Hattie is a tiny 8″ wonder of fine painting and determined survival. Against all odds, here she is, with her original body, china arms, and delicate flat-booted feet all intact. She has one miniscule rub on the back of her head but is otherwise a nearly perfect example of dolls made by Kister between 1850 and 1865.
As you can see, there are three small areas on her cloth body where rot has set in but everything is firmly attached and you can even read the penciled number “8” on both her back and her front torso.
As you can also see, I failed to follow the ONE rule for photographing a doll on the floor of my workroom, i.e., vacuum first! How many times must I remind myself that I do not have time to retouch thread scraps and popcorn crumbs!
If you look closely you might also see the third type of dirt on my rug – specks of sawdust. They’ve been leaking from her body, so I’ve set aside my normal inclination not to mess with things I know nothing about (e.g., china doll bodies) and enact the smallest repair I can think of which is also reversable. I chose to patch her with some antique linen, using cotton thread. And she now looks like this:
Thankfully, she hasn’t lost much of her stuffing and still has a wonderful little figure to dress. Which I’ll be getting to just as quickly as humanly possible.