NPK Collection doll

My 18 inch doll from EBay arrived yesterday. I was going to spend some time doing an in depth review but if I plan that, it will never get done. So here's a quick post about her instead.

She's already my favourite 18 inch doll. Although in fairness, her look is so different to other 18 inch dolls that you can't really compare them.

The neither good nor bad things-
She's all vinyl.
Her eyes are fixed, they don't close.
She has rooted eyelashes.
Her hair is a wig.
She comes with a "Certificate of Authenticity" but since this isn't filled out it's kind of meaningless.

The good things -
There's a fair bit of weight to her and the vinyl seems really nice.
 She has really nice airbrushed blushing on her face and hands.
Her nails are painted a natural colour.
Her clothes are well made.
Her shoes are great. Fake leather with actual, proper soles and working buckles.
Her hair actually feels like hair and swings beautifully.
Her face is really cute.
I don't know if it will show in pictures but the airbrushing on her face is amazing. Shaded and layered in a way you don't usually see on play dolls.

The bad things -
If you look closely at the paint on her mouth and nails you can see brushstrokes.
Her dress is . . . really ugly.
If you part her hair so you can see it, her wig cap is quite messy looking.
Her hair is insanely long. Too long. And her fringe is pretty uneven.
Her eyelashes are odd. VERY long but also a dark, blood, red colour. From a distance it looks like shading. Close up it's very strange.

Here's a close up of her face.

Her hand

This is how crazy long her hair is

That pointless certificate

Redressed in a nicer outfit

And in a lineup with a Journey Girl and an Our Generation doll

And here's what happens if I leave dolls on a chair while I wash dishes

For the record, that was three hours ago and he hasn't given her back yet. And she's still naked and bald!

So, the new doll isn't perfect but she is amazing. I'm already plotting to get a second one with dark hair!

Playing with dolls

My Wellie Wishers doll arrived last week and she is very, very cute. I like her even more in person. The only disappointment is her pigtails. One is a perfect sausage curl. The other is a curly mess. They're also uneven. At this point I'm on the fence about whether to try to fix the wonky one, or just take them out. In the end, I'll probably decide the ringlets are too much effort and take them down. Right now I haven't fixed them or taken them down.

 Since I'm home sick today, I decided to play around with a few of my similar sized dolls and see who fits what. First everyone tried on Willa's outfit. (I'm thinking of changing her name to Willow. Willa sounds weird to me, like it's supposed to be something else but I'm mispronouncing it or something. I know I'm not but it just sounds wrong to me.)

 Anna looks almost painfully cute in this. (Her hair's a tiny bit messy because the Giant Baby is a little confused about who she belongs to.) The clothes fit well, but I couldn't get her feet into Willa's boots.

  Molly looks cute too. The clothes are a little loose on her but not badly so. The fit is a little weird but I think that's mostly because of the weird shape of Molly's shoulder area. The boots fit her too, but they were so loose around her legs that they looked ridiculous.

  I really like they way Tabitha looks in this! But in all fairness, I like the way Tabitha looks in most things. The clothes fit her well, but her feet were too long for Willa's boots.

I actually really like Willa's outfit! And it looks like it's going to be one of those outfits that more or less fits and looks good on most dolls.

 Next, just for fun, I tried Anna's dress on everyone. (But not her cloak because it's a glitter-shedding monstrosity.)

 It's a little tight across Willa's bust but fits her as well as it fits Anna. (It's quite tight on Anna's waist.) Even Anna's boots fit. Willa makes a pretty cute Anna.

 I was surprised by how tight this dress was on Molly! I kept thinking of her as the thinnest doll here (especially after everyone tried Willa's outfit on) but this dress was probably tighter on her than anyone else. The side seams on the bodice were straining. I'm putting this down to Molly's different body shape, or witchcraft, or something.

 This fit Tabitha weirdly. The Chrysalis dolls are quite sway backed and the waistline of Anna's dress hit pretty much exactly where Tabitha's tummy sticks out the most. Consequently it took a couple of tries to find a pose that didn't make her look pregnant.

Next everybody tried on Molly's dress.

Willa looks quite cute but also a little boring in this. Also, I could only get the bottom press stud to do up, it was too tight across the chest and shoulders and quite loose at the waist.

On the other hand it was far too big for Anna. But a bit tight around the arms.

I really, really like this dress on Rowan. It doesn't fit perfectly, but I don't really care. At the moment this is her dress. It looks very Madman era on her, to me. It reminds me of illustrations in early 1960's kids' books.

 Next I tried Rowan's original outfit on Molly and Willa. That was cheating a little bit. Because I know it's the most forgiving outfit of all the ones that came on my 14 inch Chrysalis dolls. The dress is stretchy and the jacket has loose sleeves, so it fits almost everyone.

 It fits Willa quite well, except the sleeves are too long. But I don't think it suits her. It's too grown up, or too realistic or something. The style of the outfit, doesn't suit the style of the doll.

  Molly looks super cute though. Even though she's wearing Rowan's boots, they're way too big for her. To me, in this, she looks like a child wearing one of those obscenely expensive designer fashion brands.

  I also tried Willa in Molly's flower girl dress and it's pretty cute on her. It would probably look better if I had shoes that fit her though.

 And I tried the shirred, poppy sundress on Willa. Which probably shouldn't need to be called "trying on". The design of that sundress means it's really forgiving about who it fits.

 I kind of wish I'd had some red ribbons or poppies or something to put in her hair.

Lastly, on a whim, I tried another one of my Helen Kish Chrysalis dresses on Molly, because I thought it would suit her. It did.

  I'm going to have to skip my Word of the Month project for September. We're all sick here. But on top of that one of the girls that I work with is going on holidays and another one just quit, so I'm pretty much going to be living at work for the next few weeks, which sounds like so much fun, that I'm already growing a stomach ulcer in protest. But I will be back at that next month, and I am still working on getting those other patterns on here in the meantime.

Tiny Tuesday - Gift 'Ems by Jakks Pacific

 Gift 'Ems are one of those toys I'd seen online and liked the concept of but also had kind of assumed would never show up in Australian shops. And then, when I'd forgotten about them, I found them at ToysRUs on the weekend!

  These are another blind box toy that looks like a wrapped present with a little figurine inside. The box has a lid that can be removed and hinged panels that fold out that make a little display for the figure inside.

 The figures are themed by countries, then further borken down into day, night and beach themes. Mine is from Hanoi in Vietnam, from the regular day line. The back of the display box has pictures of the city the figure is from.

 The figures are very simplistic. Their only articulation is that their heads sit on a ball joint. They have a hole in their feet that fits over a peg in the display base to hold them in place.

I love the concept of these. But I'm not blown away by the execution. The whole thing is . . . kind of boring. I kind of wish there was something more to it. Maybe little cards that explained something about the featured city. Or have the backdrops look like a room of some kind and include some kind of accessory. Or just make the doll somehow slightly interesting. I love the little gift that folds out into a display but I really feel it has the potential to be more and really for seven dollars, this was not worth it.

Tiny Tuesday - My Mini Mixie Qs

This is an accidental collection. How do you get an accidental collection? Well, when these were first released I bought a couple of the blindbag packs. I was happy with them. I liked them. But they didn't really do anything for me, so I had no intention of buying more. But because I had them, the Giant Husband bought me some more, and more, and more. I was actually quite surprised to see how many I've accumulated.

Mini Mixie Qs are Mattel's contribution to the blingbag toy plague. They're tiny (seriously minuscule) blocky figures and accessories that look kind of pixelated. They're sold in blingbag packs of two, or in packs of several figures sometimes with extra clothes and hair pieces, or in sets with playsets. They have hard plastic wigs and clothing that can be removed and swapped around.

Figure with hair and dress

Some of the outfits are quite plain

Others have tiny attached accessories

And some are even fancier

The multi packs either have one or two figures with lots of extra outfits and hair or a few themed dolls with maybe an accessory or two

Some of the playsets fold up into cubes, others are stackable. 

I have a candy store

And a toy store. The toy store came with more accessories than actually fit inside the store. It also came with extra clothes and wigs (That I didn't photograph because I forgot about them until just now.)

These are actually really cute. (My camera didn't agree! I had a hard time getting it to focus on them at all.) But I think they're more of a novelty than a toy. They're just too small to comfortably play with and once you have the playsets are set up, if anyone so much as breathes near them, all of the teeny tiny accessories fall over and are lost forever!

My favourites are definitely the pink ninja girl and the little dog figure.

Tiny Tuesday - Baby Secrets

 These dolls turned up in our supermarket last week. Little blind bag babies, that come packed in bathtubs. For some reason I felt compelled to check them out. The display they're in, in the store, has a couple of shelves of the bathtubs (each with one doll) and larger packs with two visible dolls, one blind bag doll in a bath, and an accessory. Initially I planned on getting one bathtub and one of the accessory packs. But the only accessory packs left in stock had a highchair which, frankly looked like something from the two dollar shop. I couldn't bring myself to spend sixteen dollars on it, so I got two of the blind bags instead.

 The name Baby Secrets unreasonably irritates me. When I was a kid, I had this doll. . .

named Baby Secrets. And in my head, that doll will always be Baby Secrets and the nine year old that lives in the back of my head is annoyed at her doll's name being stolen.

Anyway, the cover art on the packages, shows extremely cute babies but from the ones I saw in the accessory sets, I had a feeling these dolls weren't going to be as cute. To be honest, lately there is such a proliferation of blind bag toys on the market, that sometimes I wonder if A) The toys that get blind bagged would sell at all if people could see what they were getting (I have an inkling most wouldn't), and B) Whether toy companies think they can sell any piece of rubbish they like by putting it in a blind bag. (I'm pretty sure they do.)

 The first thing you get when you unwrap the bathtub is the obligatory checklist. Dolls on one side. Accessory packs on the other. The checklist makes a big deal about there being 50 dolls. Strictly speaking there are 25. 15 standard blind bag dolls. 1 limited edition furry blind bag doll (That is a total Twosies rip-off). 8 dolls that are exclusive to the accessory packs. And 1 Sparkle blind bag doll, that you can only get in the accessory packs. But each of the dolls has a nappy that changes from white to pink or blue in cold water, so if you have one of each doll in each gender, that's 50 dolls. Except I only ever seem to get girls in things like this, and I can't picture parents being willing to shell out for multiples of each accessory set on the off chance of maybe getting a boy.

Next there's a "Birth Certificate" to fill out. Being an adult, I'm not overly interested in this but it's exactly the sort of thing I would've eaten up with a spoon as a child.

Finally there's a baby in a plastic bag. And wow, they're a lot creepier in real life, than they are in the cartoon artwork! Here are the two I got.

I have to say, I much prefer the one in the ski goggles. Partly because the idea of going skiing in just a nappy, woollen hat, and goggles is just bizarre. I've never been skiing but I'm guessing that if it's cold enough to snow, you probably want to be wearing clothes. But I mostly prefer that one because the goggles cover the face.

All that was left, was to find out if they were girls or boys. The checklist says to dip them in cold water. Whenever anything says to dip something in cold water, I always try putting it in the freezer first. Usually works better and I'm less likely to spill anything. But the freezer didn't work on these two. At all. So I did dip them in cold water and surprise, surprise, they were both girls.

These babies are jointed at the arms and legs and neck. But the heads are difficult to turn and don't turn very far. And after bending and straightening the baby's leg a few times, it started to look like this. . .

I don't know if you can see the little crumbs around the joint of her left leg, but that's plastic, not paint. And given I had only worked that joint maybe three times, that's some pretty shoddy workmanship.

Overall, these dolls seem to me more like a product that would've been for sale in a two dollar shop twenty years ago, than something that would be sold now. They're not very cute at all, their paint is sloppy, their construction is shoddy and the overall impression that I get is that these have been thrown into the market in an attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Li'l Outrageous Littles and Twosies. Except they completely lack the charm of the other two. And given that the company that makes these is actually the Australian distributor for a lot of MGA toys (including the LOLs), these would really annoy me if I was MGA. Surely developing a product that's in direct competition to a product that you distribute is at best a pretty jerky thing to do!

 It's toys like these that make me sick of blind bag toys.

Tiny Tuesday - Chelsea Cheeseburger. Shopkins get really creepy.

 I haven't mentioned my Shopkins Happy Places house in a while. I've been waiting until I get my hands on all the new furniture sets, so I can get it done all at once. Unfortunately there is still one set I haven't been able to find anywhere and I'm still not quite desperate enough to spend forty dollars for it on ebay. Part of the problem seems to be every shop seems to still have a million of the bathroom sets from the first season, so they're not restocking. That's a slight exaggeration but we were recently at a Target that had three of last season's bedroom set, one of last season's kitchen set and FORTY-FIVE of last season's bathroom! When I first got the bathroom set, I did not like the doll that came with it. She was wearing a robe and had yellow bubbles in her hair. Why yellow? I don't know. The yellow bubbles really bug me. But now seeing how many of that set, with that doll are still in shops, probably never to be sold, I feel bad for that doll instead. My husband says that's weird.

Anyway, I couldn't wait to show this little doll. Chelsea Cheeseburger. She's one of the individually packaged dolls that comes with two accessories and she's super cute.

There is nothing to not like here! It's all wins! Brightly coloured, burger themed, sailorish dress - cute! Adorable hamburger hair accessory - cute! Screaming, red hair - cute! Pigtails - cute! Bright, red shoes - cute! The cold, dead eyes of a killer - Wait! What!? Ah, it seems Chelsea isn't so cute after all. Let's take a look at the back of her packaging . . .

It seems Chelsea Cheeseburger is off to the Puppy Parlour (aka loungeroom) to smile as she shares some tasty grilled treats with her Petkins (sentient furniture) friends! And what tasty treat is she sharing with her demonic coffee table and couch? Why that perky little cheeseburger that's smiling at her so trustingly in the photo above! Yay! Cannibalism!

Not quite so cute now!
Don't get me wrong, I still think these are absolutely adorable but there are so many details that just make me shake my head and wonder how they happened. Like how did anyone make up the story of Chelsea bringing a new friend along as a sacrifice to be eaten alive by her and her friends wasn't just disturbing?
It is funny though.

Adventures in Deconstructing Barbie

 Wow. I did a lot of research into removing Barbie's head and it scared me. Article after article, blog post after blog post pointed out how hard it is to remove her head. How fragile her neck is. How careful you have to be if you don't want to break her. How doing it successfully is a matter of luck not skill. In the end I was nearly too scared to try.

 But I did try and honestly I have no idea what all the fuss is about. It's not hard. They can't break that easily since I pulled off eight heads without being gentle at all and not one body broke.

 I filled a plastic container with hot tap water and left the dolls heads soaking in it for about five minutes then with the help of a mini screwdriver from an eyeglass repair kit, the heads came right off. A couple were more difficult, but I found by putting them back in the hot water for another minute or two, the vinyl softened up enough to make it a piece of cake.

 On the other hand the neck pegs were all gross with globs of glue and the mini screwdriver I used is now absolutely disgusting from the horrible glue their heads are filled with. (Actually at the moment it's soaking in white vinegar to hopefully melt the glue.) I am already filled with hatred for that glue! It got everywhere! It's disgusting and spreading and too bloody awful for words!

 After I'd done some decapitating I decided to rip the hair out of one of the Barbies that I'm thinking of rerooting. That particular game has changed. My old method for that was to cut the hair short, pull as much as I could out from the outside of the head using tweezers, then pull the rest out from the inside. It took a while but it wasn't at all taxing. Now! I found I couldn't pull ANY hair out from the outside because the inside was so chunky with glue and to pull it out from the inside I was having to soften the glue in hot water and then almost gouge at the hair plugs inside the head! The glue would go soft and runny whenever it was warm, then resolidify as soon as it cooled. As I said before it got EVERYWHERE! I feel weird about the idea of kids playing with these dolls if their heads are going to be leaking sticky, gross, glue whenever they get warm.

 Only one of the Barbies has her new head so far. I ran out of time. But this was the doll that inspired the whole project. I loved her face but her weird transparent pink and glittery body, with flesh coloured knees for some ungodly reason, made her unusable in my eyes. Now she has a tall body and even though the colour match isn't perfect, she still looks a million times better.

I just wish Mattel would stop ruining perfectly good toys. Finally they stop woth the gross sticky plastisizer leaking legs on everything and immediately introduce heads filled with super gross, hopefully not extremely toxic, glue. What is wrong with them?