 Camille, this is Susan from Learning Times, and we are going to get started with doll conservation. And I am going to, first of all, encourage everyone to say hello in the chat window over on the left. Let us know that you're here. And then I'm going to ask Elsa Huxley from Heritage Preservation to do the introductions. All right, thanks, Susan. Hello, everyone. I'm Elsa Huxley. Welcome back to all of you who have been participating in previous webinars like these. I recognize a couple of names there. We're so glad you're joining us again today. Heritage Preservation is moderating the Connecting to Collections online community in cooperation with the American Association for State and Local History and with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. The site is designed and produced by Learning Times. The goal of the online community is to help smaller museums, libraries, archives, and historical societies quickly locate reliable preservation resources and network with their colleagues. In developing the community, we have drawn on many resources that were developed for the Connecting to Collections Initiative, including the Community Collections Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar workshops and webinars. And we have links to all of these resources they're filed under the Topics menu on connecting to collections.org. We'll also be filing a recording of today's webinar there, and we encourage you to share that recording with your colleagues who you might find it useful. About once or twice a month, the Connecting to Collections online community features a particularly helpful preservation resource and hosts a webinar related to it. The resources we posted for today's webinar can be accessed by clicking this photo on our web page. Again, that's connecting to collections.org. So it is my pleasure to welcome our speakers today. Tom Brown is the Objects Conservator at the Minnesota Historical Society, and Tammy Schmitz is a doll restoration artist in private practice at Solynda's Doll Shop. And she is a former volunteer in the Objects Conservation Lab at the Society. So would you like to say a little bit about yourself? Tammy, would you like to go first? Sure. Thanks for the opportunity. I guess in the mid-1980s, I began an apprenticeship working on dolls with Elder Bertagor, who owned Solynda's Doll Shop before I did. I purchased that business from her in 1989, and I've been restoring dolls ever since, with a short break to go back to college. I was really privileged to work with Tom and also with Paul Storch, another conservator at Minnesota History Society. And I guess preserving dolls for our history, and as far as trying to help my clients preserve their memories, has been really a privilege. And I'm so excited to be here to help other people do the same thing. Great. Thank you. Tom? Yeah, I'm the Objects Conservator at the Minnesota Historical Society. I did a research into a training at the Winter Tour Museum at the University of Delaware. I've been at the Society for a little over 10 years. And I don't consider myself a doll conservation expert, but I've learned a lot from Tammy, and I hope she's learned something from me. And we have a fairly substantial doll collection at the Historical Society. And thanks to Tammy and others, we've been able to document it much better and preserve it as well as we can. But how many dolls do you have? I didn't ask you that before. Wow. Sorry, I should have asked before. I believe we have less than 1,000, but we do have quite a few. Wow. I think there was a three-ring binder full of, well, three-inch thick full of doll records. Yeah. All right, well, I'm bringing over some polls now. I'm hoping that our participants will start filling them in to give Tom and Tammy an idea of who we have on the event today and what would be useful for you to learn about. OK, it looks like a slim majority of our participants have more than $50 in their collection. And most from the early 20th century, although we have a substantial amount actually from 1850 to 1900, and a combination of mediums. And that's probably not surprising to you, is it? Right. OK, thank you. One of the things that's hardest with dolls is just there, anytime you have any artifact that's composite different material, it's more difficult to preserve. And with dolls, you can get five, six, seven different materials in there that all have different storage needs and different rates of deterioration. And it makes things really complicated with dolls. All right, I'm going to close these polls up and then bring over a PowerPoint presentation that we have that Tammy has made and is going to take us through. I just want to take this opportunity to encourage participants to type in your questions at any time as they occur to you. And we may not answer them right away. And in fact, you may not see them right away because the chat is moderated. But we will make sure that we get to every question. And sometimes it's good to sort of stop and reflect on whatever it is you're wondering about right at that time because it's too weighting. So here we go, Tammy. All right, well, thanks for the chance to show this. I'm going to head us back to the beginning here. Looks like we try to think about doll preservation from a lot of different angles. What a lot of people think about are what they may have seen someone try to do is they were taking care of a child's doll for someone it fell apart or the hair was rubbed off, that sort of thing. In a museum setting in particular, or when people are trying to do restoration that's really going to preserve the stability of the doll for the future, it's more important to go with a conservation approach. So the slides you'll see really take that angle for the most part. But in case you're wondering about the difference between them, preservation is always the goal and repairs, we do everything we can to make them reversible. So any product that we would use on the doll or any part of the doll, we would hopefully be able to undo should in the future we know a better conservation technique or if something changes in the way we need to store a doll or perhaps what we tried to do now that, just isn't holding as well as we had hoped. So thinking about how to alter those things for aesthetics is not the first idea that we have, whenever that's possible we can, but we're really trying to just stabilize things so they are preserved for the future. We aren't going to necessarily try to make a repair become invisible. You would be able to see most of these repairs if you got within about six feet from them, some not until about three feet. But we don't typically use airbrushing or things that would apply product over any area of a doll that isn't already damaged. So first thing to do would be to think about whether or not this is a job that you're comfortable doing yourself. And I'm also thinking about the number of dolls I found in the collection in those polls, thinking that it might be smart to do what the History Center had done, which was to do a survey of all the dolls and decide which kinds of problems people on staff could handle, other problems maybe conservators would need to be consulted in order to make sure that more advanced treatments could be done for those dolls. And it would give you a lot better idea of a timeline when things could be done or what kind of budget you might need. So if you were trying to decide if you needed a professional to help you, some tip-offs would be is if the doll has any warped parts. A lot of times, something will crack, like a hard plastic doll, a porcelain doll. Those don't tend to warp as much, but composition and plastic do warp quite a bit if they're left unrepaired for quite some time. If there's broken bisquer composition where there's a lot of loss, so it chips or pulls in it, you probably should seek a professional. If it has very delicate textiles or that they need wet cleaning, so they're beyond just dusting that sort of thing, probably should take a professional. And today we're not going to dress a lot about textiles just because it is very much a large area of study that is gonna be on the scope of the time that we have today. But typically any textile conservator could help you with doll clothing, just like any other clothing. What you see in the slide right now is a little composition doll, which would have been made in the late 1930s depending on the model. They made those for about 10 years, and every company was doing knock-offs for each other for them. And nice thing about this, if there's nothing else wrong with a doll, this type of doll really only needs to be re-strong. And realizing Susan right now maybe that restringing photo would be helpful, we can show you some tools that you could use to bring in elastic hoarding that would be strung through some hooks that you'll see in a doll when you get up close to them. I know we use these at the lab at the History Center and I use them at home quite a bit in my studio. Just trying to reach in the hard-to-reach areas, like down through a torso of a doll or up inside of a funny head, you can use any kind of hook that you can grab elastic with and pull it down and basically use just a long length of corded elastic that's available from some of the supply companies. You'll see in the resource list. And you tie square knots after you've moved the elastic through different hooks that you'll see in the arms and legs. So if anybody ever has a question about that, you could sure feel free to contact me or there's several resource books that are available on that list as well. That will show very nice diagrams. But these are the tools that I typically would use. The two hooks on the bottom are simply just to grab elastic. The tool on the top is actually called Hognose Pliers. And for dolls that are very large and have heavy cording that you're using elastic, you actually can get little iron rings that this tool would help clamp around rather than trying to create a square knot that could come undone. Thank you, Susan. I think we can go back to the PowerPoint now. All right. So the thing to think about in the survey is that every doll is very unique. It's helpful if you have any research done on the dolls. I know at the History Center, often we were able to gather information about the original owner, where the doll came from, another volunteer we had there for a while, Kale Fenwell was great at going through and determining what mediums each doll was made of and the level of damage each portion might have. What might be helpful is to make sure that you're seeking professional advice right away on the tough ones. And to just double-check that your conservation is planned out. So for each doll that you decide you're going to work on, it would be helpful to make a drawing, take photographs, sometimes both. I've even had a few dolls come in that require an x-ray to determine where something has dislodged inside of the doll. We had an old soldier doll that I fell out of in a porcelain head that was difficult to access. And I took it to the local veterinarian who took a picture of it. It was really helpful. You need to determine if the garments can be removed from the doll. That will make a big difference as to what sorts of restoration can be done. And then the last thing before you start working on anything would be to determine what mediums are being, is each doll made out of? Is it porcelain and leather, like the little doll you see on the slide right now? Is it composition all the way? Does it have some hard plastic, some cloth? Cloth gets used in many, many venues, as does leather in many of the older dolls. Tammy, I'm sorry, it's also time rubbed for a second. Just before we start talking about the specific dolls, we had one question that I thought might be a good one to address now from Janine. And that's when you do the survey and you discover that some, I'll just read her question, how best to deal with repairs that have changed the appearance, et cetera, of the doll as it was originally created? And if I'm understanding the question right, it's once you've done that survey and you realize something happened that was a repair done after the doll had been started to have been taken care of, what should you do? Should you just not touch it or? I'm gonna lean on Tom for that a little bit, Tom. I think it's gonna depend on the sort of medium and what was done to it, but Tom, can you address the more technical? Yeah, normally I would refer to that as a curatorial call. It really depends on how you want the doll to be interpreted and either leaving the later repairs in place or removing them could be appropriate. It just depends on how you're interpreting the doll. Generally speaking, you would assume that the earlier condition would be the one that you're trying to preserve the original condition, but a lot of it just depends on the history of the piece and who owned it and how it was used. We often talk about our collections at the Historical Society as telling a story and if that story involves a doll that was used for many years or many generations and was loved by lots of people and sustained damage as a result of that, well, that's all part of the story and if someone had it restored at one point, that's also part of the story. So it really just depends on, in the case of a museum or a historic site, how you want to interpret this and that's generally a decision that the curator would make. If it's in private hands, well, then it gets a little more complicated. We had a really good example of that type of doll in the lab. It was a doll that was an excellent, beautiful model of a porcelain doll from the late 1800s, but a lady had redone the doll to look like a local priest who was quite popular and unfortunately in doing so, she damaged the doll by creating darker eyebrows and doing some other things to the porcelain and it needed to preserve a story like Tom was saying and we also ascertained that if we would have tried to remove what she had done, we would have really damaged the doll. So sometimes that story is more important. So does that fully answer? I'm not sure, Jeanine, if you have a follow-up question, go ahead and feel free to type it in there. I think we can keep going. All right. Thank you. Sure. Well, if we start thinking about the different types of mediums of dolls, I thought I would just bring up some highlights of things to consider or to help you identify those mediums. Generally in dolls, we talk about bisque-headed dolls or porcelain when we have a glass type head or at least that kind of feeling to it. I know what Tom has a more technical word for that, I'm sure. The bisque for the novice would be that it's more matte. There isn't just shiny surface. So the doll you see in this photograph is what we consider bisque. She has what we call a shoulder plate that's going underneath her chin down onto the cloth body. And we would even call her a turned-head shoulder plate because her head is turned slightly to the side as she gazes at the audience. Typically these, you don't have to worry about the paint rubbing off. It has almost always been fired on. There's an occasional time when you'll see a doll that's actually got paint on top of bisque. And unfortunately, those do flake quite easily. So if you see any paint flaking on a doll you think is this, be really cautious. And you may want to seek an advice of a professional on that one. They aren't very common though, so I wouldn't worry too much about those. China, as you can see, has a shiny surface. And the same mold could be made as a bisque doll or a china-headed doll. We see that very frequently throughout history. Composition dolls, I was looking at the time period people were plugging into the pole. Looks like many of you probably have these dolls in your collection. Most of them were made in some form, anytime from the mid-1800s until about 1940, but the bulk of them, where their cute little baby-type dolls were made in the 20s to the 40s, a little bit of hangover into the 50s. They generally have a smooth surface unless they start cracking or chipping. And the way that you can tell if you have a composition doll, if you can either look inside of a limb against a torso, gently lift the head or if a chip is off, anywhere where you can see underneath the main paint, it will look a little like graham cracker crust or pressed wood. And whenever you have that type of doll, it does require different kinds of conservation methods because they're water soluble. So we would have to be super careful about how much they're exposed to. Plastics and vinyls, the ones that we would consider most could start as far back as celluloid dolls, which is an early plastic. How far back do you think both will go, Tom? Not sure. It could go back to the 1800s, 1870s even. I think we did see some dolls in our collection that were late 1800s, maybe up to 1920, that had heads made of celluloid and their limbs may have been celluloid as well. They are extremely fragile and we'll talk a little more about those in a moment. But the dolls we typically remember from our life periods would be the plastics and vinyls like Barbies or dolls that started being produced in the late 50s, early 60s. And those dolls can start to degrade where they get a little sticky. And what's actually happening with them is the plasticizer, which is a softening agent put in the mold can start to leach out and every company's formula varied. And so some things are just fine and other things, when you pick them up, they're kind of sticky and shiny. And that does require a certain kind of treatment and some prevention from touching other objects. Tammy, I'm sorry. Loretta had asked kind of about this, but she referred to as sweating. Is that probably what you're talking about? Quite likely that would be. Is it that era of dolls that we're discussing? She said in the 60s, but vinyl type. Yes, very much so. And there has been a little bit of literature that I've seen where it suggests that we want to clean that up gently and then not be handling those dolls a lot. And you probably should use gloves when you're using those. That isn't necessarily very good for human contact on a prolonged period. How would you clean them? We'll move into a slide with that a little later. There are a few products out there, and Tom, feel free to jump in. I'm not sure we have a cure-all that's a one-time thing. I think this is a process where repeatedly you're going in and caring for the doll. With plastics, it gets very complicated. But basically, celluloid would be one of the earliest forms of plastic. And it's basically cellulose that's been treated with nitric acid. And if that began to sweat, it actually will release acidic vapors and potentially liquid acid. That can be very caustic, obviously. With other plastics, especially polyvinyl chloride, usually when they start to weep, you're looking at some sort of plasticizer. And usually the plasticizers are hydrocarbons of one type or another. And often, they can be removed with an odorless mineral spirit or something like that. But it generally will get more into the plastics and some specific products that are formulated specifically by plastics engineers that can work very well, as long as you know what you're dealing with. If you applied one of those solutions to a plastic and it was a different one than you thought it was, it could make things worse, which is another reason to use a conservator if you have any question at all about what you're working with. Yeah, it's very difficult for somebody who's not a conservator to determine what type of vinyl or plastic has been made. Even as much as I've handled on my still, I'm extremely cautious, because I'm sometimes guessing if I can't get hold of a conservator. And I only do that on my own pieces. I wouldn't do that on a client's piece or a museum piece. OK. Someone is looking for a conservator, too. I'd just like to interject here that the AIC website is a great place. There's a tool there to find a conservator near you. It's www.conservation-us.org. And I'll post that link later, so people can have it. Great. OK, that would be a big help. Well, aside from thinking about what sorts of mediums each doll is made of, like the heads and the main bodies, sometimes bodies are made out of different things as well, as Tom indicated at the beginning of our discussion. So there are varieties, like leather. There could be bisque and china parts. And in any of these, we want to think about, I'm going to go back one slide here. I think I jumped a little quick. But you may want to consider the original construction, especially if you have a cloth or leather body that you might need to make a new part for. I recently had a leather arm come in that was so torn up that there was just no way to put it back together. And I was able to lay that out and create a pattern and create a new leather arm. It looks great, and it's working fine for the doll. Kind of watch before you do too much and make some drawings. If we're talking about preserving bisque or china, like the doll in the last slide, which you can think about are the areas of loss, or the holes that exist, cracks that exist. And generally, we want to apply some sort of adhesive first if the crack is big enough to get an adhesive in there. And then filling those loss areas with a filler that is appropriate for the medium type. We often use perma filler at the history center, and I use that in my private practice as well. It's much like a back lean powder when you're repairing a plaster wall. It feels like that, it looks like that, kind of acts like that, although it's a little bit lighter in weight. And then just sanding gently with some hand sanders. I generally just use my hand. I don't use any other tools because I can do a finer sanding motion. And trying different grits to make sure that it's getting to the point. It looks nice and smooth. When something is sanded and it's been adhesed, then we can paint the broken part to try to match surrounding areas. And the museum in Tom taught me that's called in painting. So we only paint the area that's broken. We try not to feather over the edges to create an invisible repair. Once the paint is dried, and generally we're using acrylic paint for that, we would put some kind of filler over it. And often that could be a varnish, could be Renaissance wax if you could use that to polish anything for the museum. Those work really great. Anything you wanna add on that Tom, before I move on? Yeah, often we could use a water-based acrylic of varnish or paint medium. That's becoming more common. And those work well over acrylic paint, which is what we're usually, we're often using for in painting. Great, thank you. If we're talking about leather, there's a lot of different conditions that can happen to leather. And I'm gonna turn these next couple of slides here over to Tom. You just let me know when you want me to switch, Tom. Yeah, leather is one of those really complicated materials in that its long-term preservation is largely determined by how it was manufactured. And after the skin, this is sort of gross, but after the skin comes off the animal, it goes through a series of baths in the leather tanning process or the leather tawing process in order to remove fats and fluids and hair from the animal. And that these baths are generally highly alkaline and highly acidic. And if it's not, if those chemicals aren't sufficiently removed from the leather before the final tanning process, it can have long-term detrimental effects to the leather. One of the most common ones is called red rot. And most people are familiar with that. In like a rare book library or a book that has an old leather binding and you'll see this red or brown powder that has kind of a acrid smell and it'll come off on your hands or your clothes. And once a leather has started down that road, there's really not a whole lot you can do about it. There are some binders you can brush on that'll kind of hold it together, but often it'll change the color or it'll cause shrinkage and hardening. And so anyway, generally with leather, you wanna take a less is more approach. One of the few things we do with leather on occasion, you'll see that it's been over lubricated. All leathers have an oil or a fat liquor added to them during the manufacturing process and that's just to facilitate the flexibility of the leather. It allows the protein fibers in the skin to move past each other smoothly. And if a leather is under lubricated, it gets brittle and it can crack. If it's over lubricated, it can do something called spewing where this fat actually comes out of the leather. And that's something we typically would remove with like a mineral spirits or alcohol. And as soon as you remove enough of it, it'll stop coming out. But a lot of those questions are really best left to a conservator because with leather, you can do a lot of permanent damage if you don't know what you're doing. Yeah, I would echo that too. And while the resource list we gave you is very excellent, you will notice occasionally in books that are written by people trying to restore dolls that you should go out and get some kind of leather wax or do different kinds of leather cleaning. I would not advise that based on what Thomas shared with me. If we've worked on dolls, I think his approach has been great. When we've worked on dolls, they turn out much better. Do you wanna add anything? Yeah, I always like to talk about feeding. A lot of people have heard that leather or wood, for example, needs to be fed. And it's almost this idea that it consumes oil or polish or something. And that's just not the case. And usually when something's treated in that manner, you get an excess of lubrication in there. And then it leads to this spewing that I was referring to before. And again, with leather, it's just generally a less is more approach. A good plan is often to support the leather because similar to textiles, leather is often not self-supporting. And what I worry about with leather is that over time it generally becomes more stiff. And if you can support the leather in its proper shape, that way if it does become stiff, at least it's in the proper orientation. If leather isn't properly supported, it can get contorted. And then if it gets fixed in that position, it's harder to get it back to how it should look. The slide right now shows what Tom's talking about. The doll that we were working on, that was starting to happen. And you can see the arm is twisted all funny. And it was getting quite stiff when you touched it. So we actually did go through. There were some holes existing in the doll and we were able to carefully insert some polyfill to try to boost it gently. And we just did that quite slowly until it was back to more natural shape. So it wouldn't cave in on itself. Yeah, and these are, this is a cleaner that we did use. They're not a cleaner, excuse me. This was a consultant to help one particular doll that Tom and Paul determined could be stabilized by painting it on. It did soak into the fibers and help support it. It was very helpful. We have a question from Linda. If the leather is cracked and dry, should it be moisturized or just left alone? Just, it should be left alone. A particular problem with leather is shrinkage. And that usually occurs after it's been aged quite a bit. And if it gets exposed to efficient moisture and it can even be in the form of vapor, not liquid, it will shrink and that shrinkage is permanent. So if you're seeing leather that's cracked, basically the damage has been done. You're generally not gonna be able to apply anything that's gonna like heal that leather. It's not living and the cracks are just evidence that it's deteriorated. And what you need to do at that point is just make sure it's properly supported so it's not continuing to flex, which is gonna lead to further cracking. And if you needed further work done, I would talk to a conservator to see what might be able to do with that leather to better preserve it. But again, less is more at that point. Some very simple repairs you can do to leather if it hasn't been damaged in the ways Tom's been describing. If you see a seam that has come undone, sometimes the stitching just gets old and breaks, but the doll's fine. You can use some archivally safe PVC free glue to glue those seams together gently. You can also use the fiberfill technique, especially if the leather starts leaking sawdust, which many of these dolls are typically stuffed with sawdust. So that would be a simple repair you might be able to do without a conservator. But beyond that, I think you're wise to consult one if you wanna work on a leather body. And it's PVA glue, not PVV. Thank you, thank you Tom. He's got the chemistry for a reason. Is it okay to move on here Tom? Yeah. Okay, great, thank you. Eyes are another interesting product in dolls that you have to think about each one individually or the type of eye. So in a bisque headed doll, typically they will have moving eyes or sleep eyes made out of hand blown glass. And what's really neat with these is if they're not damaged, you can just gently wipe them off with a q-tip just slightly moistened. If they are severely damaged or they're cracked, they're not moving, something like that, you're going to need a conservator for that sort of work. We did have this particular doll that you see in the slide. It had its eyes in the head, but when we went to look at it more closely, the eyeballs had actually cracked quite severely. So we were able to use some little bit of fiberfill and different adhesive to work the eyeball back into shape and then put it back onto a wire mechanism so it would sleep. But it was quite a process and it is something that you probably don't want to tackle before you would try other kinds of repairs. A really important feature with any doll that has moving eyes in particular is that you want to store them face down. And it doesn't matter what kind of medium that doll is, whether it's bisque or china, composition, plastic, there's often a weight inside of a doll's head that's pulling the eyes up and down based on whether the doll's lighting down or sitting up. That weight can damage the head if it were to lay it face up. And over time it could drop down and break a porcelain head or it could also begin to just put gravity on the face and the mechanism could be damaged or something else could happen to the structure of the doll. So a really important store those dolls face down, protect them with packing around the heads very carefully. And that is the best thing we can tell you about doll eyes. This is just the inside of a doll head. Every doll head has different things going on inside, but that particular doll head extra structures for support inside the head that we had to move before we could work on the eyes. Okay, we've talked briefly about eyes, but wigs are something that people often feel that they would like to work on. It's very important to determine what fiber is used first of all in the wig. You can see a variety of anything from human hair to mohair from a goat to synthetic plastic type wigs that started being manufactured in the 20th century. Once you know what type of fiber, you can determine what you could do to a wig or not. You can always dust a wig. And I really recommend you get micro tools that attach to your regular vacuum cleaner or if you have the privilege of some more elaborate vacuum equipment that museums often have, that's even better. Tom, what did we call the vacuum that we used at the History Center? A nilfisk, which is just a specific brand. They tend to be very expensive. They can go for over $1,000. But fortunately today there's a lot of household vacuums that are HEPA, high efficiency particle something. I forget what the last letter means. But if you get a certified HEPA vacuum, you can buy commercial versions of that for just a few hundred dollars. And we like to use those if there's any concern about what sort of particulates are on the doll. Some vacuums will suck up. It's possible that a doll could have arsenic on it, for example, in a museum context. Because in the 20s, a lot of museums treated their dolls with that or their collections with that to preserve them. An ordinary vacuum will pull up that arsenic and then it won't be captured by the filter. It'll actually be blowing it around the room where you could inhale it. But a HEPA vac will capture that. That's why we often use those. OK. Well, once you know the type of fiber, if it's human hair, you can treat it much like you would treat a human hair on us. If it's mole hair, you need to take a much more gentle approach. And before you would begin, you would want to check the wig to determine if any pests have gotten into them. The same moths that like to eat wool will often go in at the base of the roots of doll's hair and start chewing away, because it is a wall. And so if you just very gently pull the fibers apart, see if it looks like things have been chopped off at the base. Or if you see little dead bugs in there, we call them frass, you want to be careful not to brush or comb that wig, because it's going to quite likely to fall apart in your hands. If you don't see anything like that though, you can use a very gentle approach. There are good resources in the books to tell you how you might clean those wigs beyond dusting. They can be curled on little comb curlers very gently with just a mild amount of water. Sometimes you can even take them off and wash them. But I would reference you back to those books for a more detailed process on that. Synthetic wigs are really difficult to determine. There is a book in our resource list by Nick Hill. And although not every chemical process he offers in that book is something Tom and I would adhere to, he has a good section at describing how you determine synthetic fibers in wigs. And that will help you decide if a simple curl that would not hurt a doll, like a little fallen rubber curler would be all right, or if it would require heat, that maybe would be damaging to a doll and you should avoid. You could kind of determine more if that was something you could do. One other thing that happens with antique dolls is that often the crown of the porcelain head, or sometimes the composition head even, will be cut out so that eyes could be inserted. And to cover that hole up, the manufacturer would place a dome-shaped object on top of the hole, which you'll see in the slide to the bottom left. That's called a pate, P-A-T-E. And in some dolls it's plaster, like in this particular doll, which requires much more care in trying to remove it, or perhaps not even removing it. If the doll's fine, the eyes are OK, I would not recommend removing it. However, if you have to get inside to work on the doll for any kind of restoration, it does have to come off. Many pates are simply a cardboard version or sort of a fiberboard that are put over them. And replacement pates are available. They do make that doll have a nice round head and hold a wig better. In this particular doll, the wig was intact. It was the original wig from the 1800s. I think we determined this doll was roughly 1860. And the only thing wrong with the wig was the cloth holding all the hairs was beginning to deteriorate. So we supported that with some bridal veiling type material and just hand stitched periodically to hold it in place. And then we replaced the pate with just a few drops of white PVA free glue on the doll's head and put the wig on without gluing it. We just laid it on there for storage and for appearance in the display. That's the inside of the wig cap after restored it. It's hard to see the stitches, but basically we tried to follow the pattern around that existed. Moving on to composition dolls, you can see the similar slide that we had earlier to a little doll that has five part body. Sometimes composition will be used for bodies on antique disc heads and the bodies will have many more parts to them. They will have an upper arm, a lower arm separated by a ball, literally a wooden ball, with a wrist and a hand at the bottom. The legs are often the same way. But restringing diagrams are available in the resource books and as I showed you earlier, those tools can be quite helpful to know which pattern to use. Often what you're looking for is to try to get the head back on tight enough that a doll could hold a pose but not too tight so that you don't split the seams where the doll's head is molded or the torso is molded. And once you have a doll like this in your hands up close, it would be quite obvious where those areas were. I'm seeing a question in the chat about whether it mattered if dolls are stored face up or down if their eyes don't move. I think it would still be advisable to store them face down because many dolls who have eyes that don't move, those eyes are being held in place by lumps of plaster that have been molded across the top. And especially in Minnesota or other areas where climate changes frequently, we have seen where plaster dries out or the glue that might be a part of that whole process has dried out as well and those eyes can fall back in and break the head. So I'd say face down for pretty much any doll. Yeah, I can remember. Yeah, go ahead. Oh no, go ahead Tom. I had noticed another question about support for doll storage. And Tammy can probably touch on that more than I can but I've seen quite a few mounts that hold a doll up so they appear to be standing or sitting in a chair. Generally speaking, I think lying the doll down is going to bring it to its, so to speak, lowest energy state and that's something that's gonna allow the doll to be preserved the best. You just wanna make sure it's fully supported so none of the parts are under any particular amount of stress. Yep, I think that's great advice. Just wondering if I should stop for a moment and answer some of those chat questions or should I keep moving forward with the presentation? Maybe we could address the one about the eyes just before we go forward because I think we're going back to storage in a couple minutes, aren't we? I think we're progressing to a five-minute storage. So, Jasson, I hope I'm saying that right, I had a question about what you should use on the Q-tip when you're cleaning those eyes. Sure, weirdly enough, I have had conservators tell me that a little bit of saliva is very beneficial because of the enzymes in it. If you're using that on a glass eye, I don't think it's gonna hurt anything. Sometimes I make myself feel better knowing I'm not leaving germs on, I may re-wipe again with a distilled water or something just to feel like I took some of my germs off of there but it doesn't work quite well and the trick is though to make sure it's extremely just barely damp. We don't want it to be soaking wet or dripping because that could get inside the doll and either rust a mechanism, damage composition if it's in a composition doll or any other medium. It's just, we don't wanna get water inside the doll's head. Yeah. I thought the, yeah, go ahead, Tammy. No, that's okay, Tom, go ahead. About the only concern I would have with glass eyes in rare instances, I've seen this more commonly in beadwork and certain type of glass vessels. You can get something called glass disease which again is an artifact of improper manufacturing technique and it's usually where there's an excess of soda or sodium that's used in the manufacture of the glass and what you get is that sodium actually dissolving out of the glass and it'll, when you see that, most conservatives have only seen it rarely but when you see it, it looks like this powdery, this white powder on the surface of the glass and when it gets wet, it looks great because it's saturated but once it dries again, it'll go back to looking exactly the way it looked and actually every time you apply water to that, you're actually removing more sodium, you're removing more of the original material and again, that's something that you'd want a conservator to look at because it's a very difficult problem to address but that would be the only concern I would have with water or saliva. Very frequently, conservators use saliva or if you're squeamish with saliva, you could call it a mild enzymatic solution and it's one of those things that's about as close to a universal solvent as you're gonna get. It has water, it has enzymes in there and it'll break down an amazingly wide range of dirt and soil that you can find on things but like Tammy said, don't use too much and it wouldn't be a bad idea to clear it with some tap water or some distilled water. Right, one other thing that can happen with these particular dolls, I'm gonna go back to the little face here again. The eyes do sometimes crystallize based on whatever medium they made them out of for these composition dolls and some celluloid dolls, I've noticed it too. I believe the eyes may incorrect me from around time. Some of them might actually be a celluloid base that causes the cracking. Yeah, what happens with celluloid is that as it goes through its stages of deterioration and a lot of that is driven by exposure to light or exposure to heat and it'll go through this induction phase where it literally shatters and you'll see these cracks form like a broken automotive glass and as that deterioration continues, it'll actually crumble into little grains similar to sugar and there's really nothing you can do about that. Once that induction phase has started, it's just a slippery slope down. Yeah, it's a very difficult problem. There are some ways you can make a doll look more aesthetic with that but the things that are often in books they'll talk about dropping a drop of fine machine oil into the iron that kind of helps clear it up. I've seen that discolorize, I would not recommend that. A late treatment I've recently seen for dolls that don't have a lot of monetary value and the owners request something be done. I will use a surface treatment to try to shine up an eye but there is a risk to it and I've seen it happen where if you have to change anything, going back to that first principle, we said do only what can be undone. Sometimes that cannot be undone so I pretty much saved that for dolls where it's all right if we make that decision but I wouldn't do that on a museum doll. I'm gonna go back to this picture of the little composition doll laying with its face down that's its head there and you'll see a big chip in the back. This is a good place for us to kind of reiterate what we were saying earlier about the steps of conservation which really apply to whether it's porcelain, disc, plastic, composition, plastic being a little tougher to do things to but in composition we would adhere the edges of the chip that you see. We would fill it with a perma-fill, we would sand it, we would intain it with an acrylic paint and then seal it like Tom described earlier and that will help often not to stabilize a doll where you could restring it again and give it quite a bit of a better appearance. Many dolls, it doesn't take a lot with these compels to make them look nice again and so the owners can feel good about them if it's for a private person or that a museum might be able to display them. Kai, Wendy had asked when storing face down do you need to use a pad to take pressure off the facial features like the nose, that's a photograph maybe about that question. What's your recommendation about that? I'm going to pass that one on to Tom. My feeling would be that porcelain that's not too big of a problem but other kinds of dolls perhaps. I don't think it would be a bad idea. If it had eyelashes or something that would be a concern or other things that could catch on it but basically the better you can support that doll the more you can take stress off of anything that's prominent the nose or the chin or whatever the better you can support that the longer it will last. And if you have a larger collection it might be a while before you can do conservation on all of them. It might not be a bad idea to think about the things Tom just described while most dolls are waiting for work. I'm going to move on to talking about plastic unless you have another question there before I do that. Could we just address quickly two other questions that came up from before? The first one is about leather doll clothing. And Janine asked this question does this also apply to leather doll clothing which should be flexible? And I'm pretty sure she's talking about the slide that had the two arms the one that had already become sort of dry and the other one that you had infused. I'm sorry, I don't remember what it was. Okay. Tom, I'm not sure which should be done with leather clothing that was becoming harder. Is there anything to do there? The same applies to the doll itself being made of leather. And the problem is that as leather gets older it tends not to flex as well. And it has to do with it drying out and getting more brittle and then if it is flexed it cracks. With doll clothing obviously it's a particular problem because it has to go through quite a bit of stress to put on the doll or to remove from the doll. So I guess the approach I would take is to make a more or less final curatorial call about the clothing and determine is this doll just gonna wear this forever or should we have it off of the doll and keep the two together but just separate it. I don't know if that answers your question but it gets very complicated with clothing if you can't remove it or replace it onto the doll. And it seems like you're saying it depends on the doll itself and the collection and how it's... How you would interpret it, how you think you're gonna interpret it. And by interpretation I mean how you're gonna display it and talk to your visitors or whoever's gonna be looking at this doll. Tammy, can I just... One other question that Adrienne had was what was the liner fabric you used to support the wig? Sure, I just used a simple like Vital Vail where it's very porous and very flexible netting. You could also use a cotton netting if you never intend to wash that doll's wig because it could shrink if you did try to wash it but if you're just supporting it, never intend to do that. That would be acceptable as well. Just some very loose weaved fabric you could put in and it stitched through easily. You don't want to have to stitch through so hard that you start cracking the cap that's actually holding the hair. That's part of the reason for keeping something light and flexible in there. Okay, thank you. You bet. Well, moving on to plastic dolls. Plastic dolls have all sorts of interesting things about them and what you see in the photograph right now with the little cowgirl is a hard plastic doll from the late 40s called the Tony doll. She's very typical of dolls from that era in that they're smooth, they're much like composition and people will often confuse them with composition. The difference being is they generally, unless it's a bad formulation at the factory, they don't crack like a composition doll would. They're through and through plastic. They don't have paint on top of a substrate like composition does. The problem with these dolls tends to be that they can over time as their plastic changes get really spinky and they have a very unpleasant order to them so sometimes people will try to apply a product called Distinker. This is from the gentleman I mentioned earlier called Nick Hill. I don't know how Tom feels about that so feel free to weigh in on that, Tom. But I usually tell people you're just gonna have to accept that they're going to smell funny. I separate them from other dolls because I believe that odor could contaminate other dolls. I try to watch what sorts of clothing I'm putting on them because I don't know if something might leach onto the clothing in the future. Do you wanna add anything with that, Tom, before I move on? Well, I guess I would just say that in my graduate training in conservation I was told that we should rely on a variety of sources and some of those are gonna be experts and some of them are gonna be novices but people that often do have a lot of interesting input. Nick Hill is one person. I believe he's a plastic chemist by profession and in his retirement he became very interested in doll preservation and he was in a particularly good position to formulate these cleaning solutions and many of them have very targeted uses. And like I was saying before, if they were used in a manner that he didn't intend them to be used they could be very damaging. But if they're used the way he had intended them to be used, his chemicals, his solutions are something that you really can't get anywhere else. And I think as long as they're used appropriately some of these formulas which you see on the slide on the screen right now, they can be very useful. I see that, Jess has a question about what does this smell like? Just truthfully I have not been close to one for a while but I think I remember it being fairly ammonia smelling. It's not like a musty smell, it's not like it was in a smoker's home. It is a very distinct odor and often if you get a collection of them in all at once you just open the box and then you kinda wanna step back. I just said that happened recently from a client and then she had taken them home. That's why I can't whip one for you right now. Yeah, a lot of it, it depends on what type of plastic you're looking at and the smell, I believe, is most commonly from the early celluloid or cellulose-based plastics. At some point they realized that the nitric acid they used to manufacture that plastic was destabilizing in the long run and so they substituted nitric acid with acidic acid. That's what gives you that vinegar smell. Oh, thanks Tom, that's a good description. And there was also in later years they used butyric acid which is similar to acidic acid but butyric acid has the particularly unfortunate property that it's the smell of rancid butter or vomit and those can be incredibly unpleasant smelling. And it has to do with the deterioration of the plastic. Right, there's another product that Nick has put out that has been really useful if you have a softer vinyl doll like a Barbie where it's very pliable. What's very interesting about that is sometimes people have either when they were young put coloring on their dolls or there might have been a manufacturing problem where a color got on the doll. I've had some dolls for tech sales gravitate red onto the body from the cloth that they're made out of and in particular Barbie dolls and some of their dolls from the early vinyl era they had earrings that oxidize and created green oxidation into the plastic. So in order to get those things out the product that you see in the slide card removes it can sometimes be used with great caution. There are great directions that come with it but it isn't a quick fix. It's something that you need to plan on doing a little bit possibly every day for weeks and you may not see something change or you may have some really good results. I just had a little vinyl doll that had the gravitation of red textile onto it and it took about three weeks of pretty steady treatment but it did come out of that doll. It can change the texture of the plastic slightly so we're always using caution about when and where to use that. You don't want to repaint a hard plastic doll because that could damage it. I'm gonna leave that as the last thing here on plastic dolls. After hearing all this what I think Tom and I probably feel good about saying is whatever you can do to prevent dolls from being damaged just like other objects is really important. So minimizing its exposure to light, dust, dirt, trying to store it properly like we discussed with the face down and padding, watching the humidity doesn't get too dry or too extreme and that it's in some way where there's good air movement is very important to dolls. When you do these things dolls generally are pretty sturdy unless they start having breakdowns of plastics or that sort of deterioration. Pest can be prevented in a few different ways without hurting dolls. We don't recommend using moss balls. Sometimes in old storage situations people will recommend that but there are things you can do like using the sticky traps. I like feeder to be in the area of the dolls and not touching the dolls because it does have an oil and that will often repel the kinds of moss that would bother more hair waves on dolls or wool clothing. Do you want to add to this at all, Tom? No, I think you covered it pretty well. Okay. And then as far as storage items there are some great sources listed on our resource list that you can get archivally safe boxes and depending on the textiles on the doll or the medium the dolls meet them you'll want to consider what sorts of acid for tissue to use with them. Want to make sure you're storing them flat especially if you have garments who want to do kind of what Tom was describing with the leather arms. We want to try to avoid creasing in those garments and you can use some of the acid for tissue to gently push in and it doesn't have to be fully puffed out but we just want to make sure it's not creased while it's being stored. Yeah, and you can see, oops, go back to that previous slide. Sorry, you betcha. There you go. You can see where there are some materials particularly protein such as silk or wool or leather that actually are better preserved at a neutral pH or maybe even slightly acidic so generally you don't want to use buffered storage materials for those for cotton and linen things that are made of cellulose neutral or buffered it would be better and with mixed medium you just, you go with whatever's the most susceptible to deterioration so generally it's safer to use buffered for that. Okay, thank you. So I've listed on this last slide a few of the places that we use as resources. The resource list that I believe Elsa has for you or Susan has will have a much more extensive list of books that Tom had at the History Center he's advising on titles. I've got some things from my library as well as a list of online resource sites that you could gain most preservation supplies or conservation materials and types of boxes and tissue and that sort of thing. That's a list that I'll be posting on the webpage when we post the recording which will be tomorrow. Everybody can be able to download and copy it and get all these great resources you've been talking about. Great, I think that's the end of our PowerPoint and I'd be happy to answer any other questions or whatever you guys mean. There are a couple questions here about acid-free tissue without cushioning and we only have a couple minutes left if anybody else has any questions, please type them in now. Tom, would you like to? Let's see, with using crumpled acid-free tissue. Yeah, that's commonly a good support. What might be better would be polyfill you're familiar with the polyester batting that they sell for filling pillows or stuffed animals. You could make a pad out of some just plain cotton fabric you might wanna wash it to remove any sizing that are in it but if you had that clean and you made a support and filled it with the polyfill that would be probably one of the best. Sometimes acid-free tissue crumpled it can be somewhat abrasive depending on what the doll is made of and it also does tend to collapse with time whereas the polyfill will retain its springiness and its cushioning over a much longer period of time. See, there's a few more questions in the chat room. Would you like us to address those or would you prefer to do that offline? Yeah, I know we have one or two minutes left and I also just wanna draw everybody's attention. I pulled up an evaluation survey and it's not very long, it's just a couple questions but we read these really carefully and we use people's comments when we're planning other ones so we really are grateful when people take a couple minutes to fill those out. What let's see here, the seal-gut question? Yeah, Tom, I don't think I will know that one. Yeah, I'm not real familiar with seal-gut. I don't know if it's rigid or flexible but generally seal-gut, it's gonna be made of keratin just like skin so it would be very comfortable Okay. How about wooden dolls that have come up? Yeah, the Shonhad dolls are awesome wooden dolls. They're just beautifully sculpted and very sturdy. They were made in the United States in the early part of the 1900s. As far as, I'm wondering if the person's wondering about preserving them or destroying them or cleaning them. You would pretty much treat them like painted wood as far as objects, conservation goals. Very, very gentle work with them. You don't wanna use any harsh chemicals. I had one doll that I brought in for myself that was a Shonhad that was all moldy and I was able to gently just clean that off of the slightly damp cloth. I may have used a little bit of something I would wash a wooden cabinet with but it was a real gentle product and being it was my doll, I was willing to do that. Tom, would you recommend anything different on something like that? No, I think what you said was very good. Okay. They do have metal joints though so you definitely wanna keep a doll like that out of humanity because you could freeze up some joints. It ended up being like a tinman in the reservoir. Janine was asking what herbs you were speaking about when you were talking about string with cedar chips and herbs. There used to be some thought that bay leaf would be helpful in keeping nearby. I haven't personally tried that. I usually stick with the cedar and I have found that that's been really effective. I've had my collection though for over 30 years and I have not yet had a problem. I just replenish it occasionally and just keep it somewhere in my case and that's about all I do. You can just get the little balls or something from the closet part of the store when you're shopping in a department store. Yeah, a lot of those things have almost like a moth ball type property but a lot of them have a limited duration of effectiveness. I think we can try to answer these last two questions and I just wanna encourage everyone if you have questions that haven't been addressed here if you go to the discussion boards on the Connecting to Collections online community, I'll definitely see anything that you post there and I will work on getting answers and I'll post them publicly there where we put the webinar so that everybody can see them. Adrienne asked if the clothing stays on the doll for storage and the structure of your staple wouldn't it be better to upright any flat storage will compress the clothing and then are you balancing the needs of the clothing versus the needs of the eyes or? Do you wanna address that first time? Yeah, it probably depends on what type of clothing you're talking about. If it's a hoop dress or something like that, yes I would agree, you might wanna store it upright but I think that's something where you'd have to balance the stability of the doll versus the fragility of the clothing and try to make a judgment as to which one is more susceptible and then determine your storage according to that. And Ruth, I'm gonna type my, this is also, I'm gonna type my email address in here and ask you if you would email me a little bit more detail about your questions about the, I think you're asking about how what the fees might be for a conservator. I'll take your question and then I'll post it in a response from someone here on the discussion board on the websites that everybody can see that. And I think it is time for us to stop but this has been a really great and lively chat. I wanna thank especially Tammy and Tom for giving us your time and your expertise. I think the people have found it really helpful and I wanna thank everybody for participating and for writing in all these great questions that helped to guide the conversation here today. Our pleasure. There's my email address so feel free to reach out to me if anybody has any more questions through my email address or even preferably on the discussion board of the ConnectingToCollections.org webpage so that everybody can benefit from the conversation. And please take a minute to fill out the evaluation if you can. Tom and Tammy, thank you so much and I hope everybody has a great afternoon. Thank you.