Flipping Cissy, part 2: new clothes

Part two of my Flipping Cissy series.  My beat-up Peaches has a new wig, and today I'll be talking clothes.  No, I unfortunately haven't gotten around to any of the hard stuff yet, restringing or repainting or any of that, but I promise that should come this summer.  For now, though, clothes.

This dress actually belongs to what could be considered the poor woman's Cissy:  a doll of similar size and jointing named Candy.  Candy was produced by Deluxe Reading (much later by Charisma) and thus could be considered a cousin of Penny Brite and a more distant relative to Suzy Cute and Dawn.  The Candy dolls that I'm aware of came with four full outfits (one for each season), and complete sets can cost a pretty penny, but loose dresses are fairly affordable and easy to find.  This dress is the spring dress (I assume) and it is done in kelly green fabric with white trim.  It is missing its purse and shoes, but it still has the cute little pillbox hat so dear to fashionable women of the early sixties.

Pillbox hats are making a bit of a comeback, in fact.  Princess Kate certainly isn't ashamed to be seen in one!  Fashionable dolls of the Camelot era often wore what fashionable ladies wore, and thus pillbox hats were not unheard of for dolls like Vogue Jill and her buddy Jan, Little Miss Revlon and her larger Revlon sisters, Barbie, Tressy, and the like.  Well...maybe Tressy could be considered post-Camelot since she was created after the Kennedy administration, but she still wore a pillbox hat on occasion.  Anyway, I have never owned such a hat for myself OR for a doll, so I'm glad to have this little chapeau aboard.  The hat has four little evenly spaced gathers, which at first threw me off a bit since I wasn't sure what was supposed to go in the back.

One side of the hat has a fabric plume, which I hoped would help me get this all sorted out.

Plumes like this usually point towards the back, but according to this old advertisement the plume was supposed to be worn in the front.  I'll try both ways and see which one I prefer, since I don't guess placement of the hat matters terribly.  The inside of this hat is not lined, which surprises me since the dress is partly lined.

Now, the dress.  The dress is in reasonably good shape, but there is one tiny little spot on the front of the bodice.

I wasn't able to get this off with my usual fix-all (spit), but a deeper, more thorough cleaning might do it some good.  For the time being I've got a tiny vintage stick pin, which I got off Etsy.  The vendor listed these as sold out the night after I bought this one, so I suspect I got the last one.  There were about thirty small pins in the pictures provided on Etsy, in the shapes of birds, insects, flowers, cats, turtles, giraffes, so I had no idea which one I'd end up with.  As y'all likely know by now I love cats, and I ended up getting...

...A CAT!!!  This little guy is a very little one indeed.

I still haven't established whether that quarter is phony or not, by the way.  Anywho, Mr. Cat is a very pale lilac (lilac?) with black spots and off-kilter facial features.  He's not particularly well-painted, but on something that small I'm not entirely surprised.  The insides of his ears are even painted!

Of course no cute little outfit is complete with a pair of shoes, which Peaches has been needing for awhile anyway.

Plain, versatile white plastic heels, the type that would probably also fit Candy or a larger Miss Revlon.  These snap closed in the middle of the strap and were a little tricky to get fastened.

To be a proper sixties-style outfit I should probably also grub up some gloves and some seamed stockings, but I don't dare do the latter until I get Peaches' broken knee fixed (the edges are sharp and would do a number on stockings of any sort).  So for now, here's what my girl looks like.

Unfortunately Peaches will never fit on that stand properly if I don't restring her.  See how her head is tilted back?  I CAN get a picture of this doll's still-attractive face, but I have to re-position the camera.

Notice that I chose to put the plume of her hat on the left.

Oh yeah, I also got Peaches a stand.  It's wood and fits her below the arms like so.

The armrest screws to the post like this, so the height can be adjusted.  It's a VERY nice stand.

During the course of this little chat it occurred to me that I've never once photographed Peaches with my Little Miss Revlon doll, Wendy.  The two are supposed to be besties despite their difference in size.

Peaches has come a long way since her first appearance in this blog, but she's still got a long way to go.  It's possible to see in this picture that she's still orange, which she should NOT be.  I've got my magic eraser ready to go, but I still need some other odds and ends before I try to take Peaches apart and clean her.

Final thought (prepare for a spate of griping).  I did some browsing on eBay, a dangerous thing to do when one is supposed to be saving up money, and I found a healthy quantity of Cissy dolls available for sale.  Get this, though:  even dolls in less-than-mint condition can go for two hundred fifty bucks, maybe more, and yet here is my poor little Peaches, knee broken and exposed to cigarettes, sitting in a junk shop with a twenty-dollar price tag.  I wouldn't have been able to afford a Cissy doll at all if not for all that damage that knocked down her price, but I still shake my head in disgust at the previous owner(s), because even when these dolls were new they weren't exactly cheap!  I can only imagine what that person's lungs must've looked like, and their teeth, and how their clothes must've smelled...ewww.  I'm not a huge fan of cigarettes as it is, but Peaches must've been around a supremely heavy smoker to get to the point she was when I found her.  Oh well, I'll fix her up and give her a chance at reclaiming her former glory.  Oh, and if y'all want to see a truly beautiful Cissy doll, check out this post.  This doll is a knockout in her vintage blue dress.

Cordially yours,

RagingMoon1987