Doll Collection Refresh Update - Patience and Baby So Beautiful

 I'm actually a little surprised about how much I've managed to get done.

 Starting with the Baby So Beautiful dolls - Cecily (the blonde one) is back on the shelf. I managed to convince myself to leave her hair alone so all she needed was a dust, a couple of grubby marks wiped off and her clothes washed. I didn't even bother to take any after pictures. She's no different. I did however take a couple of pictures of her locket while she wasn't wearing it.

These lockets came with all Baby So Beautiful dolls and were for the child to wear.

Kathryn (the brunette one) is a little more trying. Her clothes had yellowed a fair bit and it took a couple of washes and soakings to get them clean again. Her hair is a disaster. It seems that originally there was a rubber band around her little topknot ponytail and over the years it has decayed. About half of it was still around her ponytail, the rest was scattered through and stuck to her hair in fragments. I think I've gotten it all out now. Her curls are another issue. I had this happy delusion where I would comb her curls around my fingers and they would be like new and perfect and trouble free. . . no. Her curls got even more messed up while I was picking out the rubber band and are at the moment a frizzy mess. Currently she's waiting to have her hair washed and new curls put in.

The third doll, Kirralee, the dog attack victim has been given a good wash. So have her clothes. I cleaned the paint off her mouth. I wanted to use non-acetone nail polish remover (what I've always used in the past) but couldn't find any, so I used Isopropyl Alcohol. That was me being impatient because I really don't know if that's ok for using on vinyl. It's just what we happened to have in the house and actually did a good job of removing the paint (better than the nail polish remover would have) and since I washed it off straight after, I'm hoping it won't cause any problems later.
 It took ages for me to decide how I wanted to do her face. I didn't want to use acrylic paint - for reasons I won't go into here because this post would get way too long.  I decided to use pastels and possibly water colour pencils. I ideally wanted to use a spray on sealer but I'm pretty sure that would ruin her eyes. I toyed with the idea of cutting the shape of her lips out of a vinyl tablecloth or something, to make a mask so I could spray her face but it would only affect her lips. Ultimately I decided there were too many ways that could go wrong so I'm simply using a brush on, waterbased, craft sealant I happened to have around the house. I'm not sure this sealer is the right thing to use. In fact I have the same concerns about it as I do about acrylic paint, but it was the best option I had at the time.

Not finished yet. Going to take a few more layers yet.

Also the sealer was wet when I took this photo.

 I also tried scrubbing at the staining around her mouth with a magic eraser but I'm pretty sure that has soaked right into the vinyl and if I wanted to scrub enough to remove it I would have to scrub until vinyl was peeling. So I abandoned that and decided to pretend it was dribble rash. And I have absolutely no idea yet what I'm going to do about her hair and clothes in the end. At the moment I'm leaning towards dressing her in something I like and ignoring her mauled hand because I haven't yet come up with an idea for concealing it that I like.

Now, onto Patience. . . and just a warning, I am going to contradict myself several times between now and the end of this post. In fact I will probably sound like a crazy person by the time I'm done.

Wonderland Patience looks nervous about her new look.

 Alice-Patience (I try to just call her Alice, but in my head it's always hyphenated as Alice-Patience) is back on her shelf. Her clothes have been washed. Her hair has been washed and straightened. I could have straightened it more but it was sticking back in a slightly wild way that reminded me of the original Tenniel illustrations so I left it. I decided not to recurl it. Mostly because I don't like curling doll hair (not for fear of damage, it's just incredibly dull) and if something is going to happen even every five years that damages the curls so they need to be redone - ugh. Too high maintenance. It's not worth the effort. (Please forget I said that when I start talking about the other Patience.) I also discarded the idea of rewigging her because I am kind of in love with the colour of her hair. 

 Two sections of Alice-Patience's hair were tied back into little ponytails, then joined each other to make one small ponytail at the back of her head. I cut the threads securing these with nail scissors. I thought it would be easy but the threads were actually sewn to her head which made it more complicated, it also made her look a little bald in back but luckily that effect brushed out. I also had to cut off a lot of hair to get the length even. It was very uneven with it's factory cut. I am never cutting a Patience doll's hair again. Because her big, old, floppy, head just kept wobbling about which made me terrified of cutting at all, thinking if her head had moved there was no way I'd be able to get it even.

New headband!

 To finish her hair, she's got a headband I bought from Dollmore. I was just looking for a black Alice-band but when I saw this one I had to get it. The blue goes with her dress and the cat reminds me of the Cheshire Cat! The headband isn't quite long enough and little bits of her hair kept escaping, just above her ears, so under the headband there's a clear poly-band holding her hair in place.

Don't tell them all of my secrets!

 She also needed a new friend. For ages now Alice-Patience has been hanging out with the white rabbit that came with the large Alice in Wonderland Lalaloopsy doll. But the Giant Baby stole that a while ago, and now I have no idea where it is. So now she has a small Lalaloopsy of Dorothy Gale to play with and they seem to get along pretty well.

Dorothy's book is just weird!

The other Patience. . . Patience as Glinda or as I was calling her - Not-Glinda, is still a work in progress. She got a new name. I wanted to make a Georgian dress for her, so I decided to name her Georgette. . . except since I changed her name I'm constantly refering to her as Gilda. So perhaps her name is still a work in progress as well. Glinda/Georgette/Gilda is where I start to sound like a crazy person. I wanted to redress her because I found her original dress too pink and frilly and puffy. So I'm redressing her in a late-georgian gown of coral coloured silk, which I have to admit is quite pinkish and frilly and puffy! I'm not curling Alice's hair because curled doll hair is too high-maintenance. But at the moment I've washed the product and messy curls out of Glinda/Georgette/Gilda's hair and plan on recurling it neatly. It's almost as though this particular doll is encouraging me to do things completely out of character.

 Meanwhile, I think I said last time that both my Patience's have rooted hair. No they don't. Only Alice does. Glinda/Not Glinda is wigged. And once you wash the curls out her hair is down to her knees! At the moment I'm about halfway done on her dress. I suspect that the design I came up with is a little over-ambitious so I'm taking it slowly so I don't make any stupid mistakes. (Although another part of my brain is pretty sure that the design probably looks more complicated than it is - but that's the part of my brain that tends to make me make mistakes so I'm ignoring it.)

Sorry for poor quality!

Above is the design I'm working from, and yes, it is drawn in a child's colouring book; and no, I can almost guarantee that the finished dress will not look exactly like that.

 I've run out of things to say, so I'll finish with some Alice-Patience photo-spam.

Doll Collection Refresh - Baby So Beautiful

 You can be forgiven for not knowing what Baby So Beautiful dolls are. They were produced by Playmates for one year over 1995-1996. But they're one of my all time favourite play doll lines. Even when they came out, I was a teenager going through a "Dolls are not cool" phase. Even still, I dragged my best friend into a department store to check them out and we spent about an hour deciding which ones we'd want if we were little. As far as I know Baby So Beautiful were the original line. There was also Newborn Baby So Beautiful (which was smaller and younger) and Young Lady So Beautiful (who wore weird out of date ballgowns, up dos and fur stoles) but I'm pretty sure they both came later. Before I wrote this I tried to find more information about these dolls online, and was shocked to discover that there really wasn't any. I'm currently fighting the urge to buy every single one of these dolls that show up on ebay and build a database of faces, eye colours, hair styles and everything else. Unfortunately if I did that the Giant Husband would probably have me commited.

 Baby So Beautiful was a toddler doll with a similar concept to the original Cabbage Patch Kids in that there was an almost infinite variety of skin tones, face moulds and paint, eye colours, hair colours and styles, and outfits. This meant that no two dolls were exactly the same. Each doll came with a "Baby book" (a leaflet printed on magazine paper with spaced to record information about your doll) with "So Beautiful Firsts" printed on the cover, a pink plastic hairbrush, and an opalescent white plastic  "locket" on a gold coloured cord to keep a picture in. The tag-line was "The most beautiful baby in the world is your baby!" and like a lot of 1980s doll lines the pretence was that the child was adopting the doll.
 The dolls themselves are impressive for a play doll. The vinyl is good quality, with realistic inset acrylic eyes, and applied eyelashes. Their hair is lovely, not plasticy like most play dolls, and their outfits are detailed and well made. Two things really stand out to me though. The hair is wigged rather than rooted and the eyes are stationary - to me both these things are unusual in a play doll. But all in all, looking at these dolls now, I can only assume that they were discontinued because they were too well made and high production costs made them unprofitable. As far as I know all of the dolls produced were female.
 I have three of these dolls. Two were purchased at a toy shop in a small country town about ten years after they went out of production, the other is a rescue doll from a charity shop. I'm going to be working on these at the same time as my Patience dolls. Mostly because when I had a look at the rescue doll, she had the look of a doll in need of urgent care.

 Kathryn was my first Baby So Beautiful. And to me, she embodies everything that I remember about the line. This is the face that I remember the most, this is one of the few outfits I've seen more than once, this is the hairstyle I remember seeing. Her eyes are beautiful and clear, she has a cute ringletted hair style, and a sweet outfit. Hers is the best outfit of my three dolls. A pink blouse with lace trim to the collar and sleeves, a floral romper suit with lace frills across the backside, lace trimmed white anklet socks, delicate white shoes (with more lace) and a hair ribbon - surprisingly made of lace!

A sweet, little face

 She doesn't need much done for her. A quick dust, her clothes need a wash and she's lost a shoe. I'm pretty sure it's in a box of Barbie accessories in my wardrobe but haven't had a chance to look for it. Her hair is particularly dusty and her ringlets have loosened on one side. So maybe wash her hair (I hate washing doll hair) and try to fix up her curls.

Dusty, messy curls.

 Her shoes are the only thing about her that concerns me. They're that kind of fake leatherette stuff that's fabric with an incredibly thin vinyl layer over the top. It's horrible stuff. The vinyl always goes melty and peely or sticky and gross. The one shoe i currently have is discoloured and already starting to peel near her big toe. I want to clean it, but I don't want to make the damage worse or clean it with anything that's going to make it deteriorate faster than it already is. So, I'm kind of in two minds about whether I should touch it at all.

  Next is Cecily. Cecily has a different face mould, which I equally love and hate. From some angles her opened mouth expression makes her look slack-jawed and stupid, from other angles it's a look of wonder. I love the small dimple in her chin and her strangely high eyebrows. But I don't particularly like the colour of her face paint. It's too pink but also too dark, but I forgive it because it goes nicely with the colour of her outfit. She's the only one of my three dolls that still has her locket (none of my three still have their brushes or baby books.) but she used to have a headband which I can't find (and I'm pretty sure it's gone for good.) and it's possible she once had a blanket. I say possible because I know that I once had a pink doll's blanket bound in the same fabric as her dress. But I can't remember if it was her blanket or not.

Close up of Cecily's eyes.

  Cecily's dress is like a reject from the wardrobe of Little House on the Prairie. A pink on cream, floral, twill dress, with a double collar - one layer pink, one white; and bootees in the same fabric with bows on the front and white fuzzy pantaloons. Compared to Kathryn's outfit, this seems really lazy and a bit boring.

Cecily's dress in it's full boring glory.

 This doll's hair puzzles me a little. It looks at first glance as though it's in two plaits or pigtails, tied with ribbons. But when I looked at her more closely I saw short hairs sticking out all over her head. At first I panicked thinking her hair was somehow decaying and falling out. Then I realised she was still wearing her original hair net which comforted me a little, assuming if anything was decaying it was more likely to be the hair net. Having looked at her more closely now, I think it's actually not anything decaying. Rather it looks like her hairstyle is actually a short bob with one long strand hanging down on each side in a curl and the short pieces are the ends of the bobbed part.

 Untidy, sticky outy hair.

Faux pigtails

 Cecily needs a dust. Her clothes need a wash and she's somehow gotten a few grubby marks here and there that need cleaning off. I'm not touching her hair. If I'm right about her hairstyle, once the hairnet is taken off her hair will be impossible to keep nice.

The third doll, Kirralee is from a charity shop. At some point she has been the victim of a dog attack. The fingers of her left hand are gone, she has a small hole in one of her feet and very faint bite marks allover. When I got her she was bald and naked with no lip paint. At the moment she's dressed in an old My Child dress, her underpants, shoes and socks are stuff I happened to have lying around that fitted her. Her wig was stolen from a porcelain doll whose head was smashed. Her dress and her wig fit badly. The dress is too short. The wig is too big.

Kirralee's beautiful golden eyes and unfortunate mouth.

 But the biggest problem is her lips. I don't know what I used to paint them but it was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. It's bleeding into her vinyl. The paint needs to be removed before it ruins her face. Hopefully I can remove some of the staining with a magic eraser but I'm not overly optimistic. Then she will need a new mouth.
 Other than that she could do with a good clean. She needs clothes that fit, if possible something that will conceal this. . .

A new wig would be amazing but that will depend on whether or not I can get the Giant Husband to agree to the expense, which probably means it won't be as nice as I would like. Or possibly something could be done to make her current wig fit better. Hopefully I can get her looking a bit better than she does at present.