Daisy and Daisyette

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The year was 1911. Little girls in the USA were about to be offered a chance of a lifetime. The magazine Ladies Home Journal was about to initiate a subscription campaign. If you signed up three subscriptions, and added the sum of $4.50 you were promised a premium that made any little girl happy. They were not told the exact details, but they had followed the Lettie Lane paper doll series in the Journal for quite some time. They were now being promised that this doll would “come to life”, and she could be their very own doll. Each little girl sighed and dreamed how to obtain three subscriptions. The successful little entrepreneurs were eventually rewarded with a “Daisy”, a beautiful 18 inch doll direct from Germany.

The campaign was a huge success. There were initially 5,000 dolls ordered and the total grew to 26,000. The dolls came from at least two different factories in Germany. One factory was Kestner, and the other known factory was the Handwerk factory, using Simon & Halbig porcelain heads.

Our Daisy reproduction is so authentic, people will believe her head to be an antique. The fact is that each head is signed and dated by the doll artist Shirlee Baxendell, or Laura Kelley. We are offering the doll on a fully jointed (15 piece) composition body. For those interested in shelf size, or Bleuette size dolls, we are also making 10.5” Daisyettes on a combination wood and composition body. Costume patterns for the original dresses are also offered for both size dolls. For those who do not prefer to sew, we offer commercially made dresses also