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Community Corner

Mending Dolls a Labor of Love—and International Business—for Jostes

If it's broken, cracked, missing an eye or any of a million other problems that can afflict a well-loved friend, chances are this "hospital" can fix it. One patient even resembled a well-known Oak Forest musician.

Lazy eyes, loose limbs, cracked faces and missing appendages are not child’s play for Rosalie Jostes.

With a 100-year-old brunette in a long blue dress staring wide-eyed to her left and tiny clothes hanging to her right, Jostes stands at the ready to perfect her next patient, no matter how long it takes, at the Dollmenders Doll Hospital in downtown Plainfield.

Her porcelain face could be cracked in half. Or she could be a 1950s mannequin with busted fingers, or a family heirloom from Ireland in need of cleaning for a christening gift. Or a delicate fairy whose dangling leg interfered with a ceiling fan.

Or the next patient could be a 12-inch rock star with leather pants and long hair whose tricky hazel eye color needs a little tweaking.

“I thought Kiss has their own dolls so why can’t Steven Reimer have his own doll?” said Jodi Landes, who asked Jostes to create a doll that looks like her best friend Reimer, a well-known heavy metal singer from Oak Forest, as a Christmas gift. “The doll looks like him to a T.”

Landes, a hair stylist from Channahon whose clients include Jostes, said she’d supplied five photos of Reimer to Jostes, who made the rocker doll’s tiny cross necklace herself and crafted the wig from human hair.

“Everyone who’s seen the doll loves it,” Landes said. “Even my kids are impressed. Rosalie did an excellent job.”

At Dollmenders, it’s not every day that heavy metal and porcelain collide. Jostes – a mother of four, grandmother of four and fairy godmother to hundreds of dolls – will make a custom doll like the Reimer Rocker on occasion, but she is recognized nationally and beyond as the go-to gal for porcelain doll repair. She makes cracks disappear, rebuilds faces, restores finish and re-strings limbs.

It’s not uncommon for Jostes to be handling dolls dating back to the early 1900s.

“If they’ve survived that long, they deserve respect,” Jostes said of her preference for porcelain. “I especially like to repair the antique dolls. Old dolls break cleaner. New porcelain will shatter into shards when breaking and takes more filling.”

Customers drop off their dolls at Dollmenders, a small room inside the Tawny Tortoise gift shop on Lockport Street. Jostes takes them to her Channahon home to repair, with messy jobs handled in the basement and urgent repairs right at the dining room table. She has a thousand doll arms and legs in stock, but still may not have just the right one and will spend months finding it if necessary.

Her husband Phil Jostes taught himself how to airbrush a decade ago to help out when Jostes was overwhelmed with dolls in disrepair.

“He didn’t know one doll from another,” she said, “but he was a quick learner and now he is president of the Doll Doctors Association.”

The couple travels to Maryland twice a year for meetings with the 155-member association.

He works mostly with composition dolls, which were typically made from wood chips and glue in the 1920s to ’50s.

Rosalie Jostes, who served as vice president of the Doll Doctors Association and founded the Illinois chapter, taught herself doll repair and restoration through a correspondence course, “long before computers,” receiving materials the old-fashioned way through the mail.

She made a rag doll and practiced on a plastic doll recycled from a garage sale. Jostes, who worked as a secretary in a doctor’s office for 25 years, studied doll repair for a year and earned certification in 1994.

“I just have always liked dolls,” said Jostes, who slept with dolls packed all around her as a child. “I never really thought why.”

Today her customers come from local circles to as far away as Ireland. At any given time, she has some 30 doll repairs in the works.

The Dollmenders Doll Hospital is small, but has a huge reputation.

On occasion, Jostes may be called upon for expert opinion from doll lovers around the country. The Arizona Daily Star, for example, recently relied on her to identify a reader’s doll as Japanese-made and from the 1920s or ’30s.

Dolls from last century may sound expensive to repair, but that’s not always the case, even given the amount of time Jostes will dedicate toward locating exactly the right part or perfecting a tricky crack. A recent bill, for example, was only $25 for a porcelain-head doll from 1910 or 1915 in need of a new finger.

“It’s hard to price,” she said. “It’s like a car: You can’t say till you get under the hood. It depends on the type of doll and how difficult the repair is. Sometimes things go smoothly and other times it takes forever.”

Custom dolls are reasonably priced, too. The Reimer Rocker was $40.

“She certainly considers her clients’ budget when engaging in restoration or development,” Plainfield artist Tom Tracey said. “It's clearly about the passion and the joy of what she's doing.”

He commissioned Jostes to create action figures for a Web-based comic book a few years ago and paid $30 apiece.

“She handcrafted a half dozen of the heads and faces for an incredibly fair price,” Tracey said. “The pictures came alive because of her work.”

Dollmenders Doll Hospital is located at 24012 W. Lockport St. in Plainfield inside the Tawny Tortoise. Rosalie Jostes is available from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays. Dolls may also be dropped off from 9:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. Mondays to Saturdays and 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sundays. A secondary drop-off site is at Anna B’s Antiques, 14330 Beacon Ave., Orland Park. For more information, call 815-467-6472 or visit www.dollmenders.com.

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