Vintage Boxed Toy Tea Set

Although I don't much like tea in real life, for some reason I love toy tea sets, and am always on the lookout for another one to add to my collection. The dollies and teddy bears just can't get enough tea sets.
My most recent find was this, a very unusual boxed wooden set, circa the 1950s or early '60s. The small box measures just 4 inches wide, and contains a complete set of tiny tea things, along with four legs that, when inserted into the box lid, create a tea table. It's pretty amazing.

The assembled box-table:

Antique Shoofly Rocking Horse

On my birthday antiquing trip this past weekend, I found two old rocking horses, this 40 inch long shoofly rocker circa 1900, and the 1930s homemade spring horse shown in the previous post. Like most old shooflys, he's been painted over, although it looks like this was done long ago. I'll probably strip and refinish him, since the repaint covers all his impressed details, including his mane and tack. Still, I thought he was a nice horse, and he was a steal at $20. The teddy bears are going to enjoy riding in him.

Old Folk Art Spring Horse

I found this unusual spring rocking horse while on my birthday antiquing trip this past weekend. The wooden horse is 34 inches tall, and looks to be homemade. The giant spring appears to be from a chair or sofa. He's pretty ingeniously constructed. I'm guessing he's from the 1930s, a Depression-era daddy-made toy.

Freaky Marx Dollhouse Family

I found this family of vintage dollhouse dolls in their original box while antiquing for my birthday last weekend. They were made by the Marx Company in the early 1960s, and have plastic heads, hands, and shoes on poseable wire bodies with felt clothing. The children are about three inches tall, the parents five.

They're really not terribly attractive dolls, and they're also not nearly as old as most of the dollhouse pieces I usually collect. But here's why I bought them: their faces. Fast, haphazard painting by a factory line employee in Hong Kong has unintentionally resulted in crazy expressions. Mom looks like she's smelled something bad, and dad looks...well, I can't quite place his expression. Chagrin? Discomfort? A guilty conscience? The sudden realization that he left the toilet seat up? Stunned disbelief at learning the swaddled baby isn't his? Who knows, but it's definitely amusing.

Meanwhile, brother's expression can only be described as "shifty", as he glances toward his innocent little sister, malice clearly apparent in his cold, beady eyes:

Marx Troll Village

A few months ago, back when I did my troll blog-a-thon, I mentioned my longing for the elusive 1960s Marx Troll Village playset. I finally got one for my birthday: yay! 

The Marx Toy Company made all sorts of playsets like these back in the 1950s and '60s: western ranches, medieval castles, army forts, family farms, and pretty much any other imaginative setting a kid could want, complete with tiny figures, buildings, and a box or case that held all the parts.

The Troll Village is one of their most unusual such sets, as well as one of their smallest. The box measures 10 inches wide, and the little trolls within are only 1 1/2 inches tall, the size of a typical gumball machine prize troll. The set includes trolls, animals, fences, rocks, trees and foliage, a little house, and caves. Originally it also had a printed vinyl playmat, but this is often missing from the set, as it is with mine. Still, it's a fantastic toy for troll lovers, and no good troll collection can consider itself complete without one.

 The village. As you can see, many pieces are delightfully
out of scale with each other.

The little troll house is just 4 inches tall, with a crazy roofline.

Hangin' out in the troll cave...

Two of Troll Village's denizens.
As you can see from the troll in the back,
the village is not officially a nudist colony.

For a sense of scale, a Troll Village troll is on the right,
next to a standard-sized, 3 inch troll
also made by Marx. Their trolls have a very distinctive appearance.