I Finally Got Some Baps Dolls!

     Sometimes you just have a bad physical day. In my case I had a bad physical week. Things kept messing up, or falling on me. Well, Wednesday we went to Indiana to visit Ivy. It's a long drive and between a later start than we would have preferred, and loads of road construction, by the time we got there and spent some time with Ivy, it was late and I was tired. So we decided to stay all night. Luckily it's summer and there were empty rooms in Ivy's dorm. She took one of the empty beds and let us use hers. I don't know if it's because we were so tired or what, but we managed to share the twin sized bed and sleep quite well. We set off the next day, and even had a few minutes to stop at a couple of antique stores on the way home, and still get back in time for Ken to go to work at 5. As he was leaving I got out the mower and mowed the yard. (I still had the strength to mow, even though we have a non motorized mower. The kind with the little blade bar that spins and goes ching ching when you push the mower. Actually, ours needs oiling and goes skreak skreak.) As I was putting the mower back I spotted the little cupboard that's been hanging on the wall of the basement landing since before we moved in, in 1995. From the look of the style, it's been there since at least the 60's. I decided to look inside for something. Big mistake. The cupboard came loose---didn't fall, mind you. Just tilted. Unfortunately, that's where Ken has been displaying some of his antique pop bottles, and somebody put a couple of vintage glasses up there too. And ALL of them slid off and whacked me in the side of the temple, right by my right eye. I looked down and panicked because the 7-UP bottle had broken into a million pieces. I kept feeling my head for blood, but realized the bottle had broken when it hit a toolbox in the floor below the cupboard. So, it could have been worse. I had a huge lump on the side of my head when I went to bed, and a  bruise coming on. The next day I had something else: a black eye!

That's a good one, but it just keeps getting better! By the next evening, it looked like this:

That was yesterday evening. This evening the under eye ring is even more wide spread.

  The good news is, the eye doesn't even hurt. The lump was way smaller the very next day, and it really only hurts if I touch it, lay on it, or smile too widely. In any case, I'm fine, but I look awful...and I have a black eye. (Ha.)

  Now for the real reason for this post.

  Maybe I should stop going to doll shows...or searching for things online. At some point I discovered Baps dolls and fell in love. These tiny dolls are so cute they are the doll equivalent of Lay's potato chips: "You can't have just one." 

  They're 1/12 scale, or dollhouse size. Adults are a little over 5 inches tall, and children are about 3 1/2  inches tall. This goes along with my recent preference for dolls of that size, including Baps, and Caco dolls.

  I saw a family of Baps dolls at a doll show a couple of years ago. 

They have so much personality. They were irresistible. Except for the price. I could resist that very easily! 

I ended up buying a very TLC Baps doll at the show for $2.

You can see her post HERE.

But I kept thinking about the family. I saw them again at a later show. I could have bought just the little girl, who was my favourite, but I couldn't break up the family. (I also didn't want to pay $28 for one tiny doll.)

  I occasionally look for Baps dolls online. They are usually so expensive that I just look. Even their starting bids are crazy. But recently I looked and there was a whole family with a, comparably, really low starting bid. They had just been put on, and I figured they'd go way up. I bid on them, figuring I'd get outbid in the week or so they still had to go. But I won! 

"Yay!"  This family is described online as German or Bavarian. 

  So now I have a cute Baps family! The little girl isn't quite as cute as the one from the show, but look at that little boy!

I'm thinking the little girl doesn't find him so amusing.

Oh yeah. She's had plenty of him.

   They have wired arms and legs for posing, felt covered limbs, and cloth covered heads with floss hair. Their little clothes are nicely made and detailed.

  These are the poses they were in when I got them. Seeing other sets online, the parents always seem to be arm in arm,...

... the little girl has her hands tucked like this...

... and the little boy is always in this excited position.

The dad and the little boy are both wearing lederhosen, and odd socks that are only rings around their calves.

The little girl, on the other hand, has knee socks.

Sorry about the blurriness. The auto focus focused on the wrong thing.

The mom has full tights.

Her legs are bent in a walking position, as are the dad's.

They make a nice strolling couple.

  They all have heavy metal feet, so they can theoretically stand on their own. What's stopping them are their poses. With their legs bent the way they are, they need something to lean on to stand.

  There's lots of nice detail in their clothes. Look at the laces on the side of the little boy's shorts.

And on the mom's...bodice? What do you can that thing she's wearing?

Plus she has that lovely... fichu? (The scarfy thing around her neck.)

Whatever you call it, the little girl is wearing one too. (The bodice, that is, not the fichu.)

She also has polka dot undies.

I'm going to show my age here and say this reminds me of the old commercial for panty hose, when they were a new thing. The slogan was, "Nobody knows, until the wind blows."

  These dolls have great expressions, and look at the little girl's hair style.

    They're all wearing hats with the German style brush decoration.

Maybe hers is supposed to be a feather.

  Early dolls had hand painted faces. The post war faces are supposed to be distinguishable because of their shadowed eyes. These don't look shadowed, so should I assume they are prewar?

They are all in such nice condition too. They're super clean and seem to have never been played with. That brings up a point. These were made as toys for children, or to be taken home as souvenirs, (as some of them were sold on American army bases in Germany after WWII), but so many of them are found like these: still in their original positions, never having been posed or played with. Were they popular with adults even then? Were they bought and sent home to adults, instead of children? I know they were sold door to door in Germany. Were a lot of them bought just to get the peddlers to go away, and then just tucked somewhere, never to be played with? How did so many of them survive unposed? I would love to pose them, and do cute pictures with them, but I wouldn't dare pose them when they've been perfect for so long.

  You can read about how Baps dolls were made HERE. There's a great page about the history of Baps   HERE . 

  That's all for today. See you again soon.