I think I have all of my cuddly toys, and my oldest, most fragile ones currently live on their own special shelf here in the room I have at the house. A number of other ones are piled up on my side of the bed, and are often rotated which ones are under the covers with me at night. No fucks given that anyone thinks this is weird for a middle-aged woman. (As someone said above, I worry about my toys being flung in a skip when I'm gone, as well).
Over the past year, as I have time, I've been playing teddy bear hospital with the more fragile ones as and when I can repair them. One major restoration was the china doll my grandmother threw together for me probably shortly after I was born. She was crafty and creative, but my god was she fucking sloppy and cut corners. She made her living making stuff for craft fairs and all that, and constantly cut corners. My sister, cousin, and I all get our abilities to do handwork and stuff from whatever genes made up her evil body.
But anyway, the china doll -- all of the stuffing in that doll (and many of my childhood toys) has now degraded into this horrible brown powder -- were I older, my toys would have been stuffed with wool, horsehair, or sawdust, but late 50s into the 1970s, it's all this spongy polyester stuff that degrades -- which also damages the cotton fabric of the toy.
My china doll was full of this horrible stuff, but fortunately, it did not affect the cloth of her body. Over a few weeks, I gutted her and hoovered out what was left of that nasty stuff, took off and reset her arms in the correct places (my grandmother had attached them so sloppily that the doll's dress didn't fit correctly), and restuffed her with leftover wool from my spinning projects. I cleaned her dress and underthings as best I could and repaired the dress. I swear she actually looks happier now.
The huge task, though, as been my original bunny. My mother made him from one of those cotton fabric panels that's got a toy printed on it -- you cut it out and stuff it. He was my constant companion til I was about 9, when he was too fragile to sleep with anymore, and my hippo, bought with 9 whole dollars of my pocket money, took his place. Not to worry, bunny got an important place on the back of my bed. However, over the years, that polyfill shit inside him also degraded to nasty brown powder that hardened, absorbed smells from the air, and started to cause his fabric to rot. I had kept him carefully wrapped in a clean pillow case til a few months ago when I thought, right, can I restore him?
Nope -- Bear in mind, he's already covered with fabric patches from my childhood, where my mom had fixed him a few times.
Here he is in action with me, Christmas 1973 -- I would have been 8 here. The white teddy bear was another from-babyhood bear, and he's happily sat on my shelf at the moment as I write. (He's next for restoration). Lots of swag here for me, and (just out of shot) my non-tosser brother was helping me with all of it -- he was about 16 at the time, and I think got as big a kick out of playing with me and my toys as I did.
The first thing I did, was use one of his busted seams to start getting all of that caked brown powder out of him -- not an easy task as simply pressing on his cotton fabric body caused the fabric to disintegrate. I managed to remove about 99% of the powder, and gave him a very very gentle bath -- but he was still rank, as I couldn't wash him as well as I would have liked. So he spent several weeks getting nuked: hung outside on the line in the wind on bright sunny days. That can do a hell of a lot drying out and freshening up an old piece of fabric.
But he is too far gone to restuff. I had a thought about it, and as I've mentioned, I do a lot of stuff with Roman history -- I was out at the Altes Museum in Berlin in December 2019, and took a lot of photos of the Fayum Mummy paintings -- and had an ephiphany: I'd make him his own fabric sarcophagus. I can't restuff him, but I can sure as fuck cocoon him in the centre of a new body, stuffed with wool around him.
Here he is in his cleaned, but dilapidated state: I was able to remove my mom's patch for his head and look at his face for the first time in 45 years.
Long story short -- I've managed to recreate him on new muslin using Pigma inks and a bit of fabric paint. This will be the exterior of the 'new' toy, with old bunny nestled inside of him.
Old bunny himself will be seated inside a much simpler muslin shell, so that the wool stuffing can go between the simple shell and the new exterior.
I'm not much of an artist, but I am pleased with the result; the outer shell is hanging on the back of my door because I still need to set the paints with heat, and every time I glance over at it, I'm startled at how well I've captured the original bunny, considering all I had for reference.
So yeah, any time anyone wants to give me a hard time about still having a quarter fuckton of my old cuddly toys or that I've invested so much time and trouble in preserving what is little more than an old rag at this point, I will fucking cut them.
