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Just the same, on February 1, 1951, Mrs. Coburn opened her Doll Apparel and Hand Weaving Studio at 1307 Devon Avenue, Chicago. There doll clothes-racks and doll hat-stands exhibit styles of every description, both historical and modern, and glass cases display miniature jewelry—jewelry to fit any dolly.

Mrs. Coburn caters to every known need and appointment of the Queen of Toyland. Not only does she supply custom made clothes or outfits from her stock of 100 ready-made dresses and hats, for the little misses of doting little misses, she restores the costumes of dolls owned by collectors. Dolls worth from $40 to $500 each are brought to her both for face lifting, so to speak, and to be reclothed in garments that are perfect copies of their original outfits.

"You understand," says Mrs. Coburn, "that restoring and dressing dolls is just my diversion. My real living comes from my hand weaving and my dry cleaning agency. At present I must say I am pioneering in the field of doll-dressmaker."

She does almost all of her work herself, calling in a hand-weaver to help with the peasant skirts. Dolls needing repair and restoring are sent out to doll hospitals. At rush times she has employed two helpers.

THE SIZE, amount of work involved, and the amount of material used determine the price charged for work done. Dresses are priced from 65 cents to $7.50. Hats cost from 75 cents to $3.50. Accessories are priced from 35 cents to $2 for the various pieces of jewelry. Corsets cost $1.75 each.

That dolls must wear corsets is no surprise to collectors of the antique mannequins and their dressmakers. The Jenny Lind dolls all wore them, as well as farthingales—the bolster-like pads that sometimes were used instead of hoops beneath full-skirted period dresses.

The faces of the dolls are restored for a fee of $1.50.

Besides sewing costumes, making hats, and fashioning corsets for these people of toyland, Mrs. Coburn now makes the jewelry for them.

This all began in spite of the fact that Mrs. Coburn, a dressmaker for many years, vowed steadily and consistently that she would never attempt doll clothes—not even for her own daughters and granddaughters. She thought that such articles were too small to work on.

Twelve years ago she had retired from a career of professional dressmaking. She had looked around for a hobby at that time, and therefore took a course in hand weaving, a handicraft which had always seemed fascinating to her. And she thought that this art would be her only profitable hobby.

However, it is a proverb that one thing leads to another. That's how Mrs. Coburn's interest in costuming dolls began. First of all, she began to attend hobby shows because of her weaving. Then, she has always been interested in antiques. When she was a dressmaker, she was fascinated by antique laces, old textiles, beads, passementerie (trimming of braid, beaded strips, etc.), ribbons, embroideries, and all materials pertaining to dressmaking. For many years she collected such things at hobby shows, thrift shops, white elephant sales, junk shops, and Salvation Army stores located in Chicago and in small towns near-by.

Owners of near-by out-of-town thrift shops became her steady suppliers. As these proprietors have less call for their materials than those in the big cities and their expenses are lower, they are willing to sell at lower prices than the big city dealers, and they can still make a profit when they do so. When one of these thrift shop owners accumulates a suitcase full of materials, she phones or writes Mrs. Coburn. "And," says Mrs. Coburn, "even with the train fare, I save on the purchase over what I'd be charged here. A suitcase containing sixty yards of passementerie of jet beads, which I use for buttons on period-doll garments, and other miscellany recently cost me only $10."

MRS. COBURN has collected these items for all of her dressmaking career. She bought things for which she couldn't have had any use at the time, and yet couldn't resist simply because they had been part of costuming the fashionable woman. She bought whalebones, for instance, and net collar stays or bones, thinking that she would never sew them into anything.

"For several years," she says, "I walked "three miles before taking breakfast, dropping into my marts, so that I wouldn't miss any of the collector's items that had come in at closing time, the evening before. Fifteen years ago I invested 10 cents in an old velvet dress with panniers (drapery on the sides of the skirt), which dated to 1871. I put it away in a trunk, for I didn't have any earthly use for it, but I kept moving it with me the few times I moved from one location to another."

Could there have been some weakening of her resolve not to make doll-clothes, when Mrs. Coburn bought such antiques? She confesses that she always had a vague longing to try to use them in miniature replicas of nineteenth century fashions.

That 10-cent velvet dress with the panniers brought her $4.75 for each of six copies made for dolls—a total of $28.50—when she began doll dressmaking two years ago.

Mrs. Coburn had been the guest of a collector at a doll show at that time. The period costuming—mostly antique American—virtually enthralled her. She felt that she simply must try to use some of her antique dress materials in making copies of some of the simpler things.

She obtained patterns for doll clothing from pattern books, and also drafted some herself, as she had learned dress-pattern drafting in high school before becoming a dressmaker. She was enchanted by the tiny garments she created. But she is so modest that she didn't trust her own judgment and asked friends if they thought the things would please others. Of course, the response was spontaneously one of delight in the bewitchingly dwarfed articles.

SO MRS. COBURN took all the dresses and hats she had fashioned to the First Doll Fair and Hobby Show of Chicago, held in 1948. This show ran for three days and was well attended. Many curious persons as well as collectors were admiring or interested spectators. Mrs. Coburn's exhibit was especially popular and as a result every item in it was purchased.

As another result, Mrs. Coburn remembered her 10 cent purchase, the 1871 panniered dress. She was eager to know how it had been fashioned. In order to find out, she ripped it apart and studied the pieces. Then she obtained what she calls the "basic polonaise pattern" from doll-patterns sold in the needlework section of a Chicago department store. The "polonaise," it seems, is a period costume with draping on the hips, similar to the dress she had bought.

"I worked on that dress all day long," recalls Mrs. Coburn with a laugh, "just draping and redraping those panniers until I had figured them out. I call it my 'masterpiece' and it is a favorite with customers. I've had more calls for it than for any other one fashion of dress."

Shortly after her first success, Mrs. Coburn advertised her doll hats in a trade journal, although word had spread from doll-owner to doll-owner of her work. Besides bringing orders to her, her advertisements opened a new source of supplies. Doll-makers and "the trade" began to send her advertisements of materials they wished to dispose of. She finds many of the textiles she wants are supplied in this way.

For her hat making, Mrs. Coburn buys old hats which she rips apart to provide material. "The straw," she says, "must be of the best kinds and in good condition, pliable even before it's dampened or soaked in water. If it's in brittle condition, it's no good." She also fashions foundations of crinoline and covers them with velvet, trimming them with the appropriate feathers, ribbons, and so forth.

WHEN SHE makes dresses in the modern style, Mrs. Coburn buys much of the fabrics in remnant lots. "I cut my garment according to the cloth," she says. "That is, whatever material comes my way is made up according to the period it suits. Modern textiles are not all in keeping with antique styles. Designs of patterned fabrics are different according to the times and so are the weight and weave. The ribbons, brocades, taffetas, and calicos must be old-fashioned looking or the old fashions will be robbed of much of their charm."

However, the materials must be durable, too. Mrs. Coburn says that stitching a material on the sewing machine is the best. If the fabric doesn't split under the needle, it will last a long time, even though it may be more than fifty years old at the time it was purchased.

"This little dress," says Mrs. Coburn, removing from her glass case a replica of a dress made about 1880, "is made of material woven long, long ago and good for a long time still."

The quaint little garment is fashioned of brown taffeta that could stand alone. Its entire skirt hem, sleeves, and neck are edged in a pale beige fabric. "That trimming was called soisette," explains Mrs. Coburn. "It isn't manufactured today. It is a mercerized cotton. See, it is quilled to make the attractive trimming."

"Quilling" is the old term for fluting, or making tiny creases in materials. Mrs. Coburn does as much work as possible on the sewing machine, but her quilling, plaiting and puffing must be done by hand.

MRS. COBURN has dozens of nostalgically antique terms in her vocabulary. They come easily to her tongue because of the research she is able to do right in her own work-room, seated near her sewing machine and her hand looms. For in just the short space of two years, Mrs. Coburn has built up a library of costume and pattern books. These are her files, always conveniently at hand.

Not content with the meager supply of patterns for doll-clothes obtainable in her neighborhood, Mrs. Coburn consulted the advertising columns of Profitable Hobbies and various collectors' and trade journals. In these columns the old "Ladies" magazines are listed for sale. Mrs. Coburn bought complete files of Godey's Lady's Book, Peterson's, and Harper's Bazaar. They date back to 1844.

Some of the magazines came bound twelve issues to the volume. Some are single copies. Mrs. Coburn has cut up the pages of the single issues and has made ten large loose-leaf binders of them. On each page are the pictures of the dresses, corsets, or hats, and on the reverse side the directions for making. The directions are for clothes for adult human beings. (Although we found corsets for "Child From 1 to 2 Years Old" and "Corsets for Girls" of any age). Mrs. Coburn studies these and drafts her own patterns, sometimes. She has one file called "The Book of Accessories." The title is self-explanatory.

Doll pattern-makers and distributors of patterns advertise in hobby magazines, too. Mrs. Coburn gets many of the patterns she uses from these sources. Paradoxically, she drafts patterns now and then for one pattern dealer who is one of her best friends.

"Of course," observes Mrs. Coburn, "patterns have to be altered for dolls, just as for people. Although the dolls come in standard heights and the head measurements in patterns also are made for the doll according to its height, their arms are likely to vary in width and length.

WHEN antique garments or bonnets are to be restored, owners sometimes bring materials of their own selection, but usually they leave everything up to Mrs. Coburn. She hunts for materials suitable to replace the torn or worn out dress and bonnet.

Here, her files come into use. Often before buying or drafting a pattern, Mrs. Coburn has to locate the name of the fashionable article. Her pictures and descriptions in her files supply the necessary information.

Her books on costuming include descriptions, colored pictures, and names dating from 1300. Although these books are expensive, and if out of print cannot be bought in book stores, they may all be consulted at the public library.

She used her files very extensively in order to make the once popular hoop skirt, originally known as "farthingales." There were two kinds of foundations for these. One was simply a bolster made of durable material, stuffed with muslin, with the ends taped for tying around the hips. Over this, the skirts of the pioneer women of Virginia fell in flowing, graceful lengths.

The other was the connected hoops, such as Jenny Lind wore beneath her full skirts. Mrs. Coburn buys the material for these from the five and ten cent store. She prefers a flat wire, but at present is forced to buy stovepipe wire. She makes a series of graduated hoops, usually about four in number, sewed to tapes which are connected by tape reaching from hoop to hoop. The largest circle of wire is at the bottom; the smallest, standing about a half-inch away from the dolls waist, is at the top. At the waist, the tape ends are finished with button and buttonhole, hook and eye, or snaps, for fastening.

The net-collar whale bones serve as corset stays for Mrs. Coburn's costumes. Another source of stays is the metal strips used in making the creases in Red Cross surgical dressings. A trained nurse who works in a hospital sends these to Mrs. Coburn when they are discarded because of rust-stains or roughening. The corset material comes from cotton brocade, old brassieres bought at thrift shops, heavy rep, or any other suitable material.

Incidentally, Mrs. Coburn, uses the pinking shears to finish all seams. Double or turned-in seams would be too bulky for doll-garments.

MRS. COBURN has four advertising mediums: Her store display windows; the cards she attaches to dolls which she dresses for various exhibits; church and neighborhood newspaper advertising, and the enthusiastic word of mouth praise and advertising from people who see her work.

Her store display window is at street level and is filled with dolls she has costumed. This window is positively a magnet, or a Pied Piper, to children who are all welcome to come into the store and gaze through the glass case of hats and garments which they induce their parents to buy.

It also attracts many kinds of customers. For instance, recently a baker who specializes in wedding cakes ordered a bridal couple for his own display window, simply because he passes by Mrs. Coburn's window in his daily walks. For this pair, Mrs. Coburn bought the brother-sister set by a famous doll-maker. They cost her $6.40. She received $35 for them, costumed as a bridal couple. Dressing the dolls took two days. Her card was attached to them.

A fine old doll dressed by Mrs. Coburn for the proprietor of a doll hospital recently brought Mrs. Coburn $20. The materials were furnished by the doll's owner. It took only a day and a half to dress, and, exhibited with Mrs. Coburn's card, brought some orders from other collectors with dolls left at the "hospital."

A set of three dolls dressed for a showing held at a church brought the church-paper solicitation from churches of a different denomination. These dolls are owned by a gymnastics teacher who had one dressed in gym suit of bloomers and middy blouse of the 1920's, and one in the school uniform of the modern American convent school, and one in the French convent school costume. This set was exhibited at a Presbyterian church show. As a result two Roman Catholic churches on widely separated "sides" of the city solicited and obtained Mrs. Coburn's advertisement.

Mrs. Coburn exhibited last fall at a hobby show and a large number of Christmas orders resulted.