My Collection. Part Four.

And now for something completely different!

My Living Dead Dolls.
These dolls are not everybody's cup of tea. A lot of them aren't even my cup of tea. All of mine are fairly "nice" for Living Dead Dolls. They're ten inches tall and come packed in cardboard coffins, with a little slip of paper with their name, date of death, and a little poem about how they died.
Most of mine were presents from my brother, then I bought a few. But at the end of the day, while they're fun novelties, the dolls are cheaply made and the quality of their clothes started slipping, and I lost interest.

Before I show you pictures, I will warn you, they are DUSTY! I never dust them because I think they look better dusty.

This is Hollow. She was my first. She originally had very pale grey eyes and lips but I painted over them. My brother thought I could use her as a doll of Claudia from Interview with a vampire, and she had the added bonus of coming with a coffin. Except I felt everything about her was too harsh, her coffin had no lid, and her hair is only rooted around the edges of her hairline, so she only looks good in pigtails.

This is Spaceboy, the pirate. He used to be Wolfgang and had bloody gashes all over his face but I sanded them off, repainted his face, changed his name and made him new clothes. I deliberately made his clothes badly, and kind of regret it now, because I worry they will fall apart. But for a ghost pirate child that's crawled out of a sunken ship, his clothes are ok.

This is Rain. Her outfit and feathery wings are awesome. I changed her eyes, her irises were black and almost rolled right back into her head. I think I would like her more if I had changed her face more. She has long black hair and as usual, with dolls that have long hair and wings, it's hard to find a way to make them not look stupid together. Seriously. Imagine you had ankle length hair, that wasn't tied back, and wings. Then imagine trying to fly like that. I'm sure that would just be painful, and so would untangling it later.

This is Simone with her pet cat. The cat is separate but his claws are sharp and her dress is a bit creepy, so the cat can claw onto her dress. I think she'd look awesome in one of those muslin "lingerie" dresses everyone wore in the early 1900s, but I've never done anything with her. (Except let the Giant Baby play with her as an Elsa doll, until his dad agreed to let him get an Elsa doll.)

This is Jubilee. She has awesome ringlets. And her arm fell off. I don't know if it's fixable. It broke when we moved and I have been shoving the broken arm behind her on the shelf, putting off looking at it, because I really like her and want her to be fixable, and don't want to find out if she isn't. If that makes sense.

And this is Tessa. I'm not a huge fan of Tessa. She has no eyes, just empty, melty, bloody, eye sockets. Sometimes I think I could sand away some of the grossness and give her inset eyes, but more often than not, I consider her a bit of a lost cause.

These last three are mini dolls. They used the Kelly Doll body with a unique head.

This one was repainted, restyled, redressed by me. I don't remember her original name.

This is Lottie? I think that was her name. The mini dolls didn't just come in coffins, they came with little string nooses attached to keyrings. Which I kind of felt was overkill.

And the Bride of Valentine. She wears awesome Kelly sized army boots and I'm actually kind of surprised I never stole them for my Kellys!




Doll count : 51

My Collection. Part Three.

I was going to post this yesterday. But I wanted to put everyone back in their original outfits, and the real life kids were chaotic, so I ran out of time.

 Today's dolls are my Helen Kish, Chrysalis collection dolls. These dolls are awesome. They're hard plastic, except for their heads and maybe their hands, which are vinyl. They're fourteen inches tall and they're beautifully jointed, almost like a BJD. I actually kind of want to get a Kathe Kruse Kruseling one day, just to compare the jointing. Kish & Co say these dolls are supposed to be about fourteen years old. I think they look more like they're about nine, ten, or eleven, mostly because they have absolutely no waist whatsoever.

 I took a couple of pictures of one of the dolls to show the jointing.

I know this is probably insane but one of my favourite things is their ears. They aren't hyper-realistic, but given the fact they're about the size of a fingernail, they're still impressive.

And of course, like all Helen Kish dolls, they have beautiful, graceful hands.

What I don't like about these dolls.
How complete their lack of a waist is. It makes it difficult to design clothes for them, that won't look out of scale.
Mohair wigs. Mohair and I are NOT friends. It's unruly and makes my nose itch. Eventually my girls will probably all be rewigged.
How many of them came wearing high heels. Luckily they fit into a lot of MSD shoes. . . If you can find ones that don't have high heels. Lol.

Ok, so dolls.

This is Adrielle, or Adriel. I'm really not consistent in how I spell her name. (Incidentally, if I had my way, Tiny would have been named Adriel, and the Giant Baby would have been Rhidian. If their dad had his way, they would've been Thor and Elizabeth. Lucky for them, they have two parents and normal names.) She has the Wren face sculpt, which is, I think, the most realistic.

I think she's my prettiest doll. She still has her original wig, but not in it's original style, which was a side ponytail. In my head, she's the oldest of my girls, left handed and sisters with Rowan.

And this is Rowan. She should have a pair of goggles, but the Giant Husband used to let the Giant Baby play with her, while I was at work, and they got broken. Apparently, it's no big deal and I could just fix them, but I would rather sulk and give death stares over it.

Rowan has the Raven head sculpt and probably my favourite outfit.

This is Amarie, and her outfit refuses to sit properly. She's been rewigged, to make her look more like this drawing, which I named her after because I thought she looked similar.

I don't really see the resemblance anymore, except they both have lopsided faces. Amarie has the Lark head sculpt.

From one side she tends to look serious or sad.

From the other side, she has a little Mona Lisa smile.

It makes her feel alive.

This is Chiara. I got her second hand, and completely nude, except for her hair ribbons. I named her after a little girl I knew, whose parents were from Singapore, because she was so impressed to see a doll that looked like her.

Chiara has the Song head sculpt, which is supposed to look Japanese but I think looks more Thai, or Indonesian or Balinese. Her mohair wig is super unruly and hates me.

This is Emily. I named her after Emily Starr from the Emily of New Moon book series by LM Montgomery (the Anne of Green Gables lady.) A purist would point out that Emily Starr has purplish-grey eyes, I would counter with that's a pretty unrealistic eye colour. This balletish dress is a pain. The waistband is TIGHT, making it hard to get on, and every finger and thumb gets snagged in the ribbon embroidery on the sleeves.

Emily, like Adriel, has the Wren face sculpt but slightly different face painting.

This is Gwendolen. I got her second hand, at the same time as Emily. Originally she would have had three sashes - a red one, a peacock blue one, and an ivory one; and three pairs of shoes, to match each sash. But my doll only came with the red sash and shoes.

Gwendolen has the Shea face sculpt and has got the most dramatic, make-upy, face paint of all my girls. Her wig needs replacing, I swear it gets boofier by the second!

This is Eloise. Obviously she's been rewigged, she started life as a boy, I wasn't sure how good she was going to look as a girl but she looks better than I expected. Actually in her original wig, she looked a bit  weird, even as a boy. I like her a lot more in this wig.

Eloise has the Phoenix head sculpt, which . . . I don't know, the eyes are weird. They either don't fill the eye sockets or the bit at the bottom is supposed to be lower lids, in which case there's no defined lower edge to the eyes. If I ever got tempted to repaint one of these, Eloise would be the first victim. I probably wouldn't though because every Chrysalis repaint I've seen either looks like a hooker or like she has terrible hayfever.

This is Tabitha. Tabitha's clothes are weird and clunky, also I could have positioned her wig a bit better, before I photographed her. She was the last one of these dolls I got.

Tabitha has the Piper head sculpt. I held out for ages, to find a red headed Piper, and even though most of the Pipers released had red hair, I could not find one anywhere. Eventually my brother suggested getting one that didn't have red hair and changing her wig, so I did.

These last two girls are smaller (twelve inches) and look younger.

This is Lydia. Like Eloise, she came to me as a boy. And it took me until this year to find the wig I wanted for her. In my head, Lydia is Tabitha's little sister.

Lydia has the Peyton head sculpt, which is adorable. If I had all the money in the world, I would buy every Peyton I could find and have them repainted with different eye colours and rewigged in different colours and have my own village of Peytons!

Finally this is Arden. This particular doll (Olivia Primavera) came with either white blonde wavy hair (like my one) or greenish grayish bobbed hair. Her outfit always reminds me of Maggie Iacono dolls.

Arden has the Olivia face sculpt which, depending on the angle and my mood, can look spacey, or petulant, or overwhelmed. I actually really love this face too! Eep! Writing this post is making my want to trawl EBay for more of these dolls. I need to restrain myself!

Something weird I've noticed - I measure EVERYTHING in metric, except for doll heights!

Doll count : 42

My Collection. Part Two.

The rest of these posts will probably be shorter than yesterday's. All the schools here are closed until Easter, at least, which means a lot less me time. I'm looking on the bright side. I have a stress fracture in my foot that has not been improving, and hopefully three weeks of not having to walk the Giant Baby to school (and home again), will let it get better.

So here's today's installment

This is an Amazon Kelly, that I redressed, years ago. Weirdly the skirt took me about an hour to make, the top took a lot longer. But now, I still like the skirt, but I'm not at all happy with her top. These dolls were part of the Kelly Doll Barbie range. They weren't officially called "Amazon Kelly"s, but that's what a lot of people call them because they're considerably larger than ordinary Kelly Dolls. They were scaled to be little sisters to the Wee Three Friends dolls and the Star Team Stacies, which are roughly the same height as Barbie. I think they only came in packs of two Kellys or packs with a Kelly and a Stacie. Most of the packs had some sort of feature. One pack had Kelly and a dark haired friend with an easel that had a painting that revealed with water. One Kelly giggled. One had eyes that changed between open and closed  depending on whether they'd been washed with warm or cold water. I think this one used to giggle. She has a button on her back but her batteries are flat.

A Star Team Stacie or Wee Three Friends doll, that I redressed around the same time as the Kelly above. I tried to make her an outfit that went with her platform shoes, I'm not sure if I chose a red that didn't match the shoes, or if the clothes or shoes have discolored over time.

A little six inch,  Sailor Mars doll by Bandai, from about 1995. I originally had a larger Sailor Mars as well, but I can't remember what happened to her. I only got this girl out of her box a few months ago, because her box was badly damaged.

And a Sailor Moon, made by Irwin in about 2001. That fringe could fight evil, all on it's own! She's a tiny bit shorter than the Bandai girl.

And an Irwin Sailor Venus. All three Sailor scouts got unboxed at the same time, so they're still in really good condition but in all honesty, they are more scary than pretty. They didn't translate into doll form very well at all.

This is Charlotte. Originally she was Patience as Glinda by Wilde Imagination. I love Patience, but she is a huge pain in the bum. Her oversized head makes her top heavy, which means half the time she falls over, even using her stand. And it is ridiculously hard to get her eyes where you want them for a photo. They each move independently, and so easily that just thinking "Oh good! Her eyes look ok now!", is enough to send them off kilter. I think she'd look kind of awesome in a medievil or Tudor style gown. Maybe one day.

And Alice Patience. I have considered rewigging her, a million times (actually her current hair is rooted), but I like the yellowyness (Let's pretend that's a word), of her current hair and can't find anything the same colour, in the right size, that I like. She looks better in her headband, but I don't know where it is right now.

Maisie and Molly, two Maru and friends, mini pals. They're play dolls sculpted by Dianna Effner. I love these girls. Their articulation sucks, their shoulders are an odd shape, and Maisie's skin is an unhealthy "slightly suffocating, but not quite dead, yet" colour, and sometimes their arms look too long. But I really love them. And I love how they look together in their silky dresses.

An Azone Pure Neemo. I do not remember her name, but once I get around to making her an 1880s style dress out of ivory coloured silk, her name will be Marcella and she will be a ghost.

And this girl (who currently lives in her box, in my wardrobe) will also eventually have clothes and be a ghost named Celestine.

Two more Pure Neemos.

And Willow, my slightly disheveled Wellie Wisher. The Giant Baby used to steal her constantly because of her ladybug gumboots. He's lost interest, but she still needs a tidy.

That'll do for today. More when I can.

Doll count : 32

My Collection. Part One.

 I'm going to show you my doll collection over the next few weeks. There's not really anything particularly unique or rare or valuable, and it's a lot smaller than it was six months ago, when I got rid of everything that I wasn't in love with or attached to.

 I'm going to do this in parts, otherwise the post would get REALLY long and realistically, I'd never get around to posting it. Also, the photos will be taken with my phone and probably won't be overly fancy, because this is an exercise in distraction, not art.

 AND I'm going to try to keep a tally of some sort, of how many dolls I have. Because I have no idea and I'm curious. So here we go . . .

Today I'm going to show you my Top Shelf Dolls. No, not super expensive, like top shelf whiskey, but mostly too big or too ratty to waste actual shelf space on. So they live on top of my bookshelf.

This poor girl is Lola Doll.
When my sister and I were very small, she named all of her dolls Mary (after the Virgin Mary), and I named all of my dolls Sally or Sarah (For no reason that I remember.) So my Mum came up with the idea of naming our dolls after the people that gave them to us. This was given to me by my Nana's sister, Auntie Lola, and so was named Lola Doll.
 Before she belonged to me, she belonged to either my Dad's cousins, or their daughters, I don't know which, and I don't know who she was. She was pretty battered already, when I got her. And while I loved her desperately, I think the only damage that happened because of me, is a set of stitches down her back. I saw a Shirley Temple movie as a kid, where Shirley finds a diamond necklace inside her teddy. I was too young to understand it had been hidden there, and thought that was something that just randomly happened. So for years, whenever I got my hands on scissors, I would cut open dolls and stuffed toys, to "check" for valuable jewels!

This is another relic from my childhood. Actually it's a replacement, I bought in an op shop. This is Baby Come Back. She walks away from you, then turns around and comes back holding out her arms. I remember insisting on sleeping with mine, even though she was made from pointy hard plastic with very creaky joints! The creepiest thing about these dolls, you turn them on by tilting their head forward, and turn them off by tilting their head back. But they're stiff. So to turn them off you have to grab their body in one hand, their head in the other, and violently jerk their head back. It feels like you're snapping the poor dolls neck!

 This girl is a Baby Dolly Surprise. The child Dolly Surprise dolls were only about ten inches tall, but the baby is about fifteen inches. Dolly Surprise was a line of dolls, in the late eighties, that had "growing" ponytails, like Crissy. But motorised. Motorising these dolls probably seemed like a fantastic idea at the time, but most of them don't work anymore. This girl's hair still winds up shorter but if you try to make it grow, it just makes a gear grinding noise and you have to pull her ponytail to make it work, which is probably what stopped them working in the first place. Kids pulling the dolls hair to make it grow faster, will have stripped the gears.

This is Laura and Sophie, my Journey Girls. I am so glad that I got these girls before Toys R Us closed. Laura's outfit is a mix of her original outfit and some pieces from the Positively Perfect range. I think Sophie's outfit is mostly original, except her shoes which might be from a separate shoe pack. There's a good chance that in five or so years time, these will be given to my kids. But for now, I like them too much to get rid of them, or trust kids as small as mine with them.

These are my NPK dolls, redressed in Our Generation clothes. Their names as Chloe and Madison but, even though I named them, I can never remember which one is which. These are awesome dolls and much prettier and realistic than most eighteen inch dolls. They are filled with potential that in their factory state, they don't quite fulfil. Ultimately I want to do SOMETHING with them. But I do not know what.

This is Saskia. An Our Generation Raphael, rewigged as a girl. Her dress is off EBay and so is her wig. I wanted her wig to be more of a dark ash blonde or light brown, I can't remember if I ordered the wrong colour or just got sent the wrong colour but I plan on fixing it at some stage.

This is obviously my eighteen inch, Ann Estelle, Calendar Girl. There's not much to say about her, I absolutely love her and would not change anything about her for all the money in the world. The quality of her vinyl, her eyes, her clothes, everything is absolutely awesome!

My two Disney Animators girls. I want to get a HEAP of these and make them over as characters from kid's books. I originally planned for Rapunzel to be Pollyanna, but realistically her slightly petulant expression is more Mary Lennox than Pollyanna. Perhaps Tink can be Pollyanna. I also want a Merida to become Pippi Longstocking but I've promised the Giant Husband, that I won't buy more of these until I've at least done SOMETHING with at least one of the ones I've already got. (By the time these posts are done, you will see, I have a terrible habit of buying dolls to do SOMETHING with and not following through.)

This is one of my childhood My Child dolls named Rhiannon. Except secretly she isn't. My sister and I each got a Ribbons and Bows My Child doll for Christmas one year. Mine had white blonde hair and turquoise eyes, my sister's had strawberry blonde hair and purplish eyes. A few years later my Mum met a lady whose little girl had no toys, and asked if we would give our old toys to her. We said yes. My one exception was not Rhiannon. I would not part with Rhiannon. And my Mum gave them the wrong one. It was an easy mistake to make and it was because of the dress. I loved this dress. None of our dolls came in this dress but they sold it separately at Toy World. I begged my Dad to buy it. He said no. His logic was that the dress was seventeen dollars, an entire doll was thirty dollars, thus the dress was a waste of money. He would happily buy me another doll, wearing this dress, but he would not buy the dress on it's own. It was a big deal. We couldn't find a doll already wearing the dress, so I saved up for months and ultimately bought the dress myself, so of course my Mum assumed that the doll wearing the special dress, was my special doll. And when I saw how happy her friend's little girl was with the real Rhiannon, I couldn't say anything. I just quietly embroidered the name Rhiannon on the back of this doll (I used to embroider my dolls name's on their backs. Badly.) and pretended she was the same doll.

This is a Lalaloopsy Alice in Wonderland. I bought her for three reasons. One I love Alice in Wonderland. Two I wanted the mini Alice Lalaloopsy and couldn't get one. And three, I wanted to see if Lalaloopsy clothes fitted any of my other dolls. They didn't, at least not well.

A stuffed Frankie Stein from Monster High with her pup, whose name escapes me. I think maybe Fidget or Gizmo or something? I need to look that up. It could be Whatsit? I don't remember. I have another large Lalaloopsy that I'm in the process of making over to look like this version of Frankie.

A little stuffed Hermione. I wanted Hedwig. I guess Hermione is ok though. Better than Harry.

A rather grubby Power Puff Girl.

I got this Patty O'Green doll when I was about five or six. She's the small version. I was in my twenties before I realised her name was Patty O'Green. My entire life, I had called her Patio Green, which I thought was a silly name, it was.

And of course Shirley, who is on my list but so far has received none of the attention she needs.

So those are the top shelf dolls. Hopefully I'll be able to post more in a day or two.

Doll count so far : 18