"Black Friday" Finds

As much as I love hunting for treasures, I don't really go in for the day-after-Thanksgiving "Black Friday" shopfest. TVs, video games, appliances, and all the other electronic gadgets that seem to be the focus for shoppers that day don't really appeal to me much, and you couldn't pay me enough to be in those crowds. Instead I sleep in, then eat breakfast while watching the news stories of riots at the local Walmart. Fueled by Captain Crunch cereal and self-righteousness, I then go the opposite direction, visiting my favorite little independently owned shops in small towns.  My goals are chiefly: 1) supporting them, in an effort to avoid nothing but Walmarts in our future; and 2) seeing how they've decorated for the holidays.

So yesterday found me in a little "County Store" in a remote area, as far from the malls and big box places as I could get. This particular store, housed in several old farm buildings, specializes in holiday decorations along with some local crafts and baked goods. Occasionally, an antique toy can be found in its densely packed display cases, too.

And this trip didn't disappoint: I spotted this little doll's legs sticking out from under a pile of tinsel. Just a tiny 3 1/2 inches tall, this dollhouse doll was made in Germany between the 1890s-1900s, and is still wearing her original clothes.

Other finds included these old Christmas ornaments. The 3 inch snowman is made of cotton batting, and dates from around the 1930s-40s, while the chenille Santa is likely a bit older.

Who needs Best Buy's "door buster" deals when there are things like this out there, just waiting to be discovered?

Antique Tin Toy Kitchen

Here's another antique doll kitchen, just in time for Thanksgiving. This one is from the late 1800s. This style of tin kitchen was made in America to compete with the larger, fancier, and more expensive wooden German imports. Although these were mass produced, they are hard to find today, as they were fragile, heavily played with, and filled with items that were typically lost over time. This one is still stocked with most of its original items.

The kitchen is made of pressed tin and measures 10 1/2 inches wide by 7 inches tall.

The central feature is the wood burning stove with exhaust hood. This is a non-working version, but some toy kitchens came with wood, coal, or alcohol burning stoves that actually worked. That's another reason they're so hard to find today: a lot of them went up in flames from cooking gone wrong.

 

The more deluxe versions of these tin toy kitchens did have one working feature, however: a water tank that really held water, and could be pumped with a little handle to fill a sink.

 

 

The tank rests in a basin on the right side of the kitchen. Pumping the handle on the top makes the water flow into this conical sink:

 

 

The kitchen is chock full of tiny utensils and implements. Here are a miniature grater and a mold:

 

 

The plate racks at the top of the kitchen are full of tin plates:

 

 

One of the few non-tin items in the kitchen is this miniature rolling pin, seen here with a mixing bowl and a butter knife:

 

 

The knife, bowl, and rolling pin are all completely out of scale with each other, yet all are original to this kitchen. Scale wasn't important to the makers of these toys. For implements to have been in scale, they would have been so tiny as to be unusable, and the whole goal was to give little girls an affordable (hence small) toy kitchen they could actually use to practice cooking and cleaning. The oversize spoons at the top of the kitchen are another example; such spoons are nearly always included in these kitchens and mounted in this fashion, and they are always this big.

 

Some of the items in these kitchens were cleverly made from scrap metals. These little frying pans were made from a cosmetics tin and a piece of embossed ceiling tile:

 

 

Advertising items sometimes found their way into these kitchens as well, and some kitchens were occasionally given away as promotional items for various home goods companies or as sales incentives. Children could sometimes win such a toy kitchen for selling magazine subscriptions, for example. This one has a tiny dust pan advertising the "Steel Edge Dust Pan" Company.

 

 

My peg wooden doll is getting ready to start her Thanksgiving cooking. Hope yours goes well, and that you have a very happy holiday!

 

 

Antique Doll Kitchen

 

Found recently in a far back corner of an antique mall was this small doll kitchen, American made circa the early 1900s. The peg wooden dolls, while rather out of scale, seem very at home inside. 

 

 

The kitchen is one of the smallest I've ever seen, just 6 3/4 inches tall by 9 inches wide. (My largest doll kitchen can be seen by clicking here.) The open, wooden room features an impressed printed design on the sides and base, including windows, shutters, and a "stone" foundation.

The contents include a wee little cast iron stove, just 3 1/2 inches wide, and an assortment of kitchen apparatus: an earthenware pitcher and bowl; tin plates, pails, and molds (note the lobster shaped mold mounted on the wall); and a cast iron frying pan.

The peg wooden dolls are German, and the larger of the two is probably late 1800s. They, and the kitchen itself, show a lot of play wear, but I think that only adds to their charm. Some little girl over 100 years ago really loved this toy. I wonder what she pretended to cook on its tiny stove?

Remco's Elly and Andy Baby Mouse Tree House

Jerry Griswold, Director of the National Center for the Study of Children's Literature, once wrote a wonderful book length essay about some of the pervasive qualities of childhood that recur as themes in children's stories. One of these qualities he deemed "snugness," the desire of children for a small, snug, safe place of their own, like a treehouse, a fort carved out of the shrubbery, or a hideout made under a folding table draped with a sheet. 

He noted the prevalence of places like these in children's literature, particularly the cozy homes of Mole and Badger in The Wind in the Willows, and the dollhouse in Beatrix Potter's classic The Tale of Two Bad Mice. Of such small playhouses he said, "What lies behind this miniaturization and the vision of enclosed space is a wish to make life more manageable, a wish for control."

I think his thesis on the importance of small, snug playspaces can be extended to children's toys too, as there are countless examples which reflect this longing for a space of one's own, and enable children to have control over a tiny world and its inhabitants. One of my favorite examples is the Elly and Andy Baby Mouse Tree House, made by Remco in 1967 as part of their T.V. Jones line.

The 15 inch tall tree trunk house is made of lithographed tin with plastic details including a branch swing, front steps, windows, a balcony, and even a working elevator. Inside, the little house is divided into two rooms, a bedroom and dining area. Cheerful colors make the interior cozy and appealing.

 

The tree trunk is home to 3 inch tall rodent siblings, Elly and Andy Mouse:

 

The furnishings include a hutch and dresser with a pull out drawer, an adorable mushroom table with tree stump chairs, and even a piece of cheese. The chairs have little notches cut out in the back to accomodate the mouse tails, a thoughtful touch.



Upstairs are two cozy loft beds, leading the way to an inviting balcony.
 

 

If recent sale prices for this toy are any indication (I've seen a MIB example sell for $350) the now grown-up children who played with this 40+ years ago are still longing for the sense of snugness, safety, and control over life which it provided. There's no stress in the tree house, just cheese snacks, swing sets, and cozy naps. It's a good life for these little mice. 

Playtown

I've posted about the line of Playtown toys before, but I recently found some more items. This line of miniature shops and accessories was made by the Playtown Products Co. of New York from the late 1940s-1950s. Sets in the range included a bakery, general store, grocery, supermarket, luncheonette, and meat market. Each little shop averaged about 7 inches tall, just the right size for dollhouse dolls of the time. Besides the shops themselves, Playtown also sold accessory packs of goodies to stock the shelves. Here are three: one for the bakery, one for the butcher shop, and one for a dollhouse. Each little card is about 4 5/8 inches long, and the tiny items are made of painted plaster.

A braided bread loaf, cake, and donuts in the bakery package.

Hot dogs, a roast chicken, and a steak in the butcher shop.

Jello, cabbage, and eggs in the dollhouse kitchen set.

Here's the complete Playtown Meat Market, with a couple of Flagg dollhouse dolls doing their shopping:

Antique Travel Dollhouse

I received one of my most unusual dollhouses as a Christmas gift this past year. American made and dating from the 1890s to early 1900s, the 17 inch long house features detailed decoration lithographed directly onto the wooden surface. It appears to have been made as a travelling dollhouse, as the pieces disassemble and pack neatly inside for storage and transport. I've never seen anything quite like it, and can't find anything similar in any of my dollhouse books. The house has a lot of play wear, but it was so unique, I couldn't pass it up.

Here's how it looks all packed up:











One long side slides off to reveal the contents inside:

Two little china dolls have lived in this house for a very long time, along with a tiny bisque man. (Clearly, correct scale did not matter to the child who originally owned this house!)

Here are all the parts unpacked:

 The pieces all stack onto the box base to build a Victorian mansion, complete with a tower and porch:

One of the house's most interesting
features is the garage
on the left side,
complete with its
own sliding door: 

The now faded and worn lithographed detail is still wonderful, including curtained windows (some with tiny people peering out) and tiles on the roof:

 

The house is lithographed inside as well, with pictures, windows, and Victorian bric a brac:

I added some old furniture, and now the little dolls have somewhere to sit: 

The little man fits perfectly on the front porch,

where he seems to welcome us to his house.

1930s German Doll Kitchen

An antique German doll kitchen had long been on my wish list, and this past Christmas, Santa did not disappoint! This 1930s example came complete with its original floor covering, wallpapers, and furnishings. I added some accessories and a dolly cook. Measuring a hefty 27 inches wide by 11 inches high, the scale is larger than dollhouse, sized more for actual doll play. The kitchen is a delightful combination of classic Dutch kitchen decor and 1930s Art Deco styling.

The kitchen cabinet has wonderful Deco curves, a paper "linoleum" counter top, drawers that open, and real glass sliding doors.

The wonderful dry sink swivels into the counter, out of the way: 

The little blue and white stove is adorable, and the door opens. I added the china plates to cover the burner holes; they are much older, circa the mid 1800s, but fit perfectly. 

One of my most loved accessories is now in the kitchen: this tiny (1/2 inch tall) Royal Worcester pudding bowl, made in England in the mid 1800s. The piece is so very small and fragile, it's amazing to me that it survived. 

My china doll seemed to be the perfect match for this kitchen, in her color coordinated dress. She's looking forward to trying out the pudding bowl.

The doll kitchen is a very old and traditional German Christmas gift, dating all the way back to the 1700s.  In her wonderful book, Doll Kitchens, author Eva Stille explains that doll kitchens would be brought down from the attic each Christmastime by parents who would freshen them up with more grocery supplies, a new pie plate or two, and a bright new coat of paint. All winter, the kitchens would entertain the family's children, until with the warming spring weather, the toys, now depleted of provisions, temporarily lost their interest. They would be packed back up and returned to the attic as the children moved their play outdoors, only to be brought back down once more, restocked, and placed under the tree again the next Christmas.

The toys were usually passed down through several generations. Stille gives an example of an 1885 doll kitchen ordered by a wealthy family in Bregenz. The toy was passed down among girls in the family all the way to 1979, when it was bequeathed to the most recent descendant, who was still playing with it at the time of the book's publication in 1988!

I feel very fortunate to have finally received my own doll kitchen for Christmas. 

German Room Box Dollhouse

I'll start off the Christmas reporting with my biggest gift! 

This German dollhouse dates from the 1920s. Its form is unusual, being done in the open top "room box" style usually used for single rooms, but here incorporated into a two-story, five-room house. It's a big one, measuring 33 inches wide by 25 tall, and retains its original wallpapers, floor coverings, and curtains. The house came empty, but I spent the months it was on layaway collecting old furniture and accessories for it. Let's take a tour!

On the outside, commercially made brick paper covers the walls: 










Each room is framed with this carved wooden trim, which also runs along the entire top back of the house:

Inside, starting at the top left corner, the small bedroom is decorated for Christmas with a little tree and presents. A tiny box of vintage glass ornaments sits on the dresser.

My favorite room is next: the library. I've filled it with antique German furniture including plenty of bookcases and a writing desk.

On the writing desk are some of my favorite accessories: a tiny ink bottle and blotter, along with a miniscule seal, just 1 inch long, made of brass and bone (imitating ivory).

Next to the desk is a revolving bookcase complete with its original books, just 4 inches tall, made in Germany in the late 1900s.

The tall bookcase in the back of the library has another of my favorite accessories on top:  a 1 and 1/2 inch tall planter with original foliage, circa the 1920s.

On to the large bedroom at the upper right corner:

Just inside the door is this handmade fretwork cupboard: 














One of my favorite pieces of furniture is in this room: a 4 inch wide German made dressing table complete with faux-ivory accessories.

Dressing table closed.

Dressing table open. 

Heading downstairs, the dining room is on the lower right, decorated for Christmas. 

The antique buffet, made by the Star Novelty Company in the 1900s, holds a French candelabra, an English silver punchbowl, a Mexican silver decanter set, and some holiday desserts.

 

The downstairs rooms retain their original floor papers, complete with a colorfully printed "carpet":

The dining room also features colorful original curtains:

The last room on our tour is the kitchen, which I've furnished with a Hoosier cabinet and matching table, and an American cast metal ice box and stove. Christmas cakes wait on the table to be carried into the dining room.

The cabinet has doors that open and a counter that actually slides out.
















Here are closeups of the icebox, sink, and stove:

I hope you've enjoyed the tour!