Searching for dolls

This year, I've been pretty disappointed in dolls. Tonner and Wilde Imagination are no more. Kish and Company swear they still exist but they don't seem to be making dolls anymore. I don't have the patience required to get one of Dianna Effner's Little Darlings. I'm not designed to wait twelveteen thousand years for things. Meanwhile I've gotten increasingly disappointed with the selection of dolls available in big stores at the moment. But I've also insisted on investigating exactly what's available.

I found a small toy store with a great range of Our Generation accessories and mini dolls. I'm not a fan of their 18 inch dolls. Their noses look weirdly adult and their lips generally look like they're about to go into anaphylaxis but I rather like the mini dolls. (Kmart has Our Generation too, but the range is usually very limited and they don't have the mini dolls.) I'm considering getting some of the accessories as props for my 14 inch dolls. I figure they're generally kind of small in scale to the dolls they're meant for so they may work with a smaller doll. I'm also finding that the two big dolls carried by our local Kmart (April and May Lee) are actually growing on me.

I also rediscovered a relatively local toy shop that I loved as a kid because they had heaps of Playmobil and Sylvanian Families and all the european dolls like Corolle and Gotz. They don't have that stuff anymore but they do still have My Scene dolls (including the creepy ones that "grow up") and original Bratz and Hannah Montana and all sorts of extremely outdated stuff in stock. It's not stuff I want (although I was tempted to spend a LOT of money just because "You can't get these anymore!") but it was fun to see.

Almost a toy museum!

We also went to ToysRUs. Usually I find ToysRUs disappointing. I imagine it as a wonderland of toys then find they have the exact same stock as everywhere else. Just more of it. This time I was actually impressed. They had a lot more range than the other places we've been. They had the Disney Princess and Me dolls (Ariel anyway), they had Lalaloopsies, and a whole bunch of dolls I've read about but never seen. I nearly bought one of the Lalaloopsy minis with changeable clothes and wigs, except they only had them in playsets with a styling table or a sewing table and they were fifty dollars which just seemed silly.

They also had this Sylvanian Family furhiture set that made me laugh.

Somehow I think this company and I have different opinions

on what counts as a "working fireplace"

I also discovered a line of Australian 18 inch dolls called Florrie, that I'm really impressed by. (On the other hand, don't even ask my opinion of Australian Girl dolls.) I don't know that I want one but their concept store sounds really amazing and I would like to check it out. 

I've looked into getting a Wellie Wishers doll. I COULD get one through the American Girl website BUT the shipping would be sixty us dollars, effectively doubling the cost of the doll. I'm not sure I can make peace with that.

I'm also finding myself drawn to the Maru and Friends mini pals. They'd fit in well to my doll collection but I still have to find out if they ship internationally.

I ended up spending my birthday money on an Emma Wiggle doll and a Made to Move Barbie. I'm considering doing a mysterious something to Emma (not entirely sure what yet) and switching out the Barbie's head for a more interesting one. (They only had boring, blonde, blue eyed ones with candy pink make-up) Just have to work out how. We don't have heat guns or heat pads and we don't even own a hair dryer, so I'm going to have to do some research and see if it can be done using hot water somehow.

But right now our big thing is the Giant Baby. (As ot should be) We've had a few issues over the last few months with strangers mistaking him for a three or four year old and then openly discussing his behaviour and why he's not talking. Asking if he's deaf or autistic. If we've had him tested. If we've heard about this or that early intervention program.

We know he's behind in talking. But he shows no sign of being autistic or deaf (that I'm aware of) though, and he has only just turned two, so he's not as behind as people think he is. Except the nurse at his two year check up wasn't happy with it so now I'm running around, calling various places and waiting for call backs to arrange hearing and developmental tests and of course freaking out that maybe something is wrong after all. I'm confident that there's not anything wrong but I'm also aware that denial can be pretty powerful in these cases.

He has his first set of tests tomorrow, it'll be great to just get that out of the way.

Weird or not, he's still pretty!

There's something weird going on with the font sizes in this post. I keep changing them to "Normal" but for some reason bits keep showing as "Smallest" no matter how many times I try to change it.

Tiny Tuesday - Re-ment stuff

So, you know about my little Re-ment skeleton, but he's not the only piece of Re-ment that I got for my birthday. I also bought his house and a sword accessory set to go with him. (Actually I prefer the sword set as a standalone piece without the skeleton getting involved.) I also bought the complete Taisho Roman set from the Petite Sample series, partly because I suspected the furniture would work with the skeleton, partly because I wanted to check out the scale of the Re-ment pieces.
I've long admired Re-ment but never bought any in the past. It can be hard to get in my part of the world (I got my skeleton and his stuff from a Japanese seller on Ebay and the Taisho Roman set was ordered from this Hong-Kong based online store.) But also a lot of their stuff is food and for some reason although I love toy kitchens, I don't actually have much interest in toy food. But I've long been curious about the scale of their stuff. It's usually described as 1:6 scale but most of the pictures I've seen of it, it's posed with Sylvanian families toys which definitely are not 1:6 scale. I had come to the conclusion that the scale was not at all consistent and like a lot of toy lines, the furniture would be a far smaller scale than the accessories.

Anyway, I digress, because I'm going to start with the Pose Skeleton stuff I bought.
The room display that I got is Japanese in style, there's also a western room set available, and I think it cost me $17 including shipping. It has a sturdy plastic base, the flooring is textured to look like some kind of woven reed or grass mats with an empty square section in the middle.

An extra double-sided piece fits in the centre hole. One side up, it's an extension of the grass matting, the other way up, it's a little pit of sand with a place to have a fire.

It also comes with two cardboard backdrops. Both of these are double-sided, so you have a choice of four room scenes to display. These slot into grooves on the base, when I first got mine the grooves were extremely tight, making it difficult to get the backdrops in place, but with a little bit of play, they loosened right up.

One of my favourite things about these backdrops, is that where there are paintings on the walls that would normally contain human figures, the figures have been replaced by skeletons. I like the way this implies the Pose Skeletons actually inhabit a world peopled by skeletons, somehow in my mind, this makes them cuter and less creepy. But at the same time the skeletons in the art aren't immediately noticeable so wouldn't necessarily prevent you using this backdrop for non-skeleton figures.
Also included in this set are two hard plastic floor cushions to sit on, and a tiny metal kettle.

And of course everything is perfectly scaled to the skeletons.

The sword set is also scaled to the skeletons as it's also part of the Pose Skeleton range.
There is a "wooden" base with a decorated screen backing

A lantern and uchiko

A uchiko is a little silk bag on a stick, filled with powdered stone. It's tapped against the back of the sword so the powder settles over the sword, absorbing any oils, before the sword is wiped clean, polished and reoiled. . . well, not so much this one. This one's all plastic.

There are also two swords of different lengths, complete with sheaths, and a stand for them

The hilts of these swords have great painted details and I love that the sheaths are separate, the only slight disappointment is that the molded cords around the sheaths haven't been painted. The boys in my house tell me these are probably a katana (the larger one) and a wakizashi.
 All set up it looks like this

I don't have any pictures of the skeleton interacting with this set because I actually prefer it without him.

Now for the Taisho Roman set. I chose this set because I thought the furniture would work with the skeleton but I also liked it enough that I would still want it if it didn't. There are eight individual sets in this bigger set, unfortunately I was too excited to open this stuff, to wait until I'd photographed the packaging so I have no pictures of that. Actually I was so excited I (somewhat stupidly) opened the first box right in front of the Giant Baby who immediately seized this tea trolley, ran off with it and lost one of the tiny back wheels!

Anyway here are pictures of the sets. . .

All of the little details are amazing! The drinks are separate pieces that lift out of the cups. The fan in the first set can be removed from the fan holder. The cupboards of the side board open and close. The record in the last set can be removed from it's sleeve, placed on the record player and then the needle arm can actually be moved into place over the record!

 The only disappointing piece is the cake box in the fifth set, it's made of flimsy magazine like glossy paper and not folded anywhere near crisply enough. It looks messy.

As I predicted, the scale is all over the place! The armchair I would estimate to be roughly 1:18 scale. Here it is between a 1:12 scale dollhouse chair and a Shopkins Happy Places chair that I would describe as closer to 1:24 scale.

Yet the cup from set five looks completely different between it's dollhouse and Shopkins equivalents

 And if you tried to fill that cup with the kettle that came with the house set? It'd take a while

It looks nice with Frankie though so it would probably suit most dolls of similar sizes

What scale is used varies from item to item with no obvious reasoning but if you had a variety of dolls in different sizes you could probably find a use for everything. And each little box comes with a paper item as well - magazine pages, placemats and other things. I haven't cut any of these out yet but my favourite is this set of family photos.

And little Mordecai Skellington looks very happy with his new furniture

Tiny Tuesday. Re-ment Pose Skeleton.

 This was nearly a very different post. The Giant Husband gave me a budget to buy something that I wanted for my birthday. I immediately decided to order some Reutter Porzellan miniatures for my dollhouse. (If you don't know what these are, here's a link. They're lovely.) Which I would have written about here. Unfortunately the shop that I like to order Reutter stuff from (because they're fairly local, cheap and friendly) was closed for most of March and somehow I ended up finding something else entirely different somewhere else.

 Meet Mordecai, a miniature (extremely) posable skeleton by Re-ment. If you don't know Re-ment, they are a Japanese company that make miniature, blindbox toys. A lot of their stuff seems to be food, from the pictures I've seen online a lot of it's amazing, this is the first piece that I've seen in real life. The Pose Skeleton comes in a few different sizes. Mine is the first one they released (understandably marked #1 on the packaging) this one was, as far as I can tell, just a skeleton. Since they released this one, they've added #2 - a child, #3 - a slightly taller figure with a more aggressive face which is male, #4 - a slightly shorter figure with a detatchable hair bow and a more smiley face which is female. There's also a dog, a cat, accessories and furniture plus dinosaurs and animal skeletons. (I'm pretty sure the dinosaur and animal skeletons are a totally different scale to these figures though.)

 This little guy is TINY and incredibly detailed.

 In all honesty I have no idea if he's an "accurate" skeleton (I'm fairly rubbish at science in all it's forms.) but he looks extremely impressive. He's made of off-white plastic but there's plenty of shading to highlight the details. And he has an amazing number of joints. His head sits on a ball-joint. His jaw is jointed so it opens and closes. He also has a ball joint at his waist and more in his shoulders, hips, knees and ankles. His elbows are hinged. Probably the only disappointment is that his wrists are not jointed. BUT his hands do rotate in their sockets, because they're removable. AND he comes with a second extra set of grasping hands!

I'm not sure if it's just me but the grasping hands seem whiter to me than the regular hands. More importantly these are unbelievably small. I'm caught somewhere between being terrified I'm going to lose one, or just calmly accepting that I will inevitably lose one!

How is he supposed to pick his hands up, without any hands?

Altogether this little guy is eight centimetres (or 3 inches if you prefer) tall. The Re-ment website says he's nine centimetres but I think they must be measuring him with his feet stretched out, making his legs seem longer, because lying flat-footed on a ruler he is exactly eight centimetres.

Like a tiny, little fairy!

To give you a better idea of his proportions, I snapped a few, quick photos with some other dolls.

Monster High's Frankie Stein makes him look like a rag doll. . .

But they look really cute together!

This Living Dead mini doll (which has the same body and size as Barbie's old sister Kelly) makes him look tiny and delicate. . .

"When I said you were big, I didn't mean it like THAT!"

This Heidi Ott dollhouse doll (4 inches high) looks oversized and clumsy by comparison. . .

But he is posable enough to ride her rocking horse, even though she isn't. . .

And he's a fairly similar size to the mini Shopkins dolls and the mini Lalaloopsys. . .

But he doesn't look comfortable at all!

I have had a great time playing with this guy. His jointing takes a little getting used to. Mostly because he's so small that it can be tricky to move one joint without accidentally moving another. And moving his head or jaw very often generally results in his entire jaw falling off!

He is 1:18 scale. Which means he probably should work well with furniture made for Sylvanian Families (Calico Critters) or Little Woodees and Lundby dollhouse sets. Or maybe even Playmobil. Unfortunately I don't have any of this stuff to test that theory but he does fit in quite well with some of the Shopkins Happy Places stuff. . .

If they look a little wet, it's because I assumed this lounge would float.

I was wrong.

And some of the more delicate 1:12 scale dollhouse stuff actually works quite well with him, like this Reutter outhouse. . .

I couldn't help myself.

He also reminded me of one of the reasons why I loved tiny, little toys as a kid. Because I could sneak them into places that I wasn't supposed to take toys. Yep. He came to work with me.

He explored. . .

Climbed the cabinets. . .

Admired the artwork. . .

Made friends. . .

Wondered how the heck he was supposed to ride the horses. . .

And posed for pictures. . .

I am incredibly happy with this little guy and am already plotting to maybe get him a family, or to maybe buy a Sylvanian Families house (Little Woodeez are cheaper but they seem to have vanished from all our local stores so maybe they don't make them anymore?) and spookify it for him. For better or worse he is giving me a LOT of crazy ideas.

One thing I will say is that he cost me $15.50 with shipping from Japan. While I was looking for him, I saw him at a variety of prices, one ebay ad (that looked a little dodgey) had him for much less than what I paid, but also a lot of places were selling him for forty dollars, or more. As cool as he is, he's not worth that much. I wouldn't recommend paying more than about twenty dollars for him.