Adventures in restoration - giving tlc old dolls a new lease of life

 I've been trying to buy fewer dolls this year, mostly because i've got absolutely no space left at all. 

So my rule for this year was to sell more than I purchased, which is fine and dandy but the other thing I have been trying to do is stick to mostly buying secondhand dolls too. 

And ultimately I do find I get more enjoyment from dolls that need some tlc than I do from a perfect new doll. 

So today i'm going to share some of my recent (and not so recent) projects! Because why not? 

I already mentioned my scarlet reroot in a previous blog, 

but here she is again with one of my newer girls just to prove a point.

 

Scarlet reroot, who is a very very good Sindy clone, alongside a real Pedigree Sindy.

Now, bear in mind I DID repaint Scarlet's lips and narrow her eyes a bit, but the rest of her paint is original. 

the only real hint that she's a clone is that faint blue staining around her eyes which would have been eyeshadow. Real Sindys from this era don't have any eyeshadow at all, but for some reason almost all the clones DO. Go figure.

Now, Blondie is my newest 60s Sindy and she was an absolute steal on Ebay.

These are her auction photos. She came with a clone friend and some clone clothing.

I could tell from her photos that she was actually in pretty good condition. She has some chews to her feet but she has all her fingers and what looks like all her hair.

these old girls often end up with troll hair from their fringe being brushed up out of their face. Because it's quite coarse it then takes a fair bit of effort to get it to lay down again.

Anyway,

Blondie needed a good wash and condition and her clothing was stained in places while the other dress needed some sewing work.

I decided she looked better in the green and blue than the orange anyway.

 I repaired her chipped lips and ended up narrowing her eyes a little too because she looked perpetually startled otherwise. 

Because these old dolls were all hand painted their expressions can often differ quite a bit from sweet innocence to absolutely terrified. This poor girl was more in the terrified category. 

She scrubbed up beautifully. 

I really have a fondness for the early 60s Sindy dolls, they've got such sweet faces and I enjoy their chunkier bodies. 

I'm fairly sure i've probably shared this girl before but she came with me to a recent doll meet so I got to get a good look at her again. 

She is an Anna Moore doll, made by Pedigree who also made Sindy. 

She's quite a bit smaller than Sindy, being only about 9 or 10 inches tall but unlike Sindy she's fully articulated. 

She was a horse riding doll, so the joints make a lot of sense there. As do her very wide hips that make her look a little strange but would allow her to sit better in a saddle. 

As you can probably see, she only has one arm. She came to me missing her lower arm but curiously, it's not broken at the elbow joint which you'd think would have been the weak point. Instead it's broken off part way down the forearm. I have no idea HOW this could have happened, perhaps there was a microfracture or air bubble in the plastic that created a weak point. Whatever the case, it was a clean break and all I had to do was sand it a little to remove any excess sharp plastic and then embrace her disability.

She also had a chunk of her nose missing, which I rebuilt using nail acrylic. I couldn't get a decent colour match to her skintone with my paint unfortunately, so you can see where the repair starts but that's why she has the freckles and blushing, to sort of conceal it. 

She's a goofy looking little doll but I find her strangely endearing. 

Now let's talk about... this poor wretch. I think she might actually be the worst condition doll i've ever bought, but I found I kept returning to the auction and staring at her thinking "i can fix her!"

She's a vintage Midge head on a vintage Skipper body and both have seen better days. 

The head is severely yellowed, filthy, missing paint and missing most of her hair. 

the body is chewed up, covered in black stuff and yellowing.  

I spent a lot of time staring at the photos trying to figure out what I was looking at and trying to figure out if these were legit Mattel parts as Skipper clone bodies are pretty common. 

Squinting, I could just make out the markings on the butt which would be correct for a vintage skipper. I even put it through photoshop to see if I could enhance it at all to read and all I could make out was a copyright symbol and 1963. The writing underneath which should say "mattel inc" wasn't legible but that copyright and 63 marking confirmed enough to me that this was a real Skipper body. 

With the head it was a little more awkward. Her paint looked correct, the hair colour was correct (a dark blonde) and i've never seen a Midge clone. But old Mattel heads have the copyright info on the lip on the underside of the head, so you have to remove the head to see it. 

All this girl has on the back of her head is a number 12 and my searching didn't tell me much as to what the heck that meant. 

Postage cost me more than the doll herself and I was the only bidder because evidently i'm the only one crazy enough to see a doll in this state and think "yep, I can sort that out." lol. 

I knew it would be a bit of a project but I was looking for a project to distract me from UK politics anyway. 

She was every bit as gross as I expected when she arrived. 

She smelled faintly of smoke (not cigarette smoke mind, that gives me a headache and nausea, she just smells of fire) and was just grimy as all hell. Her arms and head are very yellowed but this yellowing of the vinyl seems to be quite common of the old Barbies. 

I'm not sure what this black stuff is. I was afraid it would be mold but it's not. It cleaned right off with just water and a magic eraser, so maybe it's soot? Or just dirt. 

 

Some little "darling" painted her chew wounds with red. 

She's looking very worse for wear but, that said, the weight of the vintage Skipper body always surprises me. I own I think one vintage skipper, but she's the growing up one, so her body has a mechanism in and feels different. This body is hefty, with very solid vinyl legs and arms and solid wire in the legs that clicks and holds 4 or 5 times. Damn girl. That's some excessive leg articulation. 

The head is, as I suspected, a legit Midge head. The markings on the lip of her neck hole confirm this. 

I pulled her remaining hair, gave her a damn good scrub and left her overnight in a bag with some peroxide which didn't really do much for her yellowing but did at least make sure she was nice and clean. 

I could have left her longer but she's about the same skin tone as a modern Barbie doll so I think that's fine. 

The paint in her left eye is odd. Not only is that eye really bulging (it's painted larger than the other) but it's lost the white eye shine and the blue is kinda... lumpy looking. 

Maybe some sort of scuff damage? I don't know.

She got a reroot in black milksilk/kiwi that I harvested from a Rainbow High doll head (I already used the body for another hybrid hahaha) 

While reooting such a small head didn't take that long, I did learn a couple of things in the process.

1: Milk silk doesn't knot well. I mostly use the stabby tension method but a couple of the holes in her part line were too large for that to work so I used the knot technique for them and found the hair would just keep unknotting itself because it's so smooth. 

annoying. 

I also found that her scalp, especially around the parting, is very very squishy which ALSO messes up tension. As a result, she shed like crazy and I kept having to redo the same plug over and over because it would come out when I moved her. 

booo. 

I ended up filling her head with pva glue to try to mitigate the worst of this but it didn't prevent it completely. 

but it can be combed without coming out in chunks so I consider that good enough. 

I wasn't sure what style I wanted to go with for her. I knew I didn't want to bother with the original flip curl because I suck at curling doll hair and also this fiber is quite slippery and soft which doesn't really lend itself well to such styles anyway. 

I considered the shorter bob style of Midge's second edition dolls but in the end once I cut it to an even length I decided I quite liked it longer. 

It's still quite a period accurate hair style.

 

Her body scrubbed up really well. No stains on her legs despite how black they were in places and more interestingly, once I removed the paint inside her dents, they didn't seem as deep or nasty. 

The final step was repainting Midge's face. She was missing a whole eyebrow, her lips had turned grey and her left eye was all weird. 

I initially had planned to give her a complete repaint but because so much of her eye paint was intact I instead elected to augment what she had. 

I scraped some of the excess paint from her bulging eye, painted over her irises to even them out and also fix that odd textured paint on her left side, repainted her lips in a period appropriate orangy red (same colour Sindy uses) and gave her some tweaks to her eyepaint to make her look like startled and bug eyed. 

I pondered lashes but as the original dolls didn't really have any, I instead elected to go for some stylised winged liner. 

She's still kinda goofy looking but that's Midge for you. 

It's actually quite a cute sculpt under her original paint, but the way they did her eyes make her look kinda derpy. 

I'm not sure if that's endearing or not. 

However she is now infinitely better than she WAS. 

I would like to put the head onto a barbie sized body but these vintage heads don't fit well onto modern bodies due to the smaller neck hole and the lip it has molded into it. I could cut the lip away but then i'd lose all her original markings and I don't really want to damage such an old head anyway. 

So i'm still pondering how to cobble something together for her. 

For now i'm calling her "Mipper", because "Skidge" sounds terrible.

 Though I did manage to find my one and only intact vintage Barbie (I have three but one is a vintage head on a modern body and the other is a frankendoll made of assorted parts lol) and popped Midge's head on to see how it looked. The colour match is awful but she definitely looks better on this size body. 

So i'll have to try to modify a body for her.

From the same seller I also picked up a couple more very battered dolls. I don't know what the hell happened to these dolls but this one seller has a good dozen or more dolls in various states of "wtf". Some are just dirty, others are absolutely wrecked. It's weird.

These two 90s Steffi Loves for example, are just dirty and their hair smells slightly smokey. 

More shocked Steffi has pretty bad hair. It's missing plugs and what's left is brittle and was breaking off as I brushed it. I conditioned it and it seemed to help and it's stopped shedding now but yeah... 

Dark eyeliner Steffi on the other hand has pretty decent hair. But her legs were coated in some sort of yellow ick.

gross.

It almost felt like I was removing paint. It wasn't sticky or anything, which i'd expect from plasterciser leech, it was just YELLOW and when I rubbed it with a magic eraser coated in acetone (which I often use to clean soft vinyl like legs, because grime CLINGS to them) it came away yellow. 

 What the fuck IS that?

With her legs clean it appears that her torso colour doesn't quite match the pinker legs, so I am curious as to whether Simba themselves coated her legs in something to spray tan them. 

Or it might be some sort of residue from where she was stored.

I really don't know what it is.

But it didn't come off like grime does, it came off more like something that had been airbrushed or painted on. 

So hmmmm. 

Whatever the case, she's clean and yellow ick free now. 

 

Here she is alongside a later Steffi who I got from a different seller. She needed no tlc, she's absolutely perfect and just needed new clothing. 

I found some nice garish neons for them both because you know..  90s lol. 

Also I suspect this top probably IS Steffi Love, or some other clone. It's designed for a doll who's head pops off as the halter has no fastener. 

While this dress was made by Lucky Corp, who made another Clone line called Fashion Corner

I really like this Steffi's dark eyeliner. And I honestly miss this era of Steffi. She had a bit more personality I think, rather than the modern ones who look a bit too much like a cheap Barbie doll.

 

 These two were the last two dolls from the same seller. 

Annoyingly, because of Ebay's new "easy delivery" crap, the seller couldn't combine postage which I hadn't been factoring for when I bid on them all. So I ended up paying postage three times. 

more bizarre, because of this new Ebay automatic thing, each came as their own parcel via a different courier. 

how does that make sense?

Anyway, 

these two are Tomy Dream Dancer dolls from the 80s. They use the same head sculpt as an older Tomy doll known as Yukko-chan.

Now, I don't know much about Yukko-chan's history but her head was used for a large range of gimmick dolls including one who cycled a bike (known as Randy Rider in the USA.), one in a rocking chair, one with a piano and of course, these ballerinas. 

What's unique about the Dream Dancers is that while most of these dolls had red hair and a very Japanese fashion doll face (think Licca-Chan), these girls have a unique screening and blonde hair, they are, put simply, substantially more westernised looking. 

But it's a cute sculpt. 

The body SUCKS. It's a gimmick body so what's supposed to happen is the doll would have originally come with a base which one foot clipped into, then she'd rotate wildly. 

You can watch the original advert here

Along with the spinning she also has gears inside her which when you raise her arms, her leg kicks out. 

I do find it strange they didn't bother to sculpt her arms into an elegant ballet pose though. I don't remember straight robot arms being part of the curriculum when I did ballet. 

Yes, I did ballet as a kid. My husband thinks this is hilarious because i'm the least graceful person ever. I didn't do it for long because I sucked at it, but yeah.... 

Weirdly, not all Dream Dancers, or indeed Tomy gimmick dolls in general, use the Yukko-chan head. Some, despite the packaging showing this head sculpt, use a far more clone looking grinning face. 

go figure. 

Like this Ebay listing shows. I don't think she's nearly as charming.

But this does also demonstrate at least one of her original outfits. She would have come with this workout sort of attire and a more typical pink leotard underneath. (my leotard was black because i'm cool like that. Lol)

Anyway, the dolls in question are very battered. One is severely yellowed and has hair cut, the other is covered in grey crap that was probably once glitter.

Both are missing their left arm.

But they have potential! 

 The one who had all her hair needed a really good scrub because the glitter shit on her face was mostly just grey grimy paint at this point. It looked like mold, sparkly mold. Gross. 

She still has a little green in her hairline but I can't get it out so whatever. It'll do. It's good enough. 

Her hair isn't great quality, it's some sort of nylon I assume. It's kinda soft... ish.. if you comb it just right, but it's also quite stiff and coupled with the very pale white blonde colour, it does tend to make her look like her hair is thinning a bit at the parting unless you're very very careful. 

I put her onto a Glo Up girl body i had in my stash. It's a nice enough body in terms of the aesthetics, it's very similar to a Rainbow High body in fact. But unlike Rainbow High, it's not very articulated and the articulation it does have is questionable. 

her ankles are jointed so she can wear flats or heels which in theory is a nice idea, but in practice it makes her ankles prone to collapsing under her weight. 

she has absolutely rock hard legs, no click knee or anything here and her elbow articulation can't even manage a proper 90 degrees, but it looks good and that's what really matters for a doll that's going to just stand on a shelf right?

She's wearing Rainbow High clothes and shoes which fit really well. And the head actually fits this neck nicely too. I was concerned because the original bodies have a little ball attachment and her head has a tiny hole and a lip so I was concerned it'd distort when I put it onto a wider neck but she's actually okay. Not all bodies work this well in that respect. The actual Rainbow High body has a wider neck and i'm not sure it'd fit without cutting the head slightly. 

but anyway, i'm pretty happy with her. 

Both still smell slightly of smoke, their smoke smell was stronger than the other three dolls from the same seller so hmm. Weird. 

But you have to really get your face right in their hair and try to be smelling it to really notice it, and as it doesn't give me a headache or nausea like cigarette smoke does, I think they're destunk enough. 

The other doll has a nose graze and her hair needs to be rerooted, so i'm pondering what to do there and how much I can be bothered. 

 

So this one wasn't a tlc project, I found her in the charity shops a couple of days ago when I went down to pick some stuff up from the pharmacy. 

A 1970s souvenir doll wouldn't usually be my thing but I thought she had a cute face and her clothes were nice looking. I thought I could at the very least repurpose the kilt and rebody the head.

She's grubby as all hell but she's cute.

I was actually quite surprised when I undressed her to find that she's actually pretty well made. Her body is quite decent with joints at the shoulders and hips and her head is on a ball so she can tilt her head. 

I fully expected this body to be molded as one piece in hollow shit blown plastic. Instead it's a perfectly normal ABS situation.

She has no markers mark on the box or the body but she's actually pretty nicely sculpted.

Of course, the jointed limbs are PROBABLY more a side effect of how she was made than intended for any sort of posing because her bent limbs make any other pose kind of ridiculous. 

But it's still cool she CAN move her arms and legs at all considering she was designed as an ornament, not a toy.

Her hair is quite thin and though it's decently rooted without any bald patches, the pale white colour combined with how fine the actual fiber itself is makes her hair look thin.

The other thing that absolutely floored me was that ALL her clothing is removeable and has velcro fastenings. 

Souvenir dolls usually are sewn into their clothes, or glued into them because they're not designed to ever be redressed. 

More bizarrely, the skirt and blouse fit the much larger Sindy. The jacket is a little too narrow and I didn't want to force it. The hat is also far too small for Sindy's big head.

the shoes are very soft and can also stretch a little to fit Sindy's feet. 

what the hell? 

I quite like how the skirt fits Sindy, it's a cute length. 

It needs an iron though, it's all rucked up at the back. 

The pieces are all decently made and hemmed, which is always nice to see. A lot of modern big brand dolls don't even bother with that. -_- 

the ribbons that tie the shoes on are fraying but to be fair, they're like 50 years old, I think we can forgive them that. 

The jacket has a little badge/brooch thing that's just a small piece of foiled plastic or something. It came off when I was playing around with the clothes and I had to glue it back on. It was not sewn into place, just glued. 

Looking at photos online, she probably once had a similar little triangular piece glued to her skirt too but I can't see any glue residue so who knows. 

She's a cutie.

I'm undecided about whether to rebody her or not. While her posed limbs are kinda annoying from a play perspective, from a display one she looks quite fun on a shelf.

I've seen others like her listed online as "Mary Quant Daisy clones" so I grabbed my Havoc who uses the same head sculpt as Daisy. 

 

 

 She can wear the clone's clothes, though the skirt is a bit too big on her.  I was actually surprised the hat fits because her head is significantly larger. 

They have similar noses but I don't think they otherwise look much alike at all. 

And of course the bodies are quite different. They can't swap bodies, their neck knobs are completely different sizes.

Havoc is actually a strung doll so she's held together with elastic. Her legs have a plastic "bone" inside so they bend. But as you may have noticed, this girl is quite badly damaged.

She came to me years and years ago in a bundle and as Havoc dolls are quite rare and pretty expensive, I was happy to try to restore her. 

She's missing one whole foot with just the plastic "bones" from inside sticking out of the end. So I sculpted over them with some foil after I rammed a paperclip into the hole alongisde the bone. It was all glued to keep it from unraveling or tearing.

Much like my Anna Moore, I decided that trying to find a replacement body or part wasn't worth the work (it's not like Daisy/Havoc legs are just readily available after all) and that embracing the disability was the better option. 

In Havoc's case I couldn't just leave her with a stump though, she couldn't' stand up. With the paperclip in place she can. 

Her other foot isn't in great condition either. The soft vinyl it's made of means that it tends to coil up on itself when you try to put shoes on her. I don't know if there's just some factory defect here that meant the plastic interior didn't come down far enough to stabilise her ankle or if they're all like this, but her foot is pretty mangled from curling up like the wicked witch of the east's toes. 

Anyway, Havoc was a "spy/secret agent" doll anyway so some injuries make sense in my mind. 

Finally I picked up these two for under a tenner (this is their auction photo). They're both Tressy dolls who in recent years i've developed a bit of a fondness for. They're quite often cheap as hell (I have one that husband literally found in the dumpster behind the YMCA shop) and scrub up pretty well. 

I was hopeful these two would do so as well. 

Blonde has some sort of marks all over her face (again, this is her auction photo) which I wasn't sure would be removable, but her hair looked good and her body was fine, just missing the ring for her mechanism at the back. 

I figured I could always steal the other doll's mechanism anyway. 

As it turned out, the stuff on her face came off with a gentle wipe so... yeah.. random. But her lips were badly stained with what looked like highlighter pen which had bled into the vinyl and made her look like she had a rash. 

so on went the peroxide and into a bag she went to sit in the hot sun for a few days. 

She came with her hair piece, it just wasn't attached to her so I opened her up and replaced it. 

the actual process of installing the "secret strand" (as they were called) is pretty straightforward but does require you to remove the doll's head. 

There are instructions online but I found them to be a bit vague honestly. 

heat the head/neck, carefully pull the head off. 

 

Now push in the belly button so the back half of that piece sticks out a little, this will let you find a gap behind the ring to ram something flat into to pry it off.

 

once it's off you just slide the whole belly piece out. 

The hair piece is held in with a little piece of string. The knot of the string slips through the two prongs and sits in a little hole just for it.

There's one more piece involved which is inside Tressy's body. You might hear it rattling around in there. I'm not totally sure what this piece's full purpose is, it appears to hold all the hair together inside her but i don't feel like it's a crucial piece. Regardless, the hair piece is supposed to thread through this piece before connecting to the belly button mechanism.

to do this you need to push the string into the hole at the top of the doll's head and get it to come out her neck hole. I used my reroot tool to help shove the string downward, but a pen or something would probably also work.

Once that's coming out the hole (make sure there's still hair coming out the top of her head, you don't want the hair piece to disappear inside her head fully or you'll have to start again) you can tip her body upside down and try to get the little rattly plastic piece inside to line up with her neck hole. The thinner end should stick up and out of the hole which you want to then pit the string into. Again you want to push the string down through this piece and then further down to her belly hole. Again, my reroot tool (it's a needle stuck in an exacto knife handle) was very useful for this as it's JUST the right width to pass through the holes. I used tweezers to grab the string when it appeared and pull it out of the belly button hole.

Slip the string into the prongs and slide it down til it sits into the hole, wind it around the shaft a few times and then pop that sucker back in the hole from the front.

Slip the ring back in place and then wind the mechanism to pull all the loose string into the body. Keep it a little slack though because you're going to still need to put that head back on.

heat her head up again and ram that into the neck hole. Use a flat tool if you need to to squish the edges into there. Twisting the head around and around also helps.

once that's back in, wind the mechanism to your desired length and you're done.

if you don't have a key the mech can be wound using anything thin enough to fit between the prongs. A butter knife for example, or a flat head screwdriver. I used one of my sculpting tools.

Brunette girl is was in a far more sorry state than her sister.

from the auction photo here I could tell she'd had her hair hacked and that her lips were pale and she had green staining, but ooo eee when she arrived it was so much worse than that.

Her head was coated in GLUE.

sticky... yellow... glue.

for some reason someone had filled her head hole with glue and it had ended up wicking into her hair and just going everywhere.

it hadn't dried, it had just remained tacky and disgusting and at first I assumed they were attempting to fill her head hole because she'd lost her hair piece.

but upon taking off her head, there it was. Intact and just a teensy bit gluey at the ends.

wtf?

So I first washed her with dish soap to get rid of the grease and that actually was pretty effective in neutralizing the glue. The glue stopped being wet and instead became a very tacky putty-like consistency. what?

I painstakingly picked as much as I could out of her hair and scraped it off her scalp but it was pretty stubborn so I grabbed the cif. Cif works great for Monster High glue by turning it hard so I thought maybe it might do the same here.

I didn't leave her for long, I just needed the get the glue to a point it would comb out rather than sticking to everything.

it took a lot of combing, but I finally got it all out.

and underneath what hair she HAS got is in alright condition. It's just the whole front section has been hacked short.

Is this related to the glue or separate? I don't know. 

With a good scrub her face is, it turns out, is actually a decent colour and not a dingy grey.

I repainted her lips and unfortunately in the process of trying to remove the green, I managed to remove her eyebrow by mistake (damnit) so I had to repaint that. 

I removed the cut hair stubble and pondered my options.

I could use her hair piece as donor hair to replace the front sections but I wasn't sure there was actually enough of it. These hair pieces aren't very thick and she's missing quite a lot of hair.

What I ended up doing was trimming a small chunk from the ends of the hair piece and filling in just the middle section at the front. 

why you ask? 

 Because with her longer hair strands pulled forward, the baldness should be substantially less obvious.

like so. 

It's by no means perfect, but it'll do til I can figure out a hair donor for her. 

 I used the brunette's mech ring... thing for the better condition blonde doll, but I found this washer on my desk which fit just about perfect. I don't know what it's from, something youngest took apart no doubt, but it works to keep the pieces in place and that's all I really needed. 

Now i'm working on removing that green mark, we'll see if I can. 

The blonde spent several days in the sun destaining. It didn't get it all, but it got the worst of it and that's good enough for me. 

I then spent most of the day fighting with her as I tried to paint her damn lips.

sometimes repainting lips goes super smoothly, other times it takes me hours of redoing it before I can get it right.

it's so annoying. 

I opted for a pinker shade for this girl, partially because it made her lip bleed less obvious than the red did and partially because I thought it made for a nice change. 

She has some scuffs on her lips which means texture, which you can see in the photo on her lower lip but you know what? Sod it. It's good enough. 

She's scrubbed up nicely and that's what really matters. 

I put her into an 80s Creata Lace dress that I repaired (it's made from some sort of thick pleather stuff), some mesh stockings that might belong to a Barbie and some Monster High boots. Tressy has quite large feet, a similar size to Sindy, but unlike Sindy her feet are very high heeled, more like Barbie. This makes finding shoes a bit of a challenge so I was delighted to learn that Monster High shoes fit quite well and have a high enough heel. 

  And so that's my tlc dolls. I had a lot of fun restoring them, but the big problem is that it makes me itch to do MORE. 

Still, it's a great feeling saving battered up old dolls from landfill. They should have a nice retirement here.