STOP with the Beanie Babies!

I have overdosed on eBay listings of stuffed animals:
93% of them LOOK THE SAME!!!

Every single Beanie Baby has the exact same expression, and none of them are worth more than $1.99 (if that)--they are just another '90s bubble. Even the value of the Princess beanie has not benefited from Diana's death––because the Ty Corporation made 5 billion of them or something.
[Hm. Could that co. have taken their name from Blade Runner's Tyrell Corporation, which makes replicants???]

Misfit Toys 

Instead, here is my basket of mended old toys, in the process of getting outfits.
Aren't the pink glass eyes on the panda great? Along with the scraps of fabric, they came in the mail from Art Sparker! [her Etsy]
Panda's old eyes couldn't be restored, but now it has these new antique ones.
Panda is very happy and says the eyes provide night vision!

The faded blue terrier will have a matchingly faded ribbon to wear when it goes to auction tomorrow to raise money for terrier rescue.
(Putting new fabrics next to old fur often doesn't look so good.)

Marz picked up the basket and started to sing,
"We're on the island of misfit toys..." as if she were James Hetfield of Metallica.

Stuffed Animals, Here & There: Orange Crate Creature

EBay is showing me endless stuffed animals designed to be as sweet and boring as marshmallows. But once in a while comes one that perks up your ears––sometimes simply because it's from another country.

Russian toys, for instance.
I just discovered Cheburashka---an animal of no known species. His name means tumbled or toppled, because he got into a crate of oranges in his unnamed home country, ate a bunch, fell asleep, and when a workman opened the crate up in Moscow, the little animal was so startled he tumbled to the floor.

This is a drawing of Cheburashka [Wikipeida] from the original book (1966):

There are many, many toy and media versions of Cheburashka, and he is often depicted with oranges:

I finally realized I did know this character---Russia used a  marshmallow-ified bear-like version as an Olympic mascot.

Scrubbed, Fluffed, & Stuffed

Not really "scrubbed"––gently swished in a sinkful of sudsy cold water––but definitely fluffed with a vacuuming and stuffed with new stuff, and the formerly rather squashed bear I posted a couple days ago is feeling like a whole new bear:

Next Up... [Before and After Button-Eyed Bear]

Most of the stuffed animals I'm refreshing are guests--they intend to move along after their treatments, but I think this Bear may be here to stay.

I was photographing a couple things for eBay---that's why there's a measuring tape on the chair.  This Bear just came from eBay, but its seller hadn't taken very thorough photographs for its listing, so it wanted an official BEFORE photo:

Bear is in good shape--will just be getting a bath and new stuffing (because the old stuff is a breeding ground of wee microscopic beasties).

"AFTER" UPDATE (2 days later):

My eBay

I spent ALL afternoon listing 2 things on eBay. If I keep doing this, it won't take me quite as long in the future, but I had to read all of the instructions and everything. 
Have you done it? 
Turns out it's pretty easy--[a useful article for beginners]:
set up an eBay and PayPal accounts, and then click on "sell" to upload photos & write description--that's about it.

Then I futzed forever getting photos, doing research (!) and writing descriptions--a lot like creating a blog post, in fact. 
That won't get any faster, because I like doing it--both the visuals and the research. So much fascinating cultural history is tied up in things. I've never paid much attention before, generally being more into words.

eBay cracks me up though: you don't have to do ANY research, and some don't.
The description of the lot of Dream Pets and a vintage bear (I wanted the bear) wrote exactly this:

"this stuff looks pretty old to me"

And photos can be pretty thin on the ground too: a couple of beat-up bears were posed lying down on a piece of torn cardboard, and there was only that 1 photo.

I used up 11 of 12 allotted photos per list for this Spanish molded-felt doll. > > >

She was made by Barcelona doll-maker Roldan, who made dolls as souvenirs in the 1950–'60s.
 (There's a tag on her dress and I looked it up.)

She's dressed in the traditional costume of Segovia. (I looked that up too.)

I'd bought her at Goodwill for a dollar, intending to re-use the fabric of her dress for my toys, 
but when I looked closer, the skill and craft was too impressive to cut up. 

The tiny jewelry especially is exquisite: 
little faux-pearls set in gold cups for earrings, gold-wire necklace, beads-and-wire rosary. 
She's very expressive, as you can see.

____________________________
I also listed one of the Dream Pets, from 1977.

I called it a "holiday reindeer fawn" >
because, you know, it's the holidays, right?

It's only $3.99 (plus shipping, which is sadly almost as much), 
so if it sells––
will it? I have no idea––
I will make... 
um, I guess a couple dollars, after eBay's cut and the dollar I had to spend buying it when I didn't want it.

Oh, the intrigue...! 

But it's fun,
considering there was nothing else I needed to be doing today,
if you don't count the Thanksgiving Day dishes soaking in the sink.

Which I am going to do NOW---or else there will be no room to bathe the new Bear!

"My children..."; Mourning Art

I am overdue to post some mourning art for mass killings, as I'd intended to do. I can't keep up--I'd need a whole other blog.

I actually hadn't seen the news until I got here to the coffee shop and saw the front page in the newspaper box.
You know. The mosque bombing in Egypt [in the NYT].

"On Saturday, Egypt’s top prosecutor, Nabil Sadek, said in a statement that the death toll had risen and included at least 27 children.
"Mayna Nasser, 40, who was shot twice in the shoulder, drifted in and out of consciousness as he was rushed to a hospital. 'My children were there; my children were there,' he said, according to Samy, a volunteer emergency worker..."

So I went looking for some mourning embroidery, and found instead this Victorian-era painting of a little girl, Effie Elmer, with her doll and pet lamb and cat. 
She was dead when it was painted--it's a memorial, painted by her father, Edwin Romanzo Elmer, c. 1875. That's him and Effie's mother wearing mourning black, in the background. They're in Massachusetts.

 

ABOVE: "Mourning Picture" by Edwin Elmer, ca. 1875,  at Smith College Museum of Art

Pointy Points

The Stuffed Needy Animal Repair Project is all fun and games until someone gets tetanus.

I stopped to remember if I'd had a shot recently, when I scratched myself on a metal wire removing some old stuffing. And look at these prongs holding panda's googly eyes on:

I've removed these cloudy eyes to see if I can do cataract surgery on them, and also so I can soak panda overnite in borax & dishsoap--one of the recommendations for getting the yellow out. 
I'm dubious that anything will whiten these old polyesters, but I'm going to try everything of low-toxicity.

Panda has bravely volunteered to be the test bear for this.
If I can't clear its eyes, I'd like to replace them with the same kind, but, as you may not be surprised to hear, I cannot find any of these toy pronged eyes for sale.

Dream Boat

I went Black Friday sale shopping, on purpose––I think for the first time: it was a half-off day at Goodwill. 
I got a sweater for Red Bear for 50¢. I was going to cover over "NAVY", but she likes it, promptly declaring she is captain of the ship (the sieve-like basket).

Currently, the other toys on the boat are guests, here only temporarily, having come in an eBay lot with Macy bear. Most of them are Dream Pets (by Dakin) from the 1960s, made in Japan of velveteen, stuffed tight with sawdust.

The Dream Pets don't need any restoration, and they're too flighty for me (I prefer a more ponderous bear): 
my plan is to sell them individually on eBay, when I get up to speed with that, and before I get too attached to them. Because they are intriguing mid-century specimens, from the era of Star Trek, which had a lot of Dream Petting going on...

Terrier, Transformed (now with patterns)

BEFORE (I only bought this stuffed dog because it was being sold online with a just-as-beat-up old bear I wanted.)

Since it's mine now, and since it is some sort of terrier, I went ahead and gave it the spa treatment (bath in sink + vacuum fluffing + new stuffing). Turns out, it was once a bright blue.
The ribbon stank, and it shredded I washed it, so out it went.  I sewed the ears to provide definition (they were like one mountain range). 

AFTER: With its new eyes, it spies another terrier:

The idea is, both of these terriers ^ will go to the next online auction to raise money for Terrier Rescue (live terriers, that is).

Dating the Dog

This dog was handmade--you can tell by the hand-stitching inside, and there's no label either. Its original eyes were distinctly non-childproof: they are held on with sharp prongs (that puncture the cloth), like the pointy grips that hold a gem in a ring setting. 

I found a couple McCall and Simplicity sewing patterns for dogs that looks similar, from the 1930s–40s. The U.S. started making polyester after WWII, and the toy's blue plush is definitely some petroleum-based synthetic, so I'm guessing this terrier might be from the 1950s?

Happy Thanksgiving from Macy

Happy Thanksgiving, Blog-o-land!
I am grateful for blogging and for all of you who read and respond here--thanks!

This, below, is Macy, according to the ripped tag.*
I got this stuffed bear off eBay, one in a lot of seven stuffed animals--only $7.99 for the whole lot--cheap, for eBay (though the shipping doubled the price). 
(Most of the others I don't want--shall I get into reselling on eBay myself? Might be fun...)

BEFORE, below left: 
Macy just out of the eBay box, squashed and dirty, but chipper--Macy's ears have jingle bells in them that still ring.

below right: de-stuffed and ready for a bath in the kitchen sink (I have taken to wearing a dust mask while removing toys' stuffing--I'd hate to look under a microscope at the old, wadded, chewed up material and see what's living in there)

AFTER, below: 
Macy this morning, after a brief stint in the dryer on air-fluff, then a good vacuuming for more fluff restoration, and then... fresh new stuffing.
Ready to lead a Thanksgiving Day Parade!

I was so excited by how well he cleaned up, I took him to show my neighbor, who was home baking pumpkin pies.

"Cute," they said, "but aren't you being a little obsessional?"

"Obsession is just another name for passion," I said. 
____________________

* The tag is ripped, but looks like it would read in full "Macy's Associates". Looking online, this bear looks like the Cubbi Gund bears, made in the 1950s? --some have jingle-bells in their ears too. 

"The Gund Company of Edison, N.J., the oldest stuffed toy company in the country... has been making stuffed bears since 1898." 
--article in New York Times

Turmeric Yarn

Ohboy, ohboy, the Manos del Uruguay turmeric-colored yarn I ordered just arrived! I've been holding off on darning the blanket until I had a second color to weave in. Now I do.

Star Anise & Persimmon

 ___________________________

I want to take some better photos of the stuffed animals--some close ups of their stitches, etc.--but the camera is in transit, flying back from Oregon where Marz left it last week.

In the meantime, star anise & persimmon I took recently.

Does anyone know what the marks on the bottom of the ironstone dish, top photo, signify?

Christmas music on the radio... I like it.

I've rolled my eyes in the past when radio stations start playing Christmas music before Thanksgiving, but this year I like it.
Maybe because we've already had snow? (It melted.)
Or because I'm in an unusually acquisitive, present-seeking mood?

I  revised my plan to only work with animals that come to me, organically (like, in the alley)--you just don't find wonderful old ones lying around.  I've never ordered anything off eBay before, but in the past week I've spent almost $100 for a dozen or so old stuffed animals to repair and reinvent.

The first shipment arrived last night--you can see why I might be in a Christmas-y mood:

I immediately put them on the back porch in the below-freezing temps--I read this kills dust mites, and I've been sneezing more, lately... I also need to buy a dust mask to use when I'm de-stuffing toys.

I like repairing animals for others, and but since these ones don't belong to anyone (except to me, now), I feel free to change them up. 

Not sure exactly what I'll do---maybe just a little visible mending on their worn spots; I'd like to somehow highlight the handwork in the hand-sewn ones. 
But I also might change them up, incorporate other textiles, scraps of old hand-sewn work, trinkets, or embroider them myself...
And then give them away or sell them. I don't intend to keep most of them. (Famous last words?)

Meanwhile, I do find amazing non-fabric things at Goodwill.
Look at these hand-painted mice on this ceramic plate with a handle, from Bavaria. ($2.25, with my 25% senior discount.)

I especially like the one that is looking up with some indignation at the handle: 
Who's disturbing our gymnastics?

A little googling and I found that plates with handles like this are lemon servers, for slices of lemon at tea time. 
The mice seemed weird to me, but I found a couple others like it.
Mostly, however, Bavarian ceramics are all about fruits or pheasants.

Stuffed chicken repair #1: A New Eye for Livia

For my sister.
Our father's 50-year-old stuffed chicken, Livia, had only one eye, her yellow felt comb was almost ripped off, and her feet were worn thin. Her heavy old stuffing was wadded, and she gave off a musty-dusty odor.

My preference is to restore and strengthen the toy's worn parts, (not replace them with new materials), allowing their history to show.

After giving Livia a bath and fresh stuffing, I was able to back her comb and feet with new red felt of real wool (not polyester), with top-stitching in red thread.  

I made a new eye to replace the missing one.

First photo, below, is Livia BEFORE; center & right are AFTER:

The Eyes Have It

I almost feel as if I'm cheating: this weekend I bought three well-worn stuffed animals at antique stores, to take home and repair. 

The thing is, I know from working behind the scenes that thrift stores don't put beat-up old animals out for sale––they send them off to salvage & recycling. Antique stores label them "well-loved", however, and sell them for sometimes quite a lot of money. And now I've looked, I see eBay and Etsy can be even more expensive.

This panda was $6, which is the low end for vintage animals. (I'd guess it's from the 1960s, like me.) I instantly loved it––not the case with all animals, by a long shot. And it didn't have any eyes at all, so obviously it belongs in SNARP (the Stuffed Needy Animal Rescue Project).

It looked a bit disturbing eyeless though, so this afternoon before I started any clean-up, I sewed a couple button eyes on its straw-filled head, with some white felt behind, for contrast.
So much happier!

Artisanal Stuffed-Animal Repair, Paternally Curated, Familially Sourced, & Gifted by Me

 My sister asked me to restore a pair of stuffed toy chickens that my mother bought for our father back in the 1960s, back when they liked each other.

I am very happy to. 

Here's the rooster of the pair,Taouk. > 
The hen is Livia.

Mostly the chickens are just in need of a bath and new stuffing, but you can see this felt beak needs repair.

I was a little surprised that during lunch my sister referred to something else (nothing to do with toys) as "artisanal", a word that strikes me as ridiculously overblown in most cases.  
E.g., artisanal sea-salt.

Words coming into and out of vogue don't usually bother me much, but this trio of related words---artisanal, curated, and sourced-- bugs me with its pure puffery. Oh, and there's gifted too, as in, someone gave you a present.

"I was gifted with a curated set of artisanal salt sourced at the sea."
I.e., someone gave me some high-priced salt.

This craze for using salt "to take your food to the next level" [actual ad copy] really bugs me.
I first noticed it with sea-salt caramels. Chunks of salt on candy makes some sense. (Pearson's Salted Nut Roll!) But it spread, and the other day I was served a croissant at a swank restaurant with salt dandruff on top. Even after I brushed the flakes off, they made for a very salty croissant.
I miss when unsalted butter was in vogue.

And it doesn't matter what you call it, salt is salt. It's all sodium chloride, and all of it comes from a salty body of water––a sea––even if the sea evaporated eons ago.

What's next, artisanal MSG?

a pleasing number

Not quite 007, but I liked the number in my Blogger stats this morning:

Flying Monkey Repair, III: Action!

Here's Flying Monkey, all repaired from being lost and squashed in the alley––plus I sewed it a felt jacket with flying designs on both sides, because it's an action monkey.
(What you can't see it that I replaced the smashed noise-maker with a squeaker that squeaks when you squeeze Monkey's tummy.)

And here's 8-seconds of action:

Or, "action..."
Really, it can fly much farther than that.  
One day soon, when I've stopped playing with it, I'm going to put Monkey up on a telephone pole near where I found it, with a tag saying I've repaired it and am returning it to whoever dropped it or whoever can give it a home.

Flying Monkey Repair, II: "things go round and again go round"

In a comment on this morning's "Flying Monkey Repair" post, Art Sparker quoted Wallace Stevens' poem "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating":  
"The garden flew round with the angel"...

The poem also asks, "Is there any secret in skulls?"

Yes, yes there is.
As I was repairing Monkey's head from the inside (below), I was thinking of how much work some humans put into
1) designing this creature, and 
2) constructing the many, futzy little pieces of it--its little ears alone would defeat me.

I've always thought of stuffed animal rescue in terms of benefiting the toy and its once and future owners, (and my own psyche), but today all of a sudden I saw it also honors the care and skill of its makers. (Not reflected it its price: brand new, this toy costs $5.72 at Walmart.)

Art Sparker also suggested I leave Monkey's eyes as they were, but I'd already sewn on an old glass replacement button, and a new button nose too.
Its original eyes and nose were plastic childproof ones, but I guess "childproof" doesn't mean you can run it over with a car, and they had broken, leaving a sharp plastic shaft.

Monkey is whole again (mostly), and I'm almost done making a felt vest modeled on the Wizard of Oz flying monkeys.

I'm getting cranky from hunger though, so I'm taking a break to go out for a hamburger and beer now.

Flying Monkey Repair, I

“Jesus, I’m / going out / and throw / my arms / around.”

--found on Orange Crate Art, who explains it's "an untitled poem from Lorine Niedecker’s Next Year or I Fly My Rounds Tempestuous (1934), a work made of short handwritten poems pasted over the inspirational aphorisms of a two-week-per-page calendar"

__________________

 
This Flying Monkey, below, is the neediest stuffed animal I've yet scooped up––I found it yesterday in the alley, soaking wet and run-over by a car––quite icky––
so I'm showing the after-the bath photo first.

I'm drinking coffee this morning in one of the hand-painted, speckled stoneware mugs ^ I've become enamored of (Otagiri-type, made in Japan). This mug ($1.49 at Goodwill) is one of my favorites.
Ever since Marz got into Starsky & Hutch, I've reevaluated 1970s design style, which I hated when I when I was a kid––but I like some of the designs now.

And here, below, are the BEFORE photos--those rubber tubes allow Monkey's arms to work as slingshots, to fly across the room. Before I did anything else, I gave Monkey the hot tub treatment, with a friend (also picked up in the alley):

With some new stuffing, Monkey will fly its rounds again:

I found the original toy online--they have noise-makers inside (I took the smashed pieces out when I removed all the stuffing), and a cape;
I am going to make a flying-monkey jacket from Wizard of Oz for this toy--along the lines of (but not as excellent as) this one by costumer and body-painter Breanna Cooke [links to her instructions]:

Mending Round-Up: "Who Made My Clothes?"

Sarah Corbett, founder of Craftivist Collective and the School of Gentle Protest, "changing our world one stitch at a time," interviews Orsola De Castroof––fashion designer and co-founder of Fashion Revolution, which asks, "Who made my clothes?"



scroll right for full image > >  >

Mending Round-Up: Lee Mingwei

Lee Mingwei, The Mending Project [link to youTube], a participatory installation (2012)
"During gallery hours, I was seated at [a] table, to which visitors could bring various damaged textile articles … and watch as I mended the article.

This emotional mending was marked by the use of thread which was not the color of the fabric around it, and often colorfully at odds with that fabric, as though to commemorate the repair. …
My mending was done with the idea of celebrating the repair, as if to say, 'something good was done here, a gift was given, this fabric is even better than before.'"  --Lee Mingwei [text from his site]

More bear repair, by Lee Mingwei, from Fibres of Being blog:

"That's going to take a long time."

I was darning in the sun at the food coop this afternoon, with Julia. 
A woman came up and asked what I was doing, as people do when you sew in public. (I like that.)

When I showed her, and explained that darning this old handwoven blanket is like darning a sock, she said she'd never heard of darning. She thought it was a great idea, though, to repair a family heirloom.*

Another woman seemed unimpressed. 
She said in a flat voice, "That's going to take a long time."

That doesn't necessarily mean she disapproved. 
Maybe it's an international phenomenon, but I'd say hers was a classic old Nordic Minnesotan  response, to offer discouragement, to express some version of "That won't work".
I don't know--it's like it'll keep the trolls away or something.

Come to think of it, Sicilians can be like that too:
expressing too much joy at, say, the birth of a baby, could attract il malocchio (the evil eye) and invite  bad luck. So maybe being discouraging is a safety precaution in lots of cultures.  
At least in the past.
Modern Minnesotans are more likely to say things such as, "Failure is not an option."
(Talk about god-annoying hubris...)

But anyway, I'd just been saying to Julia that I hoped the blanket would have enough holes to keep me busy all winter, so I replied  happily, 
"Yes, it's my winter project! It keeps me warm."

_________
*heirloom: 1472, ayre lome, from heir (q.v.) + loom in its original but now otherwise obsolete sense of "implement, tool." Technically, some piece of property that by will or custom passes down with the real estate. http://dictionary.reference.com/etymology/heirloom

Filling In

My auntie and her yarn friends hold up the blanket I am now mending, showing the biggest worn-through spot. 
The friends are all accomplished in working with fiber, and they were interested to examine the handwoven blanket, give me advice, and help me choose the right weight of yarn to mend it.

Because that gap is so big, I was going to patch it with cashmere from an old sweater rather than darning it, but I was inspired by how Celia Pym rebuilt with darns alone a tattered Norwegian sweater, below--it's a cool story (at 1granary) in itself.

 The chunks of darning have such a pleasing heft:

 

So, today I clipped the most worn area of the blanket onto paperboard, to hold it steady while I stitch some guidelines and outline the shape of the hole––in hopes that the massive darn that will fill it will lie fairly flat.

In the Slipstream of Time

My father, Paris, 1968, photo taken by my mother

Darn, 1, 2, 3

I thought I'd record the basic steps of darning, while I'm at the early stages of darning this ragged wool blanket. 

Basic darning is simple. 

1. Find a hole.

2. Stitch around the hole, to help firm up the surrounding area. Then, starting on firm fabric, weave lines with your needle in and out of the original weave, and across the hole. These are the stationery warp threads.

 3. Weave the other direction, going over-and-under your first lines--these are the weft threads. 
Warp and weft are weaving terms, and essentially you are using your needle to re-weaving the fabric.

 That's it!
It does take some care to make smooth and even darns, especially working with raggedy edges and holes. Luckily perfection is not the goal, and you can see I am not near it, but the darns are functional, and, I think, interesting for the eye.