Vintage 1920's Doll Restoration! - Part 1 - The Starting Place

Hello everybody!

I have the beginning of a very exciting doll story for you all today.  😃

Recently, my great-aunt was cleaning out her house in preparation for a move, and she came across an old doll in a box.  Apparently, this doll had belonged to her mother, and had been languishing in the box for around 70 years.

Having heard about my doll hobby, she kindly sent the doll to me.

When she arrived, it became obvious that the poor dolly was in dire need of restoration.
She was a lovely old composition doll, with some wooden parts and a bisque head with a real human hair wig.

 Her head had been detatched, and her stringing was all loose.














The left lower leg had been detatched from its knee joint.














The right hip socket was badly crushed in, and the entire corresponding ball joint on the upper leg had broken off and was missing.













Her arms were made of wood, not composition, so they had fared much better than the legs.













However, the hands were composition, and the right hand was missing four fingers and the thumb.

 Her neck socket and shoulders were in good condition.















Her torso had some rubs and surface crazing, but no serious crushing or cracking.














Here's her head.  I had to wrap her wig because it was falling apart and crumbling everywhere.  It was beyond repair and would have to be replaced.

Her sleeping-eye mechanism had completely broken out, but the mechanism and the glass eyes were still inside her head.  The eyes fell out the bottom when I unpacked her, while the mechanism remained trapped inside.  Both the brown glass eyes were in remarkably good condition - the stem on one was broken, of course, but only near the end.  The eye mechanism, with its weight, was intact as well.

Amazingly, the bisque head had not cracked at all and almost all of the original paint remained.  There was some minor scratching and wear on the cheeks and nose, but nothing serious.  Even her little teeth were still in place.

Here you can see what was visible of her marking before the wig came off.  From this marking, and with my aunt's help, I found out that this doll was made by the German doll company Heubach Köppelsdorf, around 1920.  Her model number is 250⋅4, one of the most popular of Köppelsdorf's dolls.


The next step is to remove the crumbling wig, clean the doll (since she was very dirty) and resculpt the broken parts.
Stay tuned for the next update!