One day in December, I came home from church to find this on my doorstep:
A baby in a basket, with a Band-Aid on her eye! The note with her was from a dad, and it said I’d spoken with his wife about fixing his daughter’s doll.
Indeed, the girl’s mom had phoned me earlier to ask if I could fix her “Jackie.” Her daughter had accidentally poked the doll’s eyes in, and now she thought she looked a little scary. You be the judge:
So I set about seeing what we had to work with here. First I had to remove the head to see how the eyes were set. I had already old my customer that I wasn’t sure I could do this repair, as I hadn’t set eyes in a vinyl head before. Have only set rocker eyes in antique (bisque) dolls, which is done with plaster. The customer was willing to let me give it a try, though. As I removed the head, this is what I found:
There was a cloth bag inside (see large photo above) with plastic pellets in it giving the doll some weight. I removed that and then removed the head from the neck piece. With a flashlight, I could see that the eyes were set into sturdy vinyl sockets. Now what to do? Cut them open and take out the eyes, fix and then re-pour plastic/vinyl/silicone?
After doing a little research, I discovered one technique used with dolls like this is to heat the eyes with a hair dryer, then pop them out from the front. Worth a try, and here is the result:
The eyes were set into a metal rim that rested inside a black plastic “socket.” The eyes were actually broken when the owner pushed them into the doll’s head. Tiny“rocker” notches sitting into holes in the black socket cup had been snapped off. No choice for me, then, but to re-set the eyes in a stationery position. No more rocking open and closed for her.
One eyes went back together all right, as it wasn’t as broken. But the other one would not stay *up* in position, and fell down into the socket cup. So I came up with the idea of propping it up with a fabric-and-epoxy composite:
I shredded this monk’s cloth to make my mixture, and then stuffed the socket cup and reassembled the eye. It worked!
Once I had both eyes fixed, after they dried a while I used the hair dryer to heat up the doll’s eye holes again. Then I popped them back into her head. After a little positioning (two attempts on one eye) Jackie was looking good! I put her pellet weights and stuffing back in, gave her a new string tether for her neck (the cloth body is tied on at the neck) and took stitches at her neck where I’d loosened the body. After washing and brightening her layette and outfit, she was ready to go home, not looking a bit scary. Mission accomplished!
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