Deconstructing Donatina

Out of my Kindi Kids, I declared Donatina to be my experiment doll. I like her least of the four and she had this weird thing going in with little strands of hair sticking out of her eye sockets.

To start with, here's a look at her construction.

Her torso size looks like it would fit big Lalaloopsy clothes. But there's no way her giant ham hands are going through sleeves made for a twig armed Lalaloopsy.
She has a bobble head, which is actually a fun feature. And her eyes are inset but from the start, I assumed they were disks like the Royal Reflections dolls have, rather than orbs.
Her hair rooting is pretty rubbish. There's about a finger's width between the rows, so any hairstyle will have to be fairly similar to her original hairstyle or she's going to look like she's got Alopecia.

Here you can almost see some of the little strands of hair that are caught between her eyes and her eye sockets. There's more I haven't drawn arrows to but those are the ones that showed up best. (And even those didn't show up very well)

The base of her head where her neck joins on, has a hard plastic ring set into it. This is part of the bobble head mechanism. A little squeezing showed that the ring was wider than the hole in her head. "So it has a lip?" I thought  "A little heat should make that workable." And it was going to take heat because the vinyl of their heads feels pretty hard.

So, I dug out the obscenely expensive hair dryer I bought ten years ago, and used maybe twice but other than making the baby cry it really had no effect.

So I boiled the kettle and dug out a mixing bowl big enough to fit a giant head in. I was a little apprehensive about doing this at first and kept thinking that water might damage her eyes, but then I remembered that the entire point was to get her eyes out because I hate them.

I soaked her head in a fifty fifty mix of freshly boiled water and cold tap water. It was a little disconcerting because she kept floating, so I had to hold her head under, which really felt like I was drowning her!

And I discovered that Moose were right when they said the heads aren't removable. There is no way that sucker is coming off! Because the bobble head mechanism means that, that isn't a plug with a lip at the base of her head. The mechanism is a cylinder and extends as far as my thumb in this picture

There's actually a narrower piece that extends even further! But I couldn't feel it until I softened her head.

At this point I went to pace in the garden and think (I said I was taking the dog to the toilet, I was actually going outside to swear without the children learning fun, new, words) I figured I had three options. One - make a cut in the base of the dolls head to see if that gave enough room to pull the mech out. Two - cut a hole in the back of her head and remove her eyes that way. Which would be fiddly given the hulking thing I'd be working around. Or three - abandon eye removal and just paint over her eyes. I'm  an idiot. Clearly.

I had left her face down in the mixing bowl. When I got her out, I squeezed her head and her eye sockets gaped a bit. So, I squeezed a bit more and her eye popped right out! YAY!

And spent the next three hours telling the Giant Baby to leave them alone.

The eye chips were harder to take apart than I expected. But with the help of my trusty craft knife, they popped apart, pretty easily.

And the glitter wiped off amazingly easily.

And now for the embarrassing "I've jumped the gun!" part. I can't actually put her back together because I still have no idea what I'm going to do with her! I mean at this point I mostly need to know what colour and style of eyes to give her. And I've got nothing.

So I'm off to seek inspiration.  .  .