Another Teddy Bear Trade

A few months ago, I wrote about a wonderful trade I did with Canadian teddy bear artist, Michelle Mutschler. We just completed trade number two: my 1918 American teddy bear and a vintage Fisher Price Goldilocks and the Three Bears playset for four of Michelle's tiny handmade bears (along with an old German dollhouse doll and a bunch of vintage holiday decorations and cards.)

Here's the group of Michelle's quirky miniature bears, ranging in size from just 3 1/2 inches tall to 6 1/2 inches, made of aged velvets and assorted trims:

 
The clown bear has to be seen in profile to have his wonderful oddness fully appreciated:

The looooooong skinny panda is my favorite out of the bunch:

Poor "Rose" suffers from an enlarged cranium which she unsuccessfully tries to disguise with a festive bow:

As does her sister, little "Pinky":

Thanks Michelle, for another fun trade!

Oopsy...

Anyone who's been following the blog may have noticed the sudden reappearance in your Reading List of several old posts...what happened is, somehow a bunch of old photos got deleted from my Picasa web albums over the weekend, and I had to republish the posts to restore the pics. Sorry about that...

Flagg Family Dollhouse Dolls in Original Box

It's funny how antiquing is sometimes: you can look for something for years without finding it, and then when you do finally find one, you seem to find them all over.

A couple of months ago, I wrote about a family of vintage dollhouse dolls made by the Flagg Company that I found at an outdoor antique show, buried in a box of junque. At the time, I had never come across any of these highly-sought Flagg dolls in all my years of collecting. Then, a couple of weeks later, I found two more (which I haven't yet posted, sorry), and then, last week, I hit the jackpot with this unplayed-with set still in its original package!

The box, cleverly designed to look like a house with the dolls peeking out the windows, measures 11 by 7 inches. The parents are about 4 inches tall, while the kids are 2 3/4 inches and the itty bitty baby (it's a boy!) is only 1 1/2 inches long.

The naively styled dolls are molded of a flexible vinyl and dressed in clothing made mostly of felt. The simply painted eyes give them a rather stunned expression, but that's part of their charm, I think. These date from the 1950s.

From the packaging:

Vintage Rocking Horse

This rocking horse was the first toy I found at an antique show last weekend. Although its design is quite simple (just a flat wooden cut-out horse, like those used on shoofly rockers), it has a certain primitive charm, and it's in amazing condition with all of its printed detail still intact.

The horse measures 35 inches long, including the rockers, and was made in the 1930s by Mengel Playthings of Louisville, Kentucky. The company was originally a manufacturer of playground equipment, but they became famous for a Lone Ranger's Silver rocking horse they produced in the late 1930s. 

Vintage Dollhouse Groceries

I have a large collection of antique and vintage dollhouse shops, so I'm always on the lookout for products to stock them with. At an antique show last weekend, I spotted these 1940s-50s American-made groceries. Constructed of paper-wrapped wooden blocks, the tallest is 1 1/2 inches tall.

Here they are on the shelves of a 10 inch tall dollhouse grocery store from the same period: