Doll-A-Day 2023 #345: Norweigian Doll by Rønnaug Petterssen

   Today's doll is one I got at a doll show way back a year or two ago. I think I showed you the shelf she was on, when it was full of dolls, and after I had shopped it. In any case, she's here now.

  She is a souvenir type doll, made in Norway.

She has a tag inside her dress that says 'Kimports' too.

  I found another doll online, that looks very similar and is also a Kimport doll from Norway. That doll is described as "a Rønnaug Petterssen doll, the version known as flat faced with needle sculpted facial features".

She has a lot of hair in her face. I need to tidy her hair. It's mohair. I'm not going to try to comb it!

That doll was 7 inches tall, about the same as this one. They're asking $309! Not  that they will actually get $309, but, still!

  Rønnaug Petterssen was the doll artist. I found a Facebook page dedicated to her, and there was a picture of some ladies at a doll show with a table full of her dolls, and a doll just like my girl was on the table! So I at least can say she's pretty certainly by Rønnaug Petterssen. 

The first doll I saw had the same legs and shoes as my girl, with the little metal buckles on her shoes. 

And very similar tiny handmade lace.

Ignore my very dry finger.

She has a lot of gold trim on her dress and her hat too.

  

The first doll was supposedly from the 1930's. If that's true, I would say my doll is too.

  It's nice to know the maker of this doll, and some other details. But I don't want to sell her. I love this kind of doll. Tomorrow we'll see another doll I'm very fond of.

Doll-A-Day 2023 #253: Pressed Cloth Face Girl

   This little girl we're seeing today, was at one of the recent shows, and she was $5. I couldn't resist her.

  She has a pretty pressed cloth face and blonde yarn hair.

 

She is about 15 inches tall and has a stuffed cloth body. She's so cute, and seems like she would have been such a sweet cuddly doll when she was new.

This is her original cotton polka dot dress.

Her yarn hair has a faux curl along the bottom in the back.

It has matching one piece undies underneath.

I have the other shoe I think, but I don't think they're original.

She has the interesting feature of having pinwheel sleep eyes in a pressed cloth face.

  She even has real lashes

  I'm not sure how old she is, but those eyebrows are decidedly 1930's. She could possibly be 1940's, but during WWII plastics were saved for the war effort, and not used in toys. So she'd either have to be prewar, or post war.

She appears to have glue from her hair on the sides of her face.

  I can't find anything out about her. If anybody knows who she is, please leave a comment. That also goes for anybody who knows if there is a way to clean her cloth face.

  That's it for today folks. I'm really busy this week, hemming Ken's pants and jacket cuffs on his suit for the wedding, and doing something about the mesh cleavage on my dress! The wedding is this weekend! I'm doing posts ahead so I'm not busy this week, but we'll still be back here tomorrow for another doll.

Doll-A-Day 2023 #242: Deanna Durbin

   Yesterday we saw some celebrity dolls. And recently you saw this picture. 

Today we're going to concentrate on another celebrity doll that was in that picture. She's Deanna Durbin. That's her on the far right. Deanna Durbin was a child actress and singer, who went on to a successful adult career. She's next to two other child stars: Shirley Temple to her immediate left, and Margaret O'Brian, to Shirley's immediate left.

Deanna Durbin was born Edna Mae Durbin, in Winnipeg Canada, in 1921. She was a singing prodigy and was taking voice lessons by the age of ten. She developed a perfect soprano voice, far beyond her years. She made her first film appearance was in the 1936  movie "Every Sunday". She and Judy Garland were cast in the movie together, as sort of a screen test, so the big wigs at MGM could decide which young singer/actress to keep. Garland was signed, but Durbin's contract option had expired by then. Instead she was signed by Universal, who renamed her Deanna.

  She made many musicals in the 1930's and '40's. Supposedly her movies were so successful that they saved Universal from bankruptcy. She was so popular that there were paper dolls and other products made with her name and image on them. Ideal made several Deanna Durbin dolls. 

You can see that the doll in blue and white still has it's original tag, with Durbin's picture on it.

  The doll is from 1938. She's 21 inches tall, and is wearing her original dress. The smaller doll to the left, in pink and purple, is also a Deanna Durbin doll. As was the practice at the time, the dolls would also have originally had a pin like this one.

The larger doll has six teeth and a felt tongue in her open mouth. Her eyes are sleep eyes with hair lashes.

 

This Deanna Durbin doll, (on the right), also by Ideal, from 1938, is a smaller size, but the dolls also came in several sizes, as large as 24 inches tall.

  The Deanna Durbin doll at the back, left, is very large.

   In 1936, at the age of 15, she auditioned to be the voice of Snow White. She didn't get the role, because Walt Disney thought her voice was 'too old'! It must have been pretty advanced, because that year she was also offered an audition by the Metropolitan Opera. She felt she needed more voice lessons and didn't accept. In 1938 she won a Juvenile Oscar. (You can read my post about Juvenile Oscars HERE. ) She wanted to make more serious movies as she grew older, btu the public preferred her in musicals. In 1946 she was the second highest paid woman in the country, after Bette Davis. She was married three times, and after marrying her third husband she retired in 1949, and moved to a farm in the countryside near Paris. She lived the rest of her life there, and died in 2013, at the age of 91.

  Those are today's doll. See you again tomorrow.

Doll-A-Day 2023 #44: Tiny Lady in a Scarf

   Today we're looking at a little mystery lady. (And watch for an extra post too.)

  I don't know anything about her. I'm not even sure now where I got this lady. It was possibly a doll show, but it may have been an antique store. I'm guessing her to be from about the 1930's.

She's about 4 or 5 inches tall. I don't have my measuring devices here at Emma's, and she doesn't remember where her ruler is. Ken has a comb with a ruler on it, like the one I use on dolls at home, but he takes it to work with him.

  She has seen better days, but she's still cute, even if she does have some damage to her face.

I'm not sure what her face is made out of. It looks like maybe celluloid or another kind of thin plastic, over pressed fabric or something?

Her clothes are linen. The fabric almost looks and feels like the fabric that was used for feed sacks back when my mom was young, in the late 20's, 30's, and 40's.

  I have some quilts that were made by my mom and grama from feed sack fabric. Companies made feed sacks, (for chicken feed, for example.) from pretty cotton fabric, so it could be useful for other things. People made clothes out of the sacks, so they were careful to try to get sacks from the same dye lots of fabric, to make sure the colours matched. My mom wore feed sack dresses and even feed sack underwear. (When I told my friend Lori this once, she immediately though of burlap feed sacks and was stunned anybody would wear burlap underwear!)

Her scarf is stitched closed under her chin, and stitched to her head in the back.

She's wearing an apron, a skirt...

..and a petticoat, along with bloomers, stockings, and little black shoes.

  I think her arms and legs are wired, but I wasn't sure, especially about the legs. So I didn't want to try to pose her very much.

  I'm not sure what her hair is made out of. It could be mohair, but it feels a bit synthetic.

You may have noticed from the previous pictures, that the part in her hair is stitched in with white thread. You'd think they would have used thread to match her black hair.

  That's the doll for today. Tomorrow we'll look at another doll.

Doll-A-Day 2023 #3: My Mom's Pin Cushion Doll

  Waaay back I did a post on brush dolls. That brought up the subject of half dolls. So I thought I'd do a post on half dolls. That led to this post on a doll that incorporates a half doll. So here is today's doll. She belonged to my mom when she was a kid. She's a pin cushion doll.

My sister owns her now.

She's made from what's known as a 'half doll'. Obviously they get their name from the fact that they are only half a figure. Half dolls were generally made to be used as part of pin cushions, or decorative tops on things such as whisk brooms and clothes brushes, like these dolls I spotted at a doll show a while back .

The popularity of half dolls was at it's height at the beginning of the 20th century. My mom was born in 1927, so her pin cushion doll dates from the 1930's.

As I said, she's a pin cushion, but she didn't appear to have ever had any pins stuck in her. My sister, who now owns her, put these in.

She looks like a Southern lady to me. She has a beautiful satin dress and ringlet curls in the back of her hair.

My mom's family was pretty poor during the depression. 

That's my grampa driving the plow. My mom is the one in the big white hat, second to the right of Grampa. This was taken in the early to mid 1940's. 

My grampa was a farmer, a plasterer, and during the depression he worked for the WPA, the government bureau that provided jobs for people during the era so they didn't starve to death. My mom had a sister and four brothers eventually. 

Mom, age 10, in 1937. That actually says 'Mae', not 'Moe'!

Because they were poor, there aren't many of Mom's childhood things around. This comes the closest to being a doll that we have of hers.

I'm not sure what she is made of. It's possibly plaster, but she could be ceramic.

The doll part is sewn into a stuffed upper skirt that is attached to a round, flat weight. That's so she can sit flat when she's being used as a pin cushion.

She came in this striped canister, and she still resides there. 

The cannister is heavy cardboard with a metal lid. It's about 8 inches tall. When the doll is put in the cannister, her dress is pulled up over her head, and she's slid down into the cannister. The bottom of the flat weight sits on the bottom of the cannister. This way her dress is kept nice and unwrinkled when she's stored.

    I did once see the exact same pin cushion doll and cannister at our local Salvation Army store. I considered bringing her home, since I don't have Mom's. But she wouldn't have been Mom's, so I left her there. 

  That's the doll for today. See you tomorrow for another one.