An interesting look at baby girls toys,and toys for girls way back in history.

Early toys for girls way back as the 10th century consisted of....

In 200 A.D. (after Christ), the first skates were used in Scandinavia. Can you imagine skating on an ice rink with skates made of iron? They would be very heavy, wouldn't they?

Kites became popular in China. It's possible that kites have been flown since before the first recordings in 1890.

Viking children..Little girl's dolls were made from a spoon with cloth wrapped around it and a face scraped or painted on.
Medieval children didn't have many toys. Their toys would mostly have been made at home. Games like Blindman's Buff and Catch were played by adults as well as children. The Vikings also had board games such as chess and hnafltafl (King's Table) .

Dolls were hand-carved with mortise and tenon joints, had painted faces and wore fashionable clothes.

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Dutch Dolls on cards published by Thomas de la Rue c1903

By the 19th and 20th centuries wood dolls were considered cheap, throw-away items. Stump dolls which had no legs were carved from a single piece of wood and painted in bright colours. A popular development in this period were the jointed peg woodens with painted faces and feet which were made in sets of various sizes in the Grodener Tal region of Austria. Map makers such as John Spilsbury first published 'dissected puzzles' in the 1760s.

Porcelain Dolls

18th century wooden doll

Three types of porcelain dolls were produced; glazed china, untinted bisque and bisque. Each head was produced in a mould and usually fired three times and glazed twice. The first firing produce the bisque or ‘biscuit’ base and subsequent firings fused the painted decoration and glazes on the head. Each mould was used 40 or 50 times before being discarded. Many German porcelain factories that produced household items began to manufacture bisque heads and limbs. Thuringia was the home of many manufacturers including Simon & Halbig, established in 1869 and Armand Marseille, 1890. Large numbers of doll heads were exported and attached to bodies at a later date. Kammer & Reinhardt and Cuno and Otto Dressel used the heads to produce complete dolls for retail.

My Dolly and I', The Infants Magazine, 1879

France was also a leading doll manufacturer. Jumeau produced bisque head dolls with jointed composition bodies. In 1899 the French companies amalgamated to form the Societe Francaise de Fabrication de Bebes et Jouets in order to compete with German competition.

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