Doll-A-Day 2023 354: Cloth Doll

  Number 354 is this cute little girl.

She's only about 7 inches tall. She has a pressed cloth face, and stockingette arms and legs.

Her face looks to be hand painted. Her dress has faux straps across the chest, and real lacing.

Her sleeves and apron are a very fine cotton. She has tiny socks, with stitching detail along the tops, and felt accents.

And little felt shoes.

Her legs appear to be stitched up the fronts.

  She has a beautiful face. I'm not sure what her hair is made of. It's shiny, and made into two little braids. Her felt hat frames it all nicely.

I assume those felt pieces are meant to be feathers.

  I would guess her to be from the 40's. From the looks of her, she's possibly meant to be Alpine/Swiss or German. Anybody know what her costume is?

  That's 354. Check out today's other posts as we try to catch up for the end of the year!

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.

A Whiney Tale and Flea Market Doll

   Just popping in to say I'm still around, and show you this little girl I got at the flea market a few weeks ago. The leg is still hurting. Sometimes it's not so bad. If I stay off of it, I have no pain. If I am on it too much I hurt pretty much from my waist to my toes. My back has gotten in on the act, probably because I walk funny from the knee pain. I feel like one leg is shorter than the other and it's throwing my back out. 

  There's a doll show this coming weekend, and another the next weekend. I'd skip the second one, because it was all just expensive fashion dolls and stuff I can't afford. But my sister liked going last year and wants to go again. I am looking forward to the first one though, as it's a good one. I don't know how the leg is going to behave though. It's a long drive there and back, and walking around the show will add to the wear and tear. Good thing I am my own boss and can take the next day off.

  Anyway, flea market doll! Here she is.

She's one of those little rubber/vinyl dolls that were really common when I was a kid. In fact, she reminds me very much of my little Jungle Legsly, which you might have seen in her Doll-A-Day post HERE.

Jungle Legsly.

In fact, she's almost exactly like Jungle Legsly, right down to the Mary Jane shoes. Jungle's weren't painted at all, but new girl's were painted all but the strap.

Kind of a slop job of painting.

  At about 5 inches she's bigger than Jungle, who is about 4 inches tall.

  She also has something Jungle doesn't have, and that's markings. This girl says Japan on her back.

  She has the standard jointing: neck, shoulders, and hips. So she can sit down, and turn her head.

She has side glance eyes, so she can look somewhat wary!

She does have a sweet face though.

Cute, but she desperately needs a cleaning. That's another thing I haven't gotten to yet. I do things on our Fun Days, Monday and Wednesday, try to catch up on things on Tuesdays and Thursdays, if I can still function without too much pain. I try to take it easy on Sundays to recover for Monday. It has been necessary to get out and go somewhere on Monday and Wednesday just to get out of the heat, since we don't have air conditioning. The last few days have been much cooler though. I took these pictures yesterday, and as you can see, it was very dark, and rained on and off. The weather is more like Fall. 

  We got up early Friday morning and went to a huge church sale in Columbus. We went a few years ago and they had some amazing stuff and the prices were really good. This time they didn't have very much interesting stuff and the prices weren't that great either. On the way home, since I haven't gone to hardly any yard sales this year I stopped at two or three, as well as a couple of Goodwills. By the time I got home I was hurting really badly. Ken wanted to cook out, so we ate outside, and we HAD to cut the watermelon we had before it started to rot on us. Ken went to work, and I cleared up the watermelon leftovers and got them in the fridge, and hauled myself upstairs. The pain had gotten worse and worse. I was in so much pain, including my back, that I was starting to get nauseous.  I ended up in so much pain that I wasn't sure I could take a shower and just go to bed. I managed to get the cat box cleaned and clean up after the food messes they had made, and get in the shower by 6 o'clock. Then I collapsed for the night.

  Her dress feels like it might be silk. Would that even make sense though? She was just a cheap doll. Of course, back in the olden days when I was a kid, doll clothes were sometimes made of silk.

Oh no! I can see into her soul through her mouth!

You might notice they didn't trim her fingers very well. They are molded round, but are cut square on the tips! 

  Her hair is a little thin, but it is in the original braids.

My sweet peas are blooming. And my tomato plants finally got some blooms on them! Of course, they'd better hurry up if they're going to grow any tomatoes.

And it's red.

  I do have another doll photographed to show you. That'll probably be in a couple of days. As for today, I'm pretty pain free, but I had to sit and lay around all day to get that way!

The Toys of the Past, Christmas and Otherwise: Lori and Family's Toys from the 40's, 50's, and 60's

  Remember back in December of 2018, when I showed you some very old Christmas photos belonging to my friend Lori? (You can find those posts by clicking Toys of Christmas Past in the sidebar. She got the best stuff! Well, I'm back, with a few more of Lori's old photos from Christmas, birthdays, and Easter. These pictures all have dolls and toys. Some of them need identifying, so if you recognize them, please leave a comment.

  The first picture is obviously Christmas, but Lori is cuddling a toy rabbit, and whatever that other toy is.

  

  Note the tiger slippers. I had several pairs of slippers as a kid in the 60's that had rubber animal heads on them. I had a few pairs with duck heads, and one with cat heads. Apart from the animals, I had a pair with clown heads. Everything wasn't licensed characters then.  

    As per most of the rest of Lori's gifts, the one she's sitting in front of here is pretty valuable these days. It's the Ding a Ling Bridge set by Topper Toys.

The Ding A Lings were a series of robot toys. You can watch a commercial for the Ding A Lings HERE. The huge structure they are running around on in the commercial makes me think of The Doozers from Fraggle Rock, and King Ding and his huge machine make me think of the Power Rangers Megazord.  The bridge set came with some Ding A Lings, but there were others that were available separately. Down in the bottom right corner, you'll see Lori's stuffed Lassie toy. My sister had one too, which I think she actually still has. Even more surprising, since Norma, Lori's mom, threw out or sold all of Lori's toys, Lori still has her Lassie toy too. Of course, Lori's Lassie is bigger than my sister's. because Lori had the best stuff.

  Here's another Christmas picture. In this one there's a Toss Across game on the right. Do they still make Toss Across? It was produced for decades, but I bet they don't make it any more. It was basically a bean bag version of Tic Tac Toe. These days it has pretty much been replaced by video games and 'corn hole'. There's a play pen with a doll. The doll looks like possibly an Ideal Snoozie Thumbelina or Snuggle Softee, or a Horsman doll. I can't find any doll online wearing that outfit though. It looks a lot like a Horsman Sofskin doll, but this doll looks like it has a soft, stuffed body. The Sofskin has a solid body. If anybody can recognize the doll or the boxes in the background and to the left of the play pen, let me know in a comment. **UPDATE** I don't know where my mind was, but Teresa F., a reader pointed out that the box in the background says 'knit'. I did some more looking, and it seems like it's probably a Kenner Knit-O-Matic automatic knitting machine.  

This picture from the same Christmas shows Lori with that doll, and her niece and nephew with something in a box, a helicopter, and an airplane. (Lori's sister is much older than she is, and her niece and nephew are closer to her age than her sister is.) The airplane looks like it might be remote controlled. The little rocking chair next to Lori's chair was really common back then too.

Speaking of Lori's older sister, here she is on her second Christmas in 1948. It looks like she was pretty spoiled too! Look at that haul! There's a doll with a stroller, a drum, an ironing board, a top, a wagon of blocks, a ball, another doll, a little red wagon, what looks like maybe Tinkertoys or Lincoln Logs, in the cannister right behind the smaller doll and the red wagon, a stuffed Panda bear, and a rocking horse. There are some other things I can't see well enough to recognize under the ironing board.   

Sister's second Christmas, 1948.

Here's her sister and a friend on Christmas 1955, There's a doll, a doll crib, and possibly some doll house furniture on the table in front of the doll. 

Christmas 1955.

This picture from January of 1956 shows her with what is probably that doll she got for Christmas.

January 1956.

There aren't any more Christmas pictures, but there are still plenty more pictures with toys. 

  This picture of Lori and her nephew features the same cowgirl outfit and toy German Shepherd I showed you in an earlier post.

That German Shephard looks pretty awesome.

  The doll in this birthday party picture looks like an Ideal doll, maybe a Belly Button Baby. (You can see my Belly Button Baby HERE and HERE.)

  Th next picture looks like Easter. The toy five year old Lori is holding looks like Mother Goose

  This picture is from another Easter. This time Lori has a cute pink poodle

Another Easter and a  bunny and...what is that cute thing? An elephant? (Those ears are pretty big.) 

  Here are Lori and her nephew on yet another Easter, with their bunnies.

Another Easter and another dog. (Or is that a lion? Hard to say really.) That's no surprise. These days Lori has EIGHT dogs! 

Her niece has some sort of plaid animal.

  Okay. The plaid animal is a bunny.

  It must be Lori's nephew's birthday. Charlie Brown is sitting behind them. Looks like the birthday presenst included a five piece truck set. Anybody recognize the toy right below the cake?

  That's it for today. Next time on The Toys of the Past we'll see some toys from my childhood pictures. There weren't many from Christmas, but there are pictures of my toys.