Welcome to My Red Cape. Long ago in another time my husband Jack and I lived in a little old red house. It was the stuff of dreams to us for the few years that we were there. I live there still a number of hours every day in imagination, with old dolls and paintings and fabrics and feather trees. I draw inspiration and happiness from the memories of that space in time and share some of it here with friends who remember how to step with Alice through the looking glass and take delight in whimsies and antiquities. ~Edyth O’Neill

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Antique doll Collector mag in November 2012

    The great article on rare cloth dolls will go in one of my scrapbooks full of doll information. Imagine a collection with 20 Izannah Walker dolls!
I keep hard copy scrap books I have had since the 1950’s, much reworked but a few of the original pages are still in it, going back in at least one case to a 1930’s antiques mag clipping. Many 40’s and 50’s clippings from mags given me by Stella Hart of Cleburne who was my doll collecting mentor from the beginning. That little lady when in her late 70’s and early 80’s would set out on a greyhound bus headed for UFDC convention every summer with a little black leather valise which would contain three small dolls, house shoes and a change of unders and little ,more. She would clamp a hat on her head and away she would go, and return with her dolls wearing ribbons. She lent me hobbies mags, and talked about her dolls and introduced me to Dallas collectors, notably Mrs Tyler who invited me into her home to study and photograph her dolls. Wonderful days.
 I was living on a ranch in Comanche county then, and drove back and forth to Dallas every few months to see my parents there with my little girls in the car with me. I would stop at Mrs Hart’s and show her what I had acquired or was dressing or such. My mama was searching the goodwills in Dallas for any doll item of merit. One item my mama turned up for me back in the 1950's  was a Steiff bear, of pretty good size not a small one, which I traded to a collector/dealer in Hamilton Texas for a child’s chair. The bear looked great in the chair but when the trade was done neither of us had them both to enjoy! The little chair went through our fire, and is now painted black and is with me still. It is perhaps my earliest New England piece.
 Many year later Elizabeth P some how turned up in Ft Worth with two brown cotton print dresses from Mrs. Hart’s estate. Mrs. Hart would never cut them up for dolls dresses, but EP did so. I have tiny scraps of them still. e

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