50s Doll Haul

I have collected 50s dolls for 22ish years now, but it was only recently that I learned to watch local listings for local finds - or perhaps it's just been that Facebook Marketplace has more recently provided a good place to buy and sell dolls.  Modern dolls come up more often as parents get rid of their kids' toys, but sometimes vintage dolls come up, too.

In any case, recently I picked up a whole under-bed plastic bin full of small 50s dolls, plus a couple of more modern 8-inch Madame Alexanders.  I bought it from a lady about my age (early 40s) who was selling her childhood dolls.  I don't know the story or why she had some 50s dolls, but I saw them and snapped them up.

The pictures were all group pictures and didn't do a great job of showing the dolls, but I knew there were some treasures in there, so I couldn't wait to get home and go through everything.  Sure enough, in that box I found a 1954 Muffie in a correct dress...

Two 1954 Vogue Ginny dolls, one in a 1955 dress and one in an unidentified ski outfit...

A 1954 or 1955 Madame Alexander straight legged walker Alexander-kins...

A couple of other 50s/60s off brand dolls...

A couple of Vogue Ginnette dolls...

Plus some Ginnette clothes, a couple of newer Madame Alexander dolls, and some other miscellaneous dolls and things.

All the dolls need to be cleaned up and restrung, and need some other small repairs here and there, but overall it's a great find!  I will take after pictures once I finish their glow ups.

Website Overhaul... Again

I've been working a lot on my visual branding lately, for this and other sites.  I wasn't happy with the website overhaul I did on this site a couple weeks ago, so yesterday I decided to work on it some more.  I knew better now what I wanted from the template, so I tried out a couple of different templates and designed a header image in Canva before finally settling on an overall appearance for my website.

I know this has been a rather ignored site for a long time, so I'm trying to revive it with a whole new look and some fresh posts.  I am planning to overhaul my restringing ebook as well to reflect my branding, and after that I'll look at getting back to work on the expanded restringing ebook and other tutorials I wanted to offer eventually.

I have some new posts coming soon, including an exciting thrift store find and a couple of glow ups!

Making Progress

I've mentioned a few times that I'm doing some updates to my blogs and websites, including this one.  I had been thinking about moving to another hosting company, but ended up deciding not to, at least for now.  But since the blog was very old and outdated, I needed to transfer it over from my hosting platform's FTP publishing, which Blogger no longer uses.

Well, I've finally finished the long, tedious task of transferring all of this blog's photos over from the original platform, which is a big deal, as it was a big job and also a big problem if you tried to view any of my older posts, as the images simply weren't loading.  That was a walk down memory lane for me, though, as I had to open up nearly every single one of my old posts.  I didn't read each one closely, but I read enough, and loaded enough old pictures, that it was quite the revelation for me.

It would have been a shame to lose all the old content, but in some ways, I wish I could have scrapped it all and started over.  Those posts were 13 and 14 years old, and I can totally see the difference: in my writing, in my doll repair projects, and especially in my pictures.  I take far better photographs now.  I was almost ashamed to repost some of those, they were so much beneath my current standards, but I wanted to be true to the original content.

I also found some inaccuracies.  For instance, I've since bought a book on Elise that does a better job of dating Elise ballerinas, and I think it's more accurate than the old information.

So while I'm glad to have all the old photos back up finally, there's still a lot to do.  I need to work more on the appearance of the website, plus I have new post ideas and updates and want to post better photos as well.  I can't forget too that I still need to figure out a new way to automate selling my ebook.

So, stay tuned for more changes in the coming weeks, and thank you for your continued patience!