Doll Stands: They Deserve More Respect

As anyone who collects more then a few dolls knows, doll stands are a major pain.  If you try to store them in a container, they tangle together into a nasty mess, and no matter how many are in that container, we can never find the perfect stand for a specific doll.  This one will be tall enough, but the support arms aren't wide enough.  That one will be too tall, leaving the poor doll hanging from the support arms in perpetual suspension.  And so it goes,
we try this and that combination, and finally settle upon something that is less then perfect but better then nothing.  Our only immediate alternative is to put the doll in storage, so you can see where this is going....  we eventually end up with a lot of dolls in our display cases that could benefit from a more suitable display stand.

When we are working with our own private collection, this may or may not be a big deal, depending upon the value we place on our dolls.  But when we are working with a collection of dolls at a museum, doll stands become a very big deal indeed.  So we are paying a lot of attention to them, and making sure that we remove the stands that may cause damage to a doll.  Today we spent time brainstorming ideas for modifying ordinary doll stands so that they are more protective and more attractive, and I'll be sharing a couple of those ideas with you in the future after we have made the prototypes and tested them.  In the meanwhile, perhaps you'd like to revisit your collection, and check for damage inflicted upon your dolls by their stands - including rubbing (damage to surface of doll), squeezing too tightly, rusting, tearing the clothing, and not holding the doll securely.  Perhaps you'll be inspired to try to think of ways to modify your doll stands so that they will function better.

While I'm on the subject, it's never a good idea to simply prop a bisque head doll up in a sitting position.  They have been known to suddenly topple over, sometimes falling completely off a shelf.  Even a sitting doll should be secured to a suitable stand.  We're working on it.