A Special Collage Project Leads to a Very Special Find

This collage was fun to make and lead me to a surprising and successful search. The photos didn't have very much damaged. The usual spots, scratches and every once in a while you get a photo with film distortion like the white patches in this photo below.

Before with white film distortion

To make the photo a little more interesting I added color to the child's clothes. Since this is a collage about my husband as a child. Colorizing only his clothes in all the photos I wanted to bring the attention to him. Wasn't he a little cutie? Or as my friend Martha would say "Isn't he a Cuuutie Pie?"




After



Before



After

               












These are my before and after. Restoring photos is fun and interesting. You really get to see the whole picture, every nook and cranny, from a distance and up close. For instance this photo of him with his favorite toy as a child a little monkey doll he called Joe Mindy after a famous monkey at the Detroit Zoo.  Ron always asked me to look for this monkey doll in antique stores. Well I didn't know what this monkey looked like. This photo shows Joe Mindy. After much work on this picture and thinking (I do a lot of thinking working on pictures). I am going to ask my antique selling friends at the The Vintage Village.com http://thevintagevillage.com/ They gave me very good advice and I found a monkey doll on eBay. Viewing the 2 photos side by side, this is definitely Ron's monkey. Upon discovering it's a Monko Monkey, this lead to a better eBay and Google search finding several others. I surprised my husband with this find, but only he could choose the one that looked most like his Joe Mindy.



Ron's original Joe Mindy

Jo Mendi II,  Monko monkey circa late 1930's -1940's

So he chose this one. Here is Jo Mendi II that sits in Ron's favorite room. I now spell his name correctly after Ron did some research on the famous monkey from the Detroit Zoo. Once Jo Mendi II arrived, my mother-in-law recognized him too. He is not the exact doll my husband had but it's close enough and made him very happy.

So moms, don't throw out your children's favorite toy. It takes years for them to find it again. Plus it costs much much more!