Makeover Time! Madame Alexander 18inch Doll Goodwill Find!

Greetings and Salutations Doll Friends!!

I went into Goodwill on Monday on my way home from work... 

I found this beautiful Madame Alexander 18inch doll for only $3.99!! Score!!

Poor beauty had been very shabbily treated!! I try hard not to judge but I just can't imagine treating a doll so poorly. I try to remember that to many people dolls are just 'just another toy' and so are likely treated just like any other bit of plastic and fluff... I know my own daughter has, more than a few times, had her fashion dolls hair get into tangled messes. So it's all a matter of priorities, eh? The good news being is that this particular doll was in for a makeover and residence at the Doll House where all dolls are treated pretty well if I do say so... Teehee.

Her hair was in such disarray that I was a bit convinced that I'd just scalp her and give her a whole new look with a new wig...

When I got her home I was shocked to discover that not only was she wearing a nearly complete (no shoes or tights) outfit... But it was also her 'meet outfit'! Meaning it was the outfit she arrived in when she was new in the box. How did I know this? Because the stitches they put in the clothing to keep it looking it nice, but that also basically sews it on the doll, hadn't ever been removed. Isn't that crazy? Nearly the first thing I want to do when I get a new doll is change her clothes. Haha. Perhaps they didn't have any other doll clothes? Perhaps they didn't like dolls and got her as a gift and just tossed her into the toy box? Who can know? However that meant, to me, that I had just gotten a nearly new Madame Alexander deluxe doll for $3.99!! Why do I call her a deluxe doll? Because she has 'rubber' feeling limbs and a good armature... I will have to pull out a couple of different Madame Alexander dolls soon and show you the differences. They've been released by several different stores under different names and the quality differs depending on which they were. Once you get interested in 18inch dolls, it can kind of blow your mind the seemingly endless 'kinds' there are!! For someone who is a collector, like me, this is dangerous information. Because you end up like "I want one of ALL the dolls!!". Or one of each type and then one of each variety and on and on.... Then there are customs which opens a whole new can of worms! You see the hazard? Oh well, there are worse things to worry about than having too many dolls. Eh? 

I didn't have anything to loose by trying to fix her hair.... I brushed it out as well as I could with my doll/wig hairbrush, washed and conditioned it and then hot dipped it and brushed it out again. In the initial brushing she lost a bit of hair but given that she was still in her meet outfit, I don't think she'd ever lost any before due to rough brushing or styling... She'd just been dumped into the toy box gotten Toy-Box-Dread-Locks very organically just like people get them in real life; by not brushing or washing or doing anything at all to her hair! Haha! So... Once I brushed it out, despite having lost a bit, it was still full and pretty!

Here she is, all cleaned up and brushed out....

And after her hair dried....

When I first found her I thought she'd look a lot like the other brown hair and brown eyes Madame Alexander doll I own named Mary.

But once I got her home, I realized that they weren't twins at all! I can't decide for sure but I think that they might even have different face sculpts...?

I've always thought Mary had a sort of middle eastern look to her... Hence my naming her Mary after Jesus' mother. I thought she could very well look a lot like Mary might have....

Whereas the new Madame Alexander, who I've decided to name Patti, looks a bit more like the 'girl next door' American, if that is a good description. I named her after my lovely friend Patti who I have breakfast and Bible study with every week because she looks a lot like her! 

Here she is with Mary and Nicky (the blonde, another MA doll) 

They are both so pretty! Do you think they have different sculpts? I can't decide!

Out of time! Happy Friday! Have a great weekend!

Till next time!

XXOO
Heather

Belle's Big Wig Transformation!

Greetings and Salutations Doll Friends!

For those of you who've read past blog postings here, you may remember that Belle, our Disney Princess and Me doll, has gone through quite a transformation. First, we cleaned her up after finding her at the Flea Market. She was a mess when she arrived! We have since had a couple of attempts at improving her over all condition. One of them was the subject of a recent post about the hot water dip method to tame frizzy doll hair. It was our last ditch attempt to fix her hair. Unfortunately, she'd lost a lot of hair before we got her I imagine which can happen if you roughly brush a dolls hair and, well, you saw how she was! Poor Belle! So after the hot water dip didn't make such an improvement that I thought she looked respectable, I decided to try my first re-wig on a doll with hair plugs that isn't the standard kind of 18" doll, like I did here. I was determined to try because I thought she deserved a nice thick head of hair!

So here are the last photos of Belle before I began to cut off her hair. 

Notice how she has a lot of cut hair. Or perhaps it is how her hair plugs were originally put in so she could have the cute little bun on the top of her head like she did when she came new. 

So here we are sort of mid way.... You may want to put down an old sheet on the area you are working, under your chair and whatnot. I didn't and I am trust me, the little tiny doll hair fragments are not very easy to clean up. Learn from my education and put a sheet down so you can shake it off in the yard later! I cut my dolls hair off over a big trash can so that most of it fell right into the trash! I still ended up with little bitty hair fragments all over both me and the doll but... Small price to pay for beauty, right?

Belle felt a bit sick during the process and I told her to hold her head over that bucket! Just kidding! I put her like this when I went on a break and laughed at how it looked like she was really not feeling well. Poor Belle!

So here she is, mostly hair free! She is still pretty in my opinion and looks very Sinead O'Conner or Annie Lennox, both of whom I thought looked amazing with closely cropped locks. 

I thought it was kind of fun that she had Belle written on her skull. Just in case she needs to be identified at the doll morgue or by archaeologists in a future land excavation or maybe so they know which head mold to put on her at the factory. Who knows?!

She had very interesting hair plugs, there was this strange 'patch' in the middle where her bun hair was located. It was much more densely plugged in that area. There is still a lot of hair to be taken off in this photo but it was the last one I thought to take. Just remove as much hair as you can!! Whatever hair is left will make it harder for the wig to stick was my thinking so I wanted to remove as much as possible!

Here she is all cleaned up after she got her hair removed. There was a lot of little hairs all over her!! I put a hat on her so she wouldn't be cold! 

Here she is, hanging out and waiting for her new wig to come in the mail!

This is obviously after the wig arrived! This is how I slathered the glue on. I put it on as thick as possible but not till it might drip or seep up through the wig cap. Learned that one the hard way!

She had a trickier hair line that my first hair-plugged doll re-wig. She has a widows peak and wigs don't have those. So I had to be very careful about getting the wig as close to the hairline as possible in all areas on the forehead. I think she lost a little bit of her forehead, if you will, in this process but there was no going back now! 

Here she is with the wig on, drying. She looks a bit rough because you want to let it sit 24 hours before you brush her hair!

Well, that's it Doll Friends!! Thanks for stopping by and see you soon as I have several blogs in the works! One is about transforming a girl doll into a boy doll! So, stay tuned, same bat-time, same bat-channel!!

A Re-Visit of Belle's Make-Over -OR- How to De-tangle Doll Hair!

Greetings and Salutations Doll Friends!

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!