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Hard Plastic Dolls
I love the wonderful hard plastic dolls from the 1950's. For some reason these are the dolls that are the most beautiful to me. Don't get me wrong I enjoy collecting many dolls old and new, but the hard plastic strung and walking dolls are truly my favorites.
The 3 girls to the right are all wearing their ballet dresses. The largest is a very interesting unmarked flirty eye doll. Her eyes not only open and close but move side to side. She has molded eyelashes. She's one of my favorite dolls and I've named her Coquette. If anyone knows who she really is or who made her, I'd love to know. The dress she's wearing in this photo is a Madame Alexander that's lost its tag. I have several 14" and two 17" of the hard plastic Alexander's but this dress fits a 20". So until I get a bigger Maggie, Coquette gets to wear it. Coquette is also a walker. I have a few more close up's of Coquette below.
The doll with the pink hairclips and long ringlets is a kind of unusual little girl. She didn't come to me in her original clothes but she has several outfits she gets to wear. I bought her ballet outfit on eBay. The wig is a new replacement that she had on when I bought her.
The little ballerina with her original wig ballet dress and shoes is a petite 14 inch doll. Even though there are several 14 inch hard plastic dolls, they don't all have the same measurements. They very in size and this little girl seems to have a tinier body than the other 14" hard plastic girls in my collection. Her panties are replaced vintage and her flowers are new. She's marked Made in USA.
I have several other versions of this doll, including a little nun doll. She's pictured with a friend below. This one has molded eyelashes and of course, no wig. While the ballerina is well made, has nice coloring and a good wig, the nun seems less well made and looks as though she was never given blush. She is very clean and I don't think she was played with much if ever.
The first 2 dolls pictured below and to the right were my first two 14" Madame Alexander hard plastic dolls. The doll to the left in that photo is a Margaret face. She is marked on the back of her head Alex. Her outfit is a very nice vintage homemade dress that she came to me wearing. It looks very much like the MA Little Women dresses, including the under things. I've been looking at the Margaret face dolls with the same hair style and guess that she may have been a Marme. There were also some bits of what I presume were the original hair net in her hair also, but they were only small bits. The doll on the right in the first photo is a MA Maggie face, also 14 inches. Neither of these dolls is a walker. Maggie is unmarked but came in a frail very dirty tagged Beth dress. I have washed her dress and it is much better but I took the picture while it was soaking.
The second photo below is another Margaret faced doll. She's modeling a crochet skating outfit that I made and sold on eBay, (just her outfit, she's still here). She gets to play Meg for now until I get a real one. She's a bent knee walker and could have been a ballerina. I've seen Margarets with that style wig and bent knees as ballerinas, but since this one came to my undressed I'll never really know. I would like to get her a vintage MA ballet dress.
The final photo below is my Amy doll. She's also a Margaret faced doll. She came to me rather dirty but I got her cleaned up and nice. She's a walker and a large handed doll, as is the doll in the second photo. All 3 photos are of 14" dolls.
  
These are my five 14" Alexander dolls together. The first one in back is the strung Margaret doll with floss hair also mentioned above. Next is a Maggie in a Jo dress. They were purchased separately. The dress originally came with a red pinafore apron, which I don't have. The Margaret faced Amy is wearing her original dress. The next doll is the Margaret faced doll in the skating outfit above. She's wearing a vintage mommy made gown. And finally in front is Meg is Beth in her original dress. The 2 Margaret faced dolls on the right both have the large hands, the others have the small hands mold. These dolls are from different years and have different flesh tones. Some are walkers and some strung.
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This doll is a repainted R&B. She came to me with bad paint wear and horrible nail polish used as lipstick all over her lips and bottom of her face.
Removing the polish also removed her paint so I decided to totally redo her. I took all the paint off her face, which also removed the R&B marking from the back of her head.
I repainted her and gave her a new commercial wig. This was my first try at a repaint and I was please with the results of a first attempt. I have several other very sad dolls that are going to be getting repaints at some point in the future.
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Below are photos of two 15 inch American Character Sweet Sue dolls. These are both walkers. The first one is wearing a vintage mommy made dress. She has several dresses she likes to wear. The doll in the second photo is wearing her original dress.
American Character Sweet Sue dolls can be marked American Character, AC or no marking at all. They dolls are identifiable from the other hard plastic 14" dolls by the eyelid fold on the face mold.
Something unusual that I noticed with these two dolls is that Sue seems to have both large and small handed dolls.
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The next little girl is a strung Horseman doll, about 16 inches tall. Her arms and legs seem small for her body and head. I originally thought that she was a put together doll, but after studying the photos of other Horsman dolls like her on auction, I've come to decide she probably is original and they just were kind of awkwardly sized dolls.
She is cute and has wonderful coloring and hair. Sadly she does have some good paint chips on her nose and cheek; otherwise she would be a really wonderful doll.
The outfit she's wearing on the left was one that I bought in lot of other cute little hand made vintage clothes. It's a bit short for her. I love that print though! She has a couple new dresses now, and is wearing one that's a bit longer, though I don't think as cute. I'll have to get another photo.
The two photos below are some of her other outfits. The ballet outfit on the left was what she was wearing when I bought her. It's pretty cheap quality. I have no idea if it was original to her or not, the shoes are new ones i had.
The other outfit is something I already had. It doesn't fit her perfectly but does look cute. She is marked Horsman, well the hors part is rubbed but you can clearly see the man. She could have been a Cindy or Bright Star. |
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This is the girl with the pink hairclips again. These are ones I just put on her for now. Like most hairclips they're being used to keep her hair in place. She's marked 180 on the back of her head. It looks like there may have been something else but there are only a few marks and nothing is legible.
This is kind of an unusual doll. She has the vinyl arms like Cissy, Sweet Sue and some of the Horsman Cindy dolls. I don't think the arms are replacements. It's really hard to work with that kind of arms, not worth the value of this doll in time and effort. And if you have these extra arms laying around, they would be much more valuable sold for Cissy replacements. Of course you can't tell it could be possible that she's a put together doll, but I think she was put together at the factory with these parts not from other dolls.
In this photo she's wearing one of the larger dresses that fits Coquette. She has a larger body but shorter legs and is about 17" tall. She fits in the same size clothes as the 18 inch dolls around but they need to be shorter where the waist sits.
The bridal doll below is one I am so happy to have. She's all original except for the flowers. She's a Mollye "Peggy Rose Bride" from 1957. There's one pictured on page 200 of the "Modern Collector's Dolls 7th series." I found her badly listed with a poor photo on eBay and knew she was more than she looked. She was wonderful. I didn't even have to clean her outfit though I did have to turn it around, as it was on her backwards. Other wise I just perked up her bonnet a bit and gave her some flowers. She's about 17 inches and unmarked.
The 2 girls below are the 18 inch Madame Alexander Maggie dolls. The girl with the red and white dress has an Alice type hair do. Her hair is very thin and it took some time to make it look this nice. The dress is not original to the doll, but it is the one she came to me wearing.
The other Maggie doll is wearing a vintage home made dress. Both girls have nicer dresses now and I hope to get a new photo of them soon. They are some of my favorite dolls and I'm hoping to make them several dresses some day.
The doll in the next photo is an 18 inch Effanbee Honey doll. She came to me undressed and is wearing the Alexander ballet outfit in the photo at right. It's too big for her, but I have it adjusted for the photo. The blue dress in the head shot is another vintage but too large dress. I recently moved dresses around and now she's wearing one that's a bit more suitable. She's a neat doll with jointed knees and ankles, and a very nice wig.
The next doll is a little flirty eyed hard plastic doll with ringlets. She's the same doll that's in the top ballet photo, Coquette. This is one of my favorite dolls. I've never seen any others exactly like her. I'd love to know who she is. The first photo of her is a close up of her face.
The three photos below are more of Coquette. The first photo shows how she came to me. Her outfit was a replacement, maybe from the 70's or 80's. It fits the Crissy size dolls and looks good on them. It was too small for Coquette.
The next photo is another one of her in the ballet dress, inside the doll case. You may notice her hair is a bit different in the 2 photos. I don't know what her original hair style was. Her hair does have some rather thin areas now. She was a played with doll. I thought her hair might look cute all curled up in the same style as some of the Ginny type dolls, or Littlest Angels. She did look cute that way too, but I liked it better down. When I took it back down I kept her bangs rolled. The curl is held in place with bobby pins.
As the only doll of her size Coquette has been very lucky to get a lot of clothes. It seems there are a lot of clothes for the larger dolls, and maybe not so many of the dolls left to wear them. The third photo is one of her many dresses. I'll have to take more photos of all the fashions of the spoiled little Coquette.
The next doll is a Saucy Walker look alike, with open mouth, teeth and felt tongue. These are her original clothes, socks, shoes and ribbons. She came in what I believe is her original unmarked box. I've seen another doll like this on eBay, but a blonde, with the same hairstyle, in the same dress in yellow. She came in what looked like the same plain original box. Also in my dolls box were a fairyland doll shoes box and an old glass baby doll bottle, but the rubber nipple was totally disintegrated.
In the first photo is how she came to me with white fungus on her eyes and rather messy. The second photo is after I cleaned her up. Later she went to see the dolly doctor, because her eyes and walker mechanism were interfering with each other. The last photo is her blue dotted Swiss dress, a gift from a dear friend. She still has her original pink dress and it's much nicer now too.
The final doll is my new Sweet Sue. Sorry about the photo it was very dark and I lightened it. I'll try to get a better one at some point. This little girl is a big 24" doll. She came to me without cloths but looks very cute in her new vintage pink dress flocked with mama hens and baby chicks. She does have what looks like an original band of flowers in her hair that can't be seen in the photo. And she came with the little ballet type shoes. The green velvet ribbon was tied around her wrist when she came to me. I can only assume some little girl put it there at some point in Sue's life. I plan on leaving it where it is.
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