Do you remember these dolls?
These are the French Fashion dolls which I didn’t get round to dressing last time. It takes about six months for an idea to get out of my head and into porcelain reality, usually. However, if I have a lot of ideas at once I tend to do the porcelain part, which is the idea, the sculpting, mould making pouring and firing for several items at once which leaves little time for dressing.
The idea I had was to do not just miniature dolls, which you could argue, quite reasonably, all dolls house dolls are anyway, but to do miniature versions of dolls throughout history to be dolls for the dolls in the dolls house. Doll’s dolls. The smaller ones of which might be dolls’ doll’s dolls.
Obviously.
They would, I thought, also be very good as stock for miniature toy shops of different eras, handy in nurseries across the years, nice as authentic inhabitants for repro houses and, most of all, maybe, just very good for doll collectors.
I had a phase of that well recognised disease, doll mania, when I just needed a doll of many different eras so badly I was quite prepared to hate museums that owned them. Imagine being a doll that had been made to be loved by a little girl, spending your dotage on a shelf in a museum merely being dusted.
As you can see only five of the French Fashion dolls made it through all the processes. This week I have dressed two in a million frills like the originals.
For a couple of days doll dressing is suspended. Tomorrow the family are coming for postponed Christmas, so today is cleaning windows and similar fun. I always go mad cleaning the house when the S&H and family are on the way. Someone said to to me once ‘Didn’t he live there? Doesn’t he know how clean the windows usually are?’
Good point which I have no time to make as I have an appointment with a bucket of water and a squeegee.
Stay tuned for a potted history of the nineteenth century Fashion doll industry and more.
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