60 year old TLC dolls

 Now one thing regular readers may know about me is that I love me a bargain. A second thing is that I can seldom resist a doll in need. 

with that in mind, these two purchases make a lot of sense I think. 

Let's take a look. 

The first bundle was a very random assortment of dolls, mostly from the 60s and 70s. 

I felt bad for battered up Paul in the middle there. 

For those unaware, Paul was Sindy's boyfriend. He was released in 1965 but this particular one is a mini Paul from 1967. The poor guy has clearly had a rough time of it but for the price I took a punt thinking "I can probably fix him right?" 

The other dolls are two Rexard dolls, a Dam Troll who's discoloured a bit but is still really adorable, some sort of dollhouse mini, a kitch "moody cutie", A Japanese made Mexican doll named Pedro and a very small plastic baby doll in a gorgeous crocheted dress. 

Paul on arrival looking pretty worse for wear. I was wary of what might be lurking under those old discoloured bandages but he felt intact.

The poor guy is covered in scratches, paint and pen. His bandages are held on with an old plaster/bandaid. Thankfully unused. but still, ew. 

His head is rock hard and one arm is loose which is in keeping with him being a mini doll. The story goes that the factory fucked up their mixture when they made the soft vinyl parts and they shrank more than expected and hardened up. The end result is a doll with a small rock hard head and often similarly rock hard arms none of which fit into the body correctly. Wobbly heads are a defining feature of these dolls but Pedigree had a waste nothing policy so they sold them anyway. What's not entirely clear is where in the process the factory realised they'd screwed up. But these dolls were still sent out to stores. One thing they do have going for them, despite their wonkiness, is that they tend to retain very very bright colouration and high blush. 

Under all the grime Paul is VERY bright and his paint looks intact under all that. 

time to unwrap this mummy.

Under the bandages there's more scuffs and scratches and more paint. Red splatters mostly. 

On his leg there's some sort of black residue. It's not paint, least, I don't think it's pain. It actually feels like it's charred. I wondered if the leg itself had been burned but the black charred stuff came off with a bit of elbow grease and left no trace on the plastic itself so uh... not a clue.

And some pretty intense scratch marks on his back. Has he been fighting bears!? what the hell? 

I'm amused that someone painted in his butt crack.

He got a good scrub with soapy water followed by nail polish remover and a magic eraser. I had to resort to using a metal file to pick the worst of the paint off as it refused to shift otherwise. 

so a lot of scraping and scrubbing later and he's looking a lot better. The blue marks are pen which looks to have leeched into the plastic. One arm is still stained and I can't get the red from between his toes. 

I wonder if the pen marks came first and were painted over in an attempt to make it look intentional.

But his back scrubbed up great! Even his butt lol. 

So now begins the destaining process. I use zit cream on these vintage dolls because it's what other collectors reccomend for flesh toned dolls. I'm aware there's some controversy about the use of it in general but it seems to specifically be use on coloured plastics like my little pony that causes issues of bleaching. Do NOT use zit cream on my little ponies and be wary of using it on similar fantasy toned vinyls and soft plastics. 

But i've been told that it's fine for dolls like Sindy and Barbie and i've used it previously with no ill effects. 

time will I suppose tell if that was a mistake. 

So anyway, first comes weeks in the airing cupboard as the English summer was AWOL and i've found in the past the heat of the airing cupboard tends to work pretty well. 

After several weeks of checking on him, reapplying cream to the areas that needed it and putting him back in the cupboard wrapped in clingfilm I finally got him to a point where only the very edges of his mouth and a faint mark from his nose were still present. 

the sun finally came out so yesterday he got new cream applied, wrapped up and stuck outside for 24 hours.

The UV seems to have done the trick removing the very last bits of staining. There's still the tiniest shadow at the corners of his mouth but it looks like intentional shading rather than staining. 

He's a very clearly played with doll, covered in scuffs and scratches but I think that adds to a vintage doll's charm honestly. 

One arm doesn't seat properly in the socket and the other still has some red staining but that'll be covered by clothes so it doesn't matter.

 

Quite frankly, i'm amazed this is the same doll. He scrubbed up so well! 

 

Now it's time to find him some clothes. 

 

I purchased a bundle of 60s Paul clothes and shoes alongside a regular sized Paul because i never have enough clothing for my boy dolls. 

This Paul needs a bit of tlc as well, he's a little grubby but this does highlight the massive size difference between the regular and "mini" dolls. 

 

It does mean the clothes are a little oversized but oh well. 

This outfit is called Motorway Man and is one of my favourites. The coat is soft and textured, the trousers are woven and underneath he has a ribbed jersey. It looks so cozy. 

Perhaps at some point i'll find some mini Paul clothes so this tiny lil' guy can actually wear something that doesn't dwarf him, but for now i'm very pleased with how my bargain boy came out. 

can you see what caught my attention here? 

the little 60s sindy peeking out between the barbies of course!

She was listed as a clone, but I know my Sindy dolls pretty well at this point. That's a legitimate Sindy. 

I was told she had a broken leg and green staining to her face but for the price she was worth it to see if I could give her a new lease of life. 

The green stain reminds me of Barbie green ear but I suspect it's dye transfer from clothing she was stored with. 

The old girl has lost a lot of her face colouration, which happens unfortunately. But that suspicious little expression could ONLY belong to a Pedigree Sindy. There's something about her expression I find quite endearing but also very recognizable. Something no clones can quite emulate.

 

Her leg had sheared off but the piece was still present inside her body. I tried to reconstruct it with some tinted milliput but unfortunately it wasn't strong enough. Reinserting the leg caused her brittle torso to crack and gentle manipulation of the leg itself caused it to rebreak. I tried several times with more and more stabilisation but alas, the joint was just too fragile.

I even went so far as to fill the whole hollow part of the leg with milliput to try to hold the hip piece on but no dice. 

I considered pinning it, but the plastic is very thin and brittle with age. In the end I opted to just glue the leg in and accept this old girl won't be able to bend that leg again. 

I mean ultimately as she'll spend her life standing on a shelf anyway it's no great loss for her. It's not like these old dolls can sit well anyway. 

Aside from the leg and the stain on her face she's in pretty good nick. But the question is, can I remove that stain? 

Like Paul she was banished to the airing cupboard for several weeks which began to fade the mark but it was going a lot slower than Paul. The dye is very very embedded into her soft head and i'm not totally sure i'll be able to get it all off. But if I can at least fade it to a point I can put some paint over it as foundation/concealer then i'll be happy. 

After several more days in direct sunlight the mark was fading, but so too was the pink around the blemish which concerned me. In fact, her pink skin seemed to be bleaching faster than the green and the green looked to be spreading which worried me a lot. 

 

 

So it was time for plan B, foundation! 

 

Now, mixing a paint that matches the skin tone of an aged doll isn't that easy because the vinyl is no longer a perfectly even colour in the first place, but I did try to get it close. The other problem is blending it so it doesn't stand out, which involved a lot of thin layers, smearing with my fingers and finally several pastel layers to blend it all. 

 

 The paint and pastel looks lighter with the flash which is picking up the white particles, but in real life it actually looks like a faint shadow. It's not a perfect coverup, but it's good enough. I mean, let's be real here, this doll is 60 years old, let's cut her some slack. 

I also took the opportunity to repaint her lips and reblush her cheeks as the red had long since faded from her face. 

This was also a little tricky as being a very well played with doll, she has little scuffs and scratches all over her, including on her cheeks. So the pastel likes to sink into those imperfections and clump. Bah. 

In natural light you can barely make out her staining, which is great news.

And once her hair is styled back into its little bob... whatever, the curls cover that part of her cheek anyway. Further disguising the shadow that remains. 

I didn't bother repainting the fading black in her eyes and eyebrows, I rather like a bit of vintage patina to my old dolls. Gives them character. Also i'm not convinced I can replicate the tiny little brush strokes. 

Besides, with her lips restored to their original bright slightly orange tinted red and blush restored to her cheeks she looks a million times better anyway.

She got a nice old Weekender outfit to wear, complete with the little white sneakers. This is the outfit Sindy was sold in originally so they're pretty common outfits to see, though often rather grubby and play worn. This is one of the earlier versions with the pattern printed onto the fabric. The later ones are made from a knit material in red, white and blue. Unfortunately I don't have the red elastic headband that would have gone with this so I substituted it with a tri striped ribbon I had from some packaging. It matches her top beautifully. 

Dressed her disproportionately short arms are all the more apparent, the poor girl. Those arms I don't think were designed with her in mind, she's quite likely a "transitional" doll cobbled together from parts they had laying around the factory. Her head is marked "made in England" but has much fuller hair than most MIE dolls. Most of the MIEs i've restored over the years have had their fringes combed back into the rest of their hair which is a pain to get back down and looking full and proper again. Most also have slightly shorter hair than this girl who's hair is surprisingly long at the back. It's a bit mullet-like honestly. 

Her body is "made in hong kong" which would date the torso to at the earliest 1966, which is the point they discontinued the "made in england" heads and moved to the made in hong kong ones. 

Her legs are hollow plastic, in keeping with the made in England dolls rather than the soft rubbery legs of the hong kong girls while her arms are rock hard and solid which is in keeping with the early hong kong "mini" sindy from 65 (as I mentioned with Paul, the rumour is that they screwed up their vinyl mixture and it shrank more than anticipated and went rock hard instead of remaining pliable. Resulting in dolls who's heads and limbs don't fit their hard plastic bodies) 

So taking all this into account, i'd say this is a 1964 head, on a 1966 torso, with 1963 legs and 1965 "mini" arms. She's quite the frankendolly huh? But at least her paired limbs match, unlike SOME of the Sindy dolls of this era in my collection. 

The liklihood is that she came out of the factory like this, Pedigree did this. They had a "use everything" mentality which was common of the UK post war, even decades later. They couldn't easily melt down the cast parts or sell them on, so they just used them. 

These dolls are often referred to as "New Zealand Sindys", the story going that in order to get around certain tax laws in NZ as long as a product was "finished" in NZ it could get certain breaks or something. So Pedigree would ship parts out to a factory in NZ to be put together. Unfortunately, often those parts weren't 100% matching and because it took so long to get the parts in (slow boat remember, it was the 60s. It took months) and because they had a quota to meet, they'd just use what they had. The result being a lot of frankendolls with mismatched pieces. However,  given how many i've found within the UK that are just like this, i'd argue this phenomenon wasn't unique to the dolls being assembled in NZ and represents more of a company wide ethos. It's very unlikely all these frankendolls have come all the way back to the UK from NZ and far more likely they were sold here as well. 

This is a point of contention between myself and some other sindy collectors who like to suggest that mismatched parts may be a parent repairing the doll, but i'd counter that even as a seasoned doll collector, replacing the arms, legs and heads on these old dolls is REALLY difficult without doing damage. I've heard accounts of people that back in the 60s if the neck broke sometimes Pedigree would send just a new head to be fitted to the old body (hopefully with instructions on how to do so) but i've never heard the same for arms or legs. In fact most dolls with damaged parts have very obvious parent repairs with wooden dowels, screws, glue and so on. 

So my feeling on the matter is that if the parts look intact and it's a 1960s doll, that's probably how she came originally. 

 

the liklihood of a parent being able to slot a replacement arm or leg in after removing the broken one and not making matters worse is pretty slim, the chance of multiple parents doing this and there being no evidence of such tampering? I'd say close to nil. 

 

 

Again I am amazed that this is the same doll in these two photos. No matter how many times I restore a doll, i'm always astounded by the difference some tlc and a little lipstick and blush makes. 

This girl isn't perfect of course. She has a glued leg, a cracked torso and a stain lurking under that concealer but she'll display beautifully and in the end, that's what really matters. She deserves a nice peaceful retirement, she's clearly had quite the life. 

Now I await the arrival of some more melamine sponges so other Paul can get the intense scrub he desperately needs.