As I mentioned in a recent post, I rescued a Belle Princess and Me doll last year from a second hand source. She was quite a mess. You can read about when she came home to the Doll House here. She's been well played with and loved since that post. She hasn't been featured in the Doll House since I've started posting again this year, in fact, because she was so mortified by the state of her hair.
As you can see, she had a bit of a cause for concern. I am not trying to be all Judgy-Judge-McJudgerson here but, well, it's a bit of a frizzy and uncontrollable mess! We never were able to get it tamed too much and she lives most of her life in pony tails. When she came from the box, she had pony tail in the top of her head and while it made for a cute style in the box, with a crown around the pony tail, it made for pretty messy hair on a doll after she's been played with at all.
You can see how we try to pin her strange little pony tail into her hair, attempting to look like a 'bump' beehive type hair-do.
Still, her hair always look like cotton candy or something. Brown cotton candy.
So, given that I had just planned a re-wig of Liberty I wondered if I shouldn't just shear off her hair and give her a whole new hair as well. So I asked my friends at My Dolls House group on Facebook what they thought. More than one of them recommended 'the hot water dip'. The what? Hot water dip is exactly what it is. You boil water, wait for five minutes for it to cool off slightly, dip in the dolls hair, let it stay in for 30 seconds, pull out, carefully because it was just in boiling water wring it out with towels. Then, working from bottom, you work out all the tangles and make it lay as strait as possible. You can find a tutorial here.
Hot water!! Here she is, all ready to go in the water. Note that I've brushed her hair as tangle free as possible and have her hair above her head and ready to dip. I probably should've covered her eyes with something, like band-aids, to protect her eyes, but I think I mentioned I am a fly-by-seat-of-pants type.
So I dipped her. Then started brushing. It didn't look good, look at how sparse her hair is. I suspect that harsh brushing, prior to us owning her, resulted in her having lost a lot of hair out of those hair plugs. I have compared her to our other Disney Princess and Me Dolls and she her hair volume is down by at least half. So... She looked rather dreadful in the comb out.
Just kept brushing it strait and brushing it strait. With a doll wig brush!!
She still has that strange pony tail in the top of her head.
But she is looking lots better already, even with her hair wet.
So... Just a matter of letting it dry now and see how it comes out.
Meanwhile, we needed to re-visit her chest joint issue. She came to us with a bit of a hunch-back. I think she must've lived in a toy box and that is murder on dolls like this. So, unless she had tape to help her stand strait, she was a hunchback. When we first got her, we used blue electrical tape to mend her. It didn't stand up very well over the last year because she also got played with here. The tape had slipped and wasn't really doing it's job anymore. So it was time for a new 'bandage'!
We'd recently acquired a roll of fancy duct tape and I decided it would make a perfect fix. Duct tape is more durable than electrical tape and I just held her strait and taped around her. I used several different lengths, rather than one long length, to navigate around so it would lay right. Worked like a charm.
Another problem she came to us with was someone had painted her face. You can still kind of see, in her right eye, the red around the very edge of her eye. I got most of the paint out of it but that bit is impossible. Her lips are also a bit stained and I plan a total repaint of them. Will update blog when I get them done but for now, I wanted to get her teeth painted back to their original white. As you can see, her white teeth paint had worn off and so she had a pink line in her teeth area.
So I fixed her teeth and they look so much better! I plan to repaint her lips because right now they look chapped!
So... Her hair dried and I think it looks about 100% better. It's still thin and I may very well re-wig her at some point. In the meantime though, at least she can show her face in the Doll House without feeling embarrassed about her hair!
So here she is, for the first time in over a year, in the Doll House! She's decided to have wear a knit hat because then you can't even see her strange little pony tail at all. She looks like her hair is straitened and pretty!
Here she is in the Doll House with all the other Disney Princess and Me Dolls we have. We've gotten them all second hand and I love them all to bits! They are so pretty! Each one has it's on unique face mold so they really do look like their namesakes in the movies.
As Liberty found out, make-overs make you have a large appetite! She even ordered the same breakfast that Liberty had with her make-over!
That's it for today at the Doll's House. See you next time!
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