This is Susan, too …

 After carefully taking poor Susan apart and visiting the Doll Workshop in Kinson, it was cleanup time. I washed all her clothes in cool water and used some Vanish for some stain spots, before a cool rinse and spin in the machine. This items were handmade by Nana many years before her death in 2010 so I’m having to replace the elastic on her knitted knickers too. 

And Susan needed a bath too, but being low fire ceramic, and pretty porous, soap and water really isn’t on the cards for her. I found an older paintbrush (not hard for an artist of many years) and also one of my soft, ostrich feather dusters. Ostrich feathers pick up dust using static, then you can shake them off outside. The paint brush loosened a lot of dust. I did wonder who’s skin cells were in there! 

Inside her newly dusted head you can see the eye mechanism. The gentle duster was good to use around her eyes and teeth area. 

The teeth are glued onto a piece of felt, and were poorly attached. Someone got glue all over her teeth but I decided that to try and clean them up might damage the old plastic so I brushed them dry, and used UHU to fix them back behind her bright red lips. 

I think Susan’s face is in great condition, and her colouring very unusual, more like one of my chickens brown eggs than any of the white dolls I’ve seen online. Her eyes seem to be dark grey, not blue or brown. 

Now at  Elllie’s Doll Workshop I bought some new elastic and a new voice. I met another pot doll who was in the shop for a re-string too. I also got Mike’s help to open the old Mama voice and see if we could perhaps hear it again. You can see how I got on in this video on YouTube. I really would like to put her old voice back in! 

This is Susan

Susan is in her 60s and wears aged six-month clothes. She’s been staying with us for a few years. But this year we both became orphans when my mother died of cancer, in March. 

She belonged to my mother, but lived most of her life at my Nana’s house, where sometimes I might be able to reverently hold her. I remember her wearing a pink dress but she came to me some years ago, in this set hand knitted by Nana. Her old head injury was caused by a drop in her early years. It’s got a nice patina on it now. 

Poor Susan was simply made, a post war pot doll. That’s a low fire clay if you are wondering. All of her limbs were held together by elastic which being over 60 years old hadn’t been very elastic for some time, and poor Susan gained a few chips around her joints. One piece of elastic held in everything including making a platform for her voice box, which you can see in the photo below. 

The voice box didn’t work. But I remember Nana tipping her upside down for me when I was a little girl. In her 20s, Susan would still meow like a Cat. But now the little device only goes ‘clunk’. 

So I’m going to do right by Susan. I feel confident to do it now. But I’m heading to Ellie’s Doll Workshop just to check a couple of things, and buy a new voice box and some new elastic.