Vintage Madame Alexander Baby Victoria Rehab...Part 2 and FINISHED!

Do you all remember this dirty little soul from my last post?  I told you I was going to rehab her, and I did!

I used my trusty hemostat to pull out all of the stuffing.

I just knew that there was a cute little baby under all those years of dirt and grime.

Perhaps if you zoom in on this picture, you will see that her cloth body looks 100 times better!  This is after I soaked her overnight in a bucket of hot water with OxyClean powder, and then hung her body out on the laundry line to dry in the hot sun over 4th of July.  I also scrubbed her vinyl with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser.

I managed to get all that stuffing back into her body!  Because I had to cut the old zip tie from her neck, I replaced it with cotton cording which looks very similar to what American Girl uses/used for their dolls.

I buy it at JoAnn's, in the jewelry making department.

Here she is, ready to be dressed, with a nice, clean body.

Her dress is tagged and original.  Her bloomer panties are vintage replacements.  I soaked them both in OxyClean as well, and they came out looking brand new.  OxyClean should really give me something for promoting their product.  I use it and rave about it all the time!

And the best part about this entire make-over...I was actually able to repair her cry box!  I will explain how I did it in my next post.  I tried to upload a video, but I can't get it to work right now.  My super-techie adult son is coming over this weekend, so hopefully he can walk his old mother through how to upload a video.  Until then, have a great Saturday!

Vintage Madame Alexander Victoria Baby Doll Rehab...part 1

I have SO many dolls I need to fix up and sell.  Seriously.  I think they multiply when I'm not looking!  I have been ignoring them, because it just gets too overwhelming sometimes to think about all I have to do to get them ready to sell.  There's just never enough time!  But I recently decided to try and rehab one doll per day...that should be do-able, right?  Yesterday, I cleaned up Toodles and sewed her an outfit.  Today, this Madame Alexander "Victoria" baby doll became the recipient of my clean up efforts:

I didn't think to take a picture until I had yanked out all of her stuffing.  The reason for removing all the stuffing was so that I could soak her extremely filthy cloth body in a hot water/Oxy Clean bath.  This has worked well for me in the past, so I'm hoping it does it's magic again.  I had to use the hemostat to pull the stuffing from the narrow cloth arms.

Here you can see her filthy body a little better.  I will "fluff" the cotton stuffing by pulling it apart before re-stuffing the doll.

This baby has such a sweet face.  I hope I don't fall in love with her and want to keep her.  I seem to have that problem with all of these little waifs that I rehab!

She also had a cry box that no longer works.  If I can figure out how to get it open (it is completely glued shut), then I will try to fix it.  I have recently figured out a way to make these cry boxes work again, and I would love to fix this one as well!  But like I said, it is completely sealed shut.  The others I've fixed were easy to pry open.  This one...not so much.  So we'll see.  If I can't fix it, I won't put it back in the body.

Okay, so this part one to the story.  Victoria's body is soaking overnight, and I hope to see it all clean (or at least extremely improved) by tomorrow morning.  Then I will hang her body out to dry on the laundry line, where hopefully the sun will brighten it even more.  I probably won't get around to re-stuffing it until tomorrow evening, since we will be hanging out with the kids and grandkids most of the day for the 4th of July celebrations.  So part two might not come until Friday.  But bear with me...I'll do my best to finish this story!