gave names to different china heads such as Mrs Bumblebottom or Mary Lincoln or other titles from these early books. In this way you could know about what you were ordering if you sent for a doll with a head called Dagmar. Some of these names persist until today.   Very early on, I desired most an Izannah Walker doll as pictured in Mrs. Johl’s books and an American Greiner doll which I did not own until the 1970’s.

 I had almost no money at all for dolls.  I could manage a bit from the grocery money to buy a china doll head for $2.35 or such.    But I was excited over my new hobby and set out to see what could be discovered locally.   The town of Comanche about 15 miles from me, had as all small towns did, a junk shop or two. In these I asked after china dolls. One shop keeper said he had seen a doll head at the iron man’s place. It was common in a small town for someone to put old pieces of iron in their front yard hoping to sell or swap them. These pieces of old farm equipment or hoes without handles and other iron pieces were often found as the iron man would check the city dump grounds on a more or less regular basis.    When I found the iron man he told me yes he had had a little chine doll head from the dump grounds and sold it to Mrs. Dofloppy  down the street for 50 cents.   The iron man’s grandchild had been playing with the little head in a coffee can in the dirt of the yard.  Coffee cans of that time were wide and squat.

I knocked on the door there and was admitted to the living room to visit this woman, and I soon spied the little doll head sitting on top of a bud vase on a shelf.   This perch on top of the flared vase gave a “body” to the little head, which was without it’s shoulders.   I was able to purchase the doll head for 75 cents.  I clasped my first real antique doll find and was thrilled with her!  She was a little common blond head, needing everything.  Hands and feet were ordered from Mark Farmer, and I made the doll a body and a dress, and named her Resurrection!   I was not to have her long.  My mama came from Dallas on a visit and grabbed Resurrection and announced that She must have the doll. My protests counted for nothing. Mama was building a salt box doll house and intended to show it in the State fair that October and 6 inch tall Resurrection was the very doll she needed.    So in less than a year, Resurrection went from the Comanche city dump to the state fair of Texas in my mama’s winning blue ribbon exhibit.  Believe! 

Our family has not kept many of mama’s miniature rooms, and that was not the only blue ribbon she won. But we do have Resurrection in that doll house still.  My mama’s little  great great grandchildren ooh and ahh at it through a pane of plexiglass.

And the hobby that began for me in my 20’s has kept a firm grip until this time in my 80’s.  

         Helen tried to write this as a comment but that did not work so here is the  sequel she sent me this afternoon! 

"I own a "cousin" to Resurrection, the little blonde china of this story. In the 1960s, my sister's family lived in Comanche, and on a visit to a junk shop there locally called M & S (though the faded sign said Mc's), I found a small brown metal object which proved to be a rusted tin doll head, a German Minerva for a 12" doll. I bought it for a few dollars (inflation had come to the doll market there), took it home with me to Fort Worth to a doll repair shop for repainting, ordered china arms and legs and a body pattern from my Mark Farmer catalog, made a body from a pale pink linen guest towel, and muslin pantalettes, petticoat and a dimity dress. The "professional" paint job proved to be amateurish and unsatisfactory, and since I didn't yet know Edyth O'Neill, I couldn't take it to her to fix. So I repainted it myself, not good, but better, and at least my own mess. My dear sister is gone now, but I still have that doll, packed away in storage waiting to see the light of day again. Edyth perfectly named her reclaimed treasure, but mine is still Nameless. Helen Pringle"



Doll Sized Basket Tutorial by Michele Made Me

Dixie here.  I would love to borrow Michele's brain for a day.   She is such an inventive person!  And what is lovely is that she uses recycled materials to make many of her crafts.   So hop on over to Michele's blog to see how she made these wonderful little baskets and what she made them from.  Michele is the modern incarnation of author of The Girl's Own Toymaker.  Enjoy!