Some dolls for Odessa's house

Cleopatra, Rudolph Valentino as 'The Sheik', and an Indian Maharajah are having drinks on the terrace.

Admiring the view from the balcony .... 

while a maid stands outside the main door below ....

These ladies and gentlemen would need to bend their heads to pass through the doors, especially with their elaborate turbans. I hope they can stand up inside! However, I thought the bright colours of their costumes would go well with the decoration of Odessa's house.
Cleopatra and her companions are Rexard dolls; the others are souvenir dolls from Turkey (the couple) and Egypt (the woman in the green dress).

I will see how they like the inside of the house - perhaps they are just staying here briefly while they shoot some scenes from a film ... or perhaps they will make a longer stay here.

And here's the furniture!

I could see from the auction listing that the book house I showed in my last post was something special - I could also see that most of the furniture had come from the Sydney toy shop Walther & Stevenson!

There's a pink Walther & Stevenson bedroom set:

and a blue Walther & Stevenson bedroom set:

(I'm not sure if the blue bed is from Walther & Stevenson - I'm pretty sure the blue dressing table isn't.)

Both sets have been painted twice. Walther & Stevenson sold them as natural plywood, which could be painted by the buyer, or left plain. The pieces which I bought with the Toyworks dolls house were left plain. These have apricot paint under the pink (the same pink as the house has been painted!), and pale mint green under the blue.

There's also a blue Walther & Stevenson kitchen set:

The two layers of paint on these pieces meant that the doors wouldn't open. I used a Stanley knife (box cutter) to work through the paint in the cracks, and managed to get one of the cupboard doors on the sink open, and both wardrobes.

Guess what I found in the pink wardrobe?!

Clothes! which had been painted in!!!

Here they are:

A wee dress, a top for a baby, a table cloth, a knitted jumper, and a lace skirt. Four dolls came with the house, two little girls and two babies. The dress and top fit two of the dolls perfectly:

The other little girl does fit into the jumper, but as she has no legs, she is more comfortable in the pram:

The living room furniture doesn't come from Walther & Stevenson. There are two homemade matchbox chairs, which need recovering:

And I forgot to photograph a homemade table, made from the screw-on lids of two jars with a wooden cotton reel between them (all painted pink, naturally).

I'm not sure about the fireplace - it is wooden, but professionally painted, unlike most of pieces sold by Walther & Stevenson:

The other furniture looks more recent. It is painted with European folk designs. There's another bed, with some chairs and a bench:

And a grandfather clock, table and bench:

The bed is signed underneath:

It looks like 'A. Kody'. (The taped name is presumably a former owner of the piece?)
I think I've seen other furniture on Australian ebay, with similar painted designs and also signed with this name. Does anyone know more about it, or have any?

Sherry and Pepper have a party

Pepper and Sherry are having a party. Things look a bit strained, though, and Sunny and Mandy don't seem very comfortable ..... Are Pepper and Sherry arguing?

Or are they just talking to some of the girls in the other rooms?

Lacey is feeling a bit off colour, and is staying in bed.

Melly and Sandy have come to keep her company, but Sandy's idea of keeping her company was to play the radio very loudly. Melly turns it down, and tells Sandy off for being selfish and not thinking of Lacey ...

Heather and Libby are in the kitchen finding some food ... Perhaps some drinks would help make the party livelier, too?

Michaela is in the bathroom, despairing at the state of her hair.

"Why don't you get it cut short, like mine?" asks Susie. "It will be much easier to take care of then."


The girls are Dolly Darlings by Palitoy. Sunny and Susie have their original names, but who would want to be called Lounge Suit or Powder Puff?

 

I have just discovered that Dolly Darlings had their own playrooms - a bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen. However, I don't have them - the rooms my Dolly Darlings live in are by Blue-Box.

They don't have a date on them, as some Blue-box dolls houses do. Many of the furnishings, and the colours, look quite retro ...

But that looks like a laptop computer in the bedroom, so they must be considerably later than the 1970s!

Never mind, I think the rooms suit the 1960s Dolly Darlings very well - who knows what they make of the laptop! I added some extra furniture - Fisher Price bunk beds and kitchen table and chairs, Linda from Hong Kong lounge chairs.

The buttons you can see at the front of each room turn on battery-powered lights and sounds in each room. Sometime I'll take videos of them, so you can get the full effect!

PS. I have turned on the Comment Verification again. I got tired of getting comments from spammers who said things like, "Great post, and by the way have you seen my website, house painting in Missouri?" I hope it won't be too hard for you to work out those pesky numbers - why are they such poor images here, when some other websites have quite clear verification numbers?!

Hey! It was Easter!

Hope you got some eggs this Easter!

A belated happy Easter, dear blogging friends! ☺ A Happy Passover to my Jewish friends! ☺ And a Happy Easter to come to my Greek and Russian friends! ☺ Best wishes to all of you! ♡

Introducing Miss Birdie Fethalite

Miss Birdie Fethalite is an Australian doll, who was born in the 1940s in Sydney. She has an extensive wardrobe, consisting of two summer frocks:



two winter coats:



a siren suit:



and a party dress:


From the front, Birdie looks nicely rounded. Her back view, however, shows that she is flat, and even slightly hollowed out:


From the back, you can see how her clothes clip on around her waist. Sadly, she has had an accident some time in which she lost most of her right arm.

Birdie is not as fortunate in regards to housing as she is with her wardrobe. I'm sure she would love to live in the Marquis kitchen and other rooms in that set. As I didn't win it, however, I have posed her here in front of Marquis kitchen furnishings set up in front of the photo of the inside of the box on my computer screen. It looks just the right size for her, and the walls even match one of her dresses - but as she can't live in front of the computer all the time, I will have to find another home for her!

Perhaps she could live with the Cacos, and they could all share the curling tongs:


This little doll is marked with the Fethalite brand name and symbol:


The number 204/1 appears to be the product number. All the pieces of clothing are also marked: the frocks are 204/2, the long dress is 204/3, the coats are 204/5, and the siren suit is 204/6. She must have had another outfit too, as 204/4 is missing from this set.

Fethalite plastic products were made by Pierwood Plastics (Piercy & Ashwood) in Chatswood, Sydney. qilich has a Fethalite catalogue from 1949, which shows miniature kitchen and bathroom sets, and a couple of dolls, but not this one. Her hairstyle and the siren suit definitely date her to the 1940s, so she was probably made before 1949. I wonder if she was always alone, or whether a family of dolls was produced?

Update: Ysé6 and Roberta have told me on flickr that the same doll was also made by the Selcol company in England. A Selcol doll is listed on ebay at the moment - here she is with her outfits and her right arm:



The clothes are almost the same as Miss Fethalite's, although the decoration on the long dress is different. The piece missing from my set is probably the little gym tunic, here in yellow next to the yellow frock.

Thanks, Ysé6 and Roberta - though I'm sorry to realise that all Australian-made plastic dolls house miniatures were made using moulds from US or British companies! Seems we did OK on production (at least while tariffs were in place), but didn't produce original designs.

Update 2: Sally also has a Selcol doll set: see her blog stitchywoowoo. It's clear from Sally's pictures that the frock is a pinafore dress - Miss Birdie's frock doesn't have straps, so that's another difference between the English and Australian clothes.

And Marcie Tubbs has very kindly emailed to say that in her book Dollhouse and Miniature Dolls 1840-1990 (which I have!), she pictures both a 'Peggy' doll made in the US by Ideal in the mid 1950s, and a Lido doll dress set, also made in the US. She also received a photo from a reader of a boxed set of 'Peggy's Magic Snap-On Wardrobe', made by Bell Industries (in the UK, I assume).
The dolls and clothing sets made by Selcol, Fethalite, Ideal, Lido and Bell, in the UK, US and Australia, are almost identical. As Marcie says, this doll really travelled! I wonder where she started?
The mid 1950s Ideal catalogue which Marcie has describes her wardrobe as consisting of 2 bathing suits, pajamas, 2 over-coats, hat, 2 school dresses and party dress. The Lido set identifies the bathing suit as a play jumper.
Sally describes the 'school dress' as a pinafore dress (the Australian one isn't, as it doesn't have straps). I was seeing the clothes through the lens of 1940s British novels, so the bathing suit / play jumper looks like a gym slip to me, and the pajamas look like a siren suit. If Peggy was originally made in the UK, the siren suit would make sense (and as I suggested, it goes with her 1940s hairstyle). If she was first made in the US, then they probably were pyjamas originally.

So, more questions: where was she first made? when? and how did she come to be made or sold by 5 companies in 3 continents? We may be able to answer some of them if we're lucky enough to find dated catalogues showing the Selcol and Bell dolls one day.

Thanks, Marcie and Sally, for sharing your dolls!

My 1966 Scrap Album: Fashion Dolls etc

At my mother's house, in the bedroom I slept in when I was a teenager, I still have a cupboard with some of my things in it. Among them are several scrap books, and I realise I almost have enough scrap books to make a collection!



I have one my mother's mother made for me when I was very little - it has lots of pictures with texture, like embossed cards, cards with tinsel on them, or small pictures stuck on larger ones, so you can run your finger over them and feel them as well as see them.


I also have one I made myself when I was a bit older; one my father's mother's stepmother made (the 1905 Watson's Bay card which says The Pleasures of the Season attend thee was scanned from that); and as a family we have one of my mother's father's mother's scrap albums, with press cuttings (!!) and mementos of her time as a school student, a university student, and on the world tour where she met my great-grandfather.



The scrap book that the pictures I've scanned here come from, was made for me by my mother in 1966. We had been to England to visit her family, and shortly before we were due to leave, my mother fell down some steps in her sister's house (called Rosemary Cottage), holding my baby sister, and broke a toe.



So, my father flew back to Australia with my sister and me, while my mother travelled by ship, so her toe could heal in peace. During that voyage, Mum made this scrap book from an old Sydney telephone directory. (How did she come to have that, on a voyage back from England to Australia? And enough magazines to cut pictures out of? I don't know.)



The magazines she used were from 1964 and 1965. I don't collect fashion dolls myself - in fact, my sister and I only had one, for a short time, who stood in the middle of a record and twirled around. But I realised that there are quite a lot of photos of fashion dolls, and those of you who collect them might be interested to see them. Most likely the photos accompanied patterns for the clothes which the dolls are modelling.



I've also scanned a few other photos of kitchen utensils etc, to remind us of what was seen as desirable in those years!



Some of these I have seen in miniature (this goblet, for example) - but perhaps not as much stainless steel as a 1960s doll would like!


I have to admit too that I am not sure who all these dolls are. I think most are Barbie, but who are the others?