Vintage Ladies Restoration (vinyl)
Posted: Fri May 04, 2012 6:59 pmI hope this is the right forum section for a thread like this. Last weekend I found these two lovely ladies in one of my local thrift stores:
They're high-heeled vintage fashion dolls, 20" tall, from either the 1950s or 60s. Only one of them had a price tag, and when I asked if they were both the same price, the lady said that they'd been on the shelf so long that they were 50% off. So I brought the pair of them home for <$16.
They were absolutely filthy, their vinyl stained (it looks like horrible bruises!), but I plan to restore them and make them gorgeous ladies once again. I wanted to make a thread to document the process.
So please meet Evie:
And Hazel:
The first thing to do was clean them. I carefully removed their clothes. The metal of the snaps had all corroded green, and the threads holding the snaps on just fell apart. I handwashed their clothes very thoroughly with woolite and oxyclean, but the fabric is still so delicate that I don't think I feel safe redressing them. I will use their original clothes to base patterns on to make replicas and keep the original clothes somewhere safe.
The ladies themselves got scrubbed down with hot water and Dawn and an old toothbrush. They both have very bad stains from their clothes. Evie's red capris made a mess of her legs, and the black trim on Hazel's dress left marks on her back. Hazel was also strangely yellowed/pale under her bra, and her thighs were strangely discolored too. Her petticoat was almost stuck to her...I think it might be migrated plasticizer from her vinyl. They both have green ear, though neither was wearing earrings when I purchased them.
Even after scrubbing, their eyes were still very pale. I though maybe the color was just permanently faded, but I read online somewhere that you could restore clouded sleep eyes by blowing on them with a hot hair dryer for 5-10 minutes. I tried it, and to my great surprise it worked! This pic shows Hazel after being treated to the hair dryer, and Evie who has only had the toothbrush scrubbing:
Also you might notice that Evie's eyebrows are different! Originally she had heavier, uneven brows, but while I was cleaning them, those came off and she had neatly painted brows exactly like Hazel's underneath.
Evie eyes have gotten the hair dryer treatment as well, and now the ladies are sunning themselves on my back porch with Oxy cream on their stains. It might be a while until the next update, because I don't know how long that stain removal is going to take.
Anyway, I hope you like my new girls! They're going to be a lot of work, but I think they will be beautiful.
They're high-heeled vintage fashion dolls, 20" tall, from either the 1950s or 60s. Only one of them had a price tag, and when I asked if they were both the same price, the lady said that they'd been on the shelf so long that they were 50% off. So I brought the pair of them home for <$16.
They were absolutely filthy, their vinyl stained (it looks like horrible bruises!), but I plan to restore them and make them gorgeous ladies once again. I wanted to make a thread to document the process.
So please meet Evie:
And Hazel:
The first thing to do was clean them. I carefully removed their clothes. The metal of the snaps had all corroded green, and the threads holding the snaps on just fell apart. I handwashed their clothes very thoroughly with woolite and oxyclean, but the fabric is still so delicate that I don't think I feel safe redressing them. I will use their original clothes to base patterns on to make replicas and keep the original clothes somewhere safe.
The ladies themselves got scrubbed down with hot water and Dawn and an old toothbrush. They both have very bad stains from their clothes. Evie's red capris made a mess of her legs, and the black trim on Hazel's dress left marks on her back. Hazel was also strangely yellowed/pale under her bra, and her thighs were strangely discolored too. Her petticoat was almost stuck to her...I think it might be migrated plasticizer from her vinyl. They both have green ear, though neither was wearing earrings when I purchased them.
Even after scrubbing, their eyes were still very pale. I though maybe the color was just permanently faded, but I read online somewhere that you could restore clouded sleep eyes by blowing on them with a hot hair dryer for 5-10 minutes. I tried it, and to my great surprise it worked! This pic shows Hazel after being treated to the hair dryer, and Evie who has only had the toothbrush scrubbing:
Also you might notice that Evie's eyebrows are different! Originally she had heavier, uneven brows, but while I was cleaning them, those came off and she had neatly painted brows exactly like Hazel's underneath.
Evie eyes have gotten the hair dryer treatment as well, and now the ladies are sunning themselves on my back porch with Oxy cream on their stains. It might be a while until the next update, because I don't know how long that stain removal is going to take.
Anyway, I hope you like my new girls! They're going to be a lot of work, but I think they will be beautiful.