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Saturday, June 18, 2011

Oh, Wow! I'd heard of this but never encountered it for myself!!


Two heads!! She has two heads--one sewn right over the other. This was often done in the "olden days" to extend the life of a doll. Her arms have also been recovered, I think to make the doll look "cleaner" without washing it. Depending on what it has been stuffed with, washing might have been impossible w/o destroying it.
   I am planning on taking her down to the original, unstuffing her, washing her (very gently) and then restuffing her with clean stuffing. If it appears that the head/body fabric won't hang together, I'll cover it with new similar fabric, and put the face on with pen, just as the original had. I am wondering if this doll originally had a china head; if I look under the bottom-most face and see that the head has been sewn to a headless body, I will presume that. The body is made of a different fabric than the head; it is more coarsely woven and the head fabric appears to be regular old muslin.
   I will also wash and preserve the second head/wig so that it can be pulled over the original--the second face, with it's 3D nose WAS something of an improvement, and the original head has a glue stain (I guess) on the back of the head, so I'm sure the maker of the second head/wig considered she'd improved the doll. It was probably a birthday or Christmas present for some little girl. I'll tell you, people "back in the day" wasted NOTHING, and nothing was ever thrown away until it had gone through every transformation possible.

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