Doll Repair and Doll Restoration Professional

What style of doll do you have? This section is to show general body styles for common composition antique dolls to help you select appropriate clothing.   As there are many more styles and variations, please email with questions concerning your doll clothing needs.

What is composition? Composition is a wood product with the basic formula made of fine sawdust chips, plaster, lime and glue (formula varied with companies) that has been placed in a mold to form heads, bodies, arms and legs.

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Mama Dolls - Mama dolls are made with a  composition head, arms and legs.  They have a rather chubby cloth body with long straight legs so that they look like children, not babies.   They are made to look like little girls 3-7 years old,  longer,  more slender arms and hard stuffed bodies (longer and less “chunky”).  Most also have a cry box in the cloth portion of their bodies.

Antique Flossie Flirt with American Mama doll body style

Baby Dolls –  There are two categories of baby dolls,  1) composition with cloth body  and   2) all composition.  Babies have chubby bodies with bent legs and bent arms. They are meant to be posed in a sitting position like a baby.  Composition baby (soft body) dolls  have composition arms, legs & head with a cloth torso and generally a cry box.   Baby dolls are intended to look like under-one-year-old babies. In the photo you will see a small all composition baby as well as the type with cloth body and composition on all or part of their arms.  Baby dolls can also have cloth legs and partial cloth arms with cloth bodies as in the the photo.  As companies tried to out do each other, some babies were mechanical (bottle baby), crawled, cried or had some other unique feature.

All composition and cloth body American composition baby dolls body type	Composition Byelo baby doll & Arranbee Dream Baby (bottle baby) cloth body and legs (frog type) cloth arms celluloid hands

Toddler Dolls - Composition (chubby) Toddlers  are all composition with  straight chubby legs. Many can stand alone such as a Kewpie or Scootles type dolls.

Antique composition chunky toddler body

Child Dolls – These are dolls like Shirley Temple, Anne Shirley, Princess Elizabeth, Patsy family dolls  etc.   Children dolls have a more slender body with long straight legs.  They are designed to be young children.

 

 

 

Composition child body style	Patsy and Patsy type body style