Shopkins Happy Places. Fun but possibly the creepiest thing ever.

Shopkins Happy Places house exterior.

It's happened. I've lost my damned mind and gotten into Shopkins. Not the weird "What the hell are you even supposed to do with these?" Shopkins that have been around for a few years now, but the newer, smaller, Happy Places, dollhouse Shopkins.
 I've been eyeing the dollhouse sets ever since they came out but hadn't really intended on buying any of them. Then I was sent out to buy myself a Christmas present from the Giant Baby and somehow came home with the dollhouse. The very next day, the same shop had the Party Studio house extension in stock. That found it's way under our Christmas tree too. And then through various sources by the time Christmas was over I had all of the furniture and doll sets that go with the basic house and the party studio.

Furnished house.

And the Party Studio.

 A basic run down of how these sets work so I don't sound like a completely mad person for the rest of this post.
First there's the basic dollhouse. It's cute, the rooms are a little small and I wish the ceilings were higher but it was relatively cheap which makes it easier to deal with these issues. This comes with a doll and roughly half of the loungeroom furniture and accessories.
Next there's what they call "Welcome Packs." Each of these contain a doll and about half the furniture and accessoroes for a room. There's one for the bathroom, bedroom and kitchen but not the loungeroom because the loungeroom welcome pack is more or less what comes with the house.
Next there are "Decorator Packs." There's one of these for each room and they have the other half of the stuff for each room.
Then there are doll packs which is just a doll and two tiny accessories and lastly "Surprise Delivery" packs. Surprise delivery packs look like teeny shipping boxes and come with three random accessories. The three accessories will all be for the same room and usually related in some way eg. An egg, an eggcup and a saucepan.

Surprise Delivery egg and eggcup. . . not sure why the egg is green though

Each room has an animal theme. Bunnies for the bathroom, bears for the bedroom, puppies for the parlour and kitties for the kitchen. And ALL of the furniture and accessories have the faces of the animal of the room they belong to (and the ears and tails.) Apparently they're called "Petkins". The concept of petkins raises a lot of questions to my mind that probably I wouldn't wonder about if I was a kid but I'll get to that in a bit.
The Party Studio is an extension to the basic house and while Party Studio sounds pretty fancy, it's really just an extra bedroom and a dining room. It comes with a few pieces of furniture for each room and a staircase. I'm counting the staircase separately because it's not fixed in place. The extension can be slotted into place on either side of the house and the staircase can be attached to either side of the basic house or extension in the same way.

Basic house, staircase and Party studio

Anyway when the Party Studio appeared so did two new decorator packs (one for each room of course) and three new dolls.
The structures are well made and seem fairly sturdy and has cute details like power outlets in each room. I like the way you can connect them on either side rather than having one set layout you're stuck with forever. It bothers me a little how small the rooms in the base house are. The rooms in the Party Studio (I feel stupid and pretentious every time I say "Party Studio") are bigger even though there's less stuff to go in them. But the decorator packs and surprise delivery packs do come with small "floor tiles" that can be connected to the house to make the rooms bigger. Except the can only be connected to the ground floor at the sides and they look a little silly.

Power outlet

Every room has built in shelves and the ground floor room of the Party Studio has a little window that opens. The loungeroom has a cute aquarium - actually just a square of transparent blue plastic with fish and seaweed moulded into it. Along the roof of each structure is a strip of bunting and paper lanterns. The bunting has little faces - bunnies, puppies, kitties and birds.

Detail of the bunting. Third flag along is clearly a bird and clearly not a bear.

Since the first three animals are also the theme animals from three of the rooms in the base house this makes me wonder if perhaps the bedrooms bear theme was originally planned as a bird theme. So far there is no room with a bird theme.
Most of the little pieces of furniture and accessories are made of a slightly rubbery feeling plastic. The bunk bed from the sleepover bedroom is made of harder plastic and there may be more pieces that I can't think of off the top of my head. Ninety nine per cent of the furniture has little animal faces. Painted eyes, moulded painted ears, little raised muzzles with painted mouths and little moulded tails on the back. I have considered removing the paint and filing off the ears, tails and muzzles and repainting this furniture to be more realistic but that would be a LOT of work and I'm not sure I would prefer that. The little faces are cute and since the dolls and houses are quite cartoony they look pretty good together.

Petkin chair showing face and tail. I don't know that I'd be overly comfortable sitting in that chair.

The little dolls are cute. Even though their features are clearly copied from the larger Shopkins dolls, they're nowhere near as terrifying. They're adorable. The dolls are roughly 3 inches high but because of their moulded hair, the actual height varies from doll to doll. They have little rubbery removable dresses but I'm not sure how useful this really is. You see, their sleeves are painted on their arms, their shoes and socks are painted on their legs, and both are fairly outfit specific, so swapping their dresses looks a little weird. On top of that, the more hair the doll has, the harder it is to get her dress off or back on again. And frankly if I was a child, I would be far more likely to just swap their heads around if I wanted to change their clothes. Heck, I'm an adult and if I ever want to change their clothes, I'll just be swapping their heads.

These are the dolls that came with the Welcome Packs and house

More dolls. The pink eyes are a little creepy.

Even more dolls.

If you undress the dolls they look like they're in a Jane Fonda workout video.

And the three dolls that were released at the same time as the party studio.

And now on to my issues with these sets, or as I like to call them "Reasons to suspect Shopkins will be responsible when I finally go completely mad."

 1. The Sparkle Hill Happy home.
 I don't have this. I will never have this. The only place I've seen it for sale is the Walmart website. It's a variation on the basic house but with special holographic wallpaper and glitter through the paint. It even comes with special edition kitchen furniture which is all glittery. Yay. . . Except, wait a minute. The only way you can get half of the loungeroom furniture is packed with the ordinary basic house. So if you get this you either have to have an unfurnished lounge or buy the basic non-glittery house as well. On top of which the kitchen furniture it comes with is the furniture from the Welcome pack but all pink and glittery but this won't match the rest of the kitchen furniture. You'll have 1 glittery kitchen chair and one plain 1. This idea really bothers me.

What's more disturbing a toilet with a face or food with a face?

2. Petkins. So depending on how you look at it the idea of Petkins can be kind of disturbing. Everything had these little faces. The furniture, the food, the toilet, the toilet paper, the bath. . . Are they alive? Or are they just cute faces on things? I can deal with the idea of the cute faces but if they're alive? That's a whole different story. Firstly there's just the concept of how annoying it would be if all of your possessions were alive but then there are the more complicated concepts like do they eat? Do they poop? Do they breed? Because if they did that there's your whole day gone just feeding them and cleaning up their poop. And what do they eat? All the food in the house IS petkins! That's just gross. Furthermore, I'm not sure what would bother me more, a toilet and toilet paper that's alive or eating food that's alive, but I'm pretty sure both things would disturb me greatly.
3. Pictures from the Puppy Patio sets (which I haven't seen in person yet.) show that it has stuff to look after a dog. A kennel, a dog bowl, a dog bone. BUT there's no dog in sight! Sooooo either this stuff is to look after an imaginary dog OR the puppy petkins. If it's the petkins, then this house is pretty underprepared to look after all the other damn animals in it and also Yay! 

The puppy petkins get to eat dog treats that ARE puppy petkins! That's not creepy or cannibalistic at all.

How many different coloured TVs does a shopkin really need?

4. A LOT of the stuff you get in the Surprise Delivery packs are just recolours of stuff that was in the furniture packs. While I'm all for having choice, getting something new is WAY more fun than getting ANOTHER television in a different colour.

Riana Radio and her accessory that's . . . not a radio

5. Riana Radio. One of the individual dolls is named Riana Radio. Until I opened her box I thought her accessory was a little kids karaoke machine and microphone. Nope. It's a diary and a pen. Why?!  Why would you name a doll Radio unless her accessory was somehow to do with music?! The others make sense. Spaghetti Sue is cooking spaghetti. Sarah Sushi has a bento box of sushi. Melodine is playing piano. But there's no logical connection between the name Riana Radio and a diary.
6.And this is going to make me sound like a huge whiney baby and I don't care.
There's a whole new set of Happy Places stuff that's been released. A games room and laundry extension, a backyard and pool extension, and a heap of dolls and furniture packs to go with them. I've been seeing them all over Instagram since Christmas. It appears these sets are available EVERYWHERE.  . . except Australia. The fact that I could walk to Moose head office (I wouldn't because it would take about 3 hours and I have shit to do, but I COULD if I really needed to) for some reason makes this more annoying. I want to see the new sets. Especially the pool and garden stuff. I want to see the little catalogue that shows all the new stuff. I especially want to know if the rumours are true and some of the new accessories are indeed a poop scooper and poop because that is so terrible it's hilarious. But none of the new stuff has shown up anywhere yet.

In all fairness I finished writing this last Friday and have been waiting to take pictures and since then the new stuff has shown up in our local shops. Probably expect to hear about it soonish (unless our internet goes out again in which case close to soonish.)

Stalled.

  I'm having a hard time getting anything done lately.
  Christmas was chaos. Then the Giant Husband was on holidays which was great but he always wants to be doing something which left me with no time or energy for my stuff.
 On top of which I've been a bit off. Not ill as such. I've developed a weird sensitivity to sunlight. We don't open our curtains ever because otherwise I burn. I wear sunscreen whenever I remember but I still burn. And when I burn I come out in a horrible, hivey, blistery rash on the burn. And when I have the rash I feel awful. Tired and sluggish and headachey and everything achey and cranky and just not good. That's what I've been like for most of the last six weeks. Meanwhile the Giant Baby has been a turbo-charged ball of fury because he doesn't like being hot and it's been quite a warm Summer so far. Consequently Summer is quickly going from being my favourite time of year to a big pain in the neck.
 Meanwhile all the stuff I'm trying to do has problems. Whenever I pause a project, for some reason I lose confidence and have trouble getting back into it. At the moment I'm trying to bully myself into finishing Not-Glinda's dress but so far haven't quite finished.
 The Baby So Beautiful dolls are having issues. The broken one has a wig now. She needs clothes. I have no idea what to make her. Every idea I come up with, I discard twenty minutes later because I hate it.
 The one that just needed her hair restyled is currently bald. I tried to curl her wig without getting her head wet. They have a hole under the wig in the back of the head. I didn't want water getting in there and damaging her eyes. But it meant her curls ended up sticking out on a weird angle. I couldn't get them to sit right. So, I've taken her wig off to try again but haven't done it yet.
 I got an Iplehouse doll for Christmas. I chose one of the kid size ones the assumption that she'd wear the same size wigs and shoes and possibly clothes as my 14" Kish dolls and my Dollmore Zihu. I ordered eyes the size the website said to order, unquestioningly. Paige's page says eye size 8-10mm. I ordered size 8 which turns out to be way too small so currently I'm waiting for new eyes for her.

  I have so many plans for this year. Things I want to make things I want to do. Getting time always seems to be an issue so I've decided to make a rule that every night once the Giant Baby is in bed and we've packed away his toys, I get to (or have to depending on my mood) spend the next hour doing my stuff. Haven't started that yet, only came up with it this morning, but hopefully it means I'll get more stuff done. I'm going to try to make a post in the next few days outlining the stuff I want to get done, or at least the stuff I want to prioritise because it seems I want to do EVERYTHING.

What the hell, Mattel?

 Seriously Mattel, are you ok? Is everything ok at home? Have you maybe been dabbling in the party scene and maybe popping some pills? I'm concerned right now.
  I know Barbie isn't super popular at the moment, but you're kind of phoning her in at the moment aren't you? Yes, she got new bodies, which is great for you because that means parents are going to have to buy three times the amount of clothes for her. And let's be honest, her clothes are pretty uninspired at the moment. Is that what you're getting the work experience kids to do? Or are you just doing it on your lunch break? Because frankly you can get Barbie clothes of the same quality and with better design in no name packages from bargain stores. The Fashion Fever dolls ten years ago were amazing. I'll bet if you added that level of detail and design to her outfits now, she might not soar again, but she'd do better. Your mainline dolls right now are of cheaper construction and more poorly designed than your supermarket dolls were ten years ago. How is that not a problem?
  And American Girl. I'm not into American Girl. Not being American, I've never even seen one in real life, but I've seen the website and I don't know what to say. You had a lovely line of sweet, ridiculously over-priced, dolls with historically accurate costumes and you decided to "update" them. Now their clothes are definitely not as historically accurate, they've been popified and cartoonified and while stile being loosely historical you've clearly decided that children have no concept of history and that you have to semi-modernise their outfits to make them "accessible to today's kids" or some such piffle. While you haven't quite succeeded in making them cheap and tacky, you're certainly on your way and surely you're losing the spirit of the entire line.
  And Monster High. Your "revamp". No, it's not a revamp. All you've done is simplify the face-paint and replace any subtle colour in your palette with eye meltingly bright ones, and replace well thought out fashion options with boring dresses made from crazy digital prints. (I say crazy because I'm being polite, they're actually hideous.)
 And Ever After High. I'm not going to say anything about the new faces because I think you can guess I don't like them but exactly how many drugs were you taking on the day you approved THIS? A playset that's a chamber you insert a doll (or anything small enough to fit) in, the playset then sprays the doll with glue and then glitter. WHAT!? Who is going to buy that? No parent is stupid enough to want that in their house and no kid has enough money to buy it. Granted there are people I hate enough that I would happily plant that in their homes, but anyone I hate that much - I'm not buying their kids gifts.

Seriously Mattel, go to rehab, see a shrink, take a gap year, talk to someone - plenty of people love you and would be willing to help. But whatever it is, you need help.

Update - Back to work!

So all my doll stuff was put on hold while I made ridiculously elaborate costumes for a party the Giant Husband and I went to. Thankfully that's over and done with now. The party was fun and we won a holiday in Queensland for our costumes but it was a LOT of work.
I cheated in the costumes a little bit. Instead of ruffs, we had frills. I made paned sleeves for the Giant Husband's shirt but having done that I flat out refused to make the legs of his pants with panes as I had originally intended. I started making a bum roll to hold out my skirts properly but in the end decided it would be easier to just tie a breast feeding pillow around my waist.
 If you're curious I have pictures. I've blanked out the Giant Husband's face at his request and yes, I am aware I'm making a stupid face in my picture but unfortunately it's the only picture I have of my costume. And yes, I am aware it makes me look roughly the size and shape of a sofa but I'm ok with that.

Work and costumes and all sorts of nonsense. . .

 All of my doll projects are on hold again. Yep. I'm a horrible negligent doll-owner.
 The damaged Baby So Beautiful doll finally has her new wig and face. Her wig isn't quite what I wanted but it was close and available so it will do. I may restyle it though. Now she's sitting on my printer, wrapped in a cloth nappy - to keep her clean; waiting for clothes. I still don't know what I'm doing about her clothes.
 The brunette Baby So Beautiful is similarly sitting wrapped in a cloth nappy in the bathroom, waiting to be redressed and put back on the shelf. This is mostly because she's in a corner of the bathroom that's out of the way. I keep forgetting she's there and when I remember, I'm already doing something else, so I make a mental note to fix her up later, and promptly forget she's there again.
 Not Glinda's dress is in a zip lock bag on a shelf in our loungeroom. Still not finished. Nearly finished, though. Will eventually be finished.

 Everything was put on hold because a month ago the Giant Husband and I received an invitation to a costume party for the end of November. I (stupidly) suggested I make us costumes. Fantastic Elizabethan costumes. The Giant Husband (even more stupidly) said "You're not going to be able to do that." He says he was talking about time constraints. Doesn't matter, because the second he said that, I had to make them even if it kills us all, because that's how my brain works. Except, since then, I've been working twice as much as usual which has left not much time for sewing. Now there's a month to go and I'm ridiculously behind and about to have a nervous breakdown over the whole project.

 We have to go as famous people from history or now. I'm going to be Elizabeth I. He's going to be Francis Drake. His costume is based on a portrait of Drake. (Not started yet, though, except making the pattern.) Mine isn't going to be historically accurate. It's not based on a particular picture or anything. My starting point was actually one of the dresses worn by Miranda Richardson when she played Elizabeth I in Blackadder. But I've made some changes mostly based on what materials are available and what I'm going to have time and skill to actually do. There's no standing ruff because I have no idea how to do that, won't have time and think it looks incredibly uncomfortable. The fabric won't be perfect - we couldn't afford for me to buy the sort of satin brocade I really would have liked so I'm using tapestry upholstery fabric. And when I drafted the pattern, I did something weird with the stomacher so it's not quite a stomacher anymore. Seemed like a good idea at the time but not sure how I'll feel about it when the dress is finished.

Since I started making this dress I keep thinking back to a princess dress my mum made for me to wear to a costume party when I was twenty. I bought the fabric, two months in advance but didn't own a sewing machine. I kept considering hand-sewing it but my mother kept talking me out of it. "Don't worry." she'd say, "Don't hand-sew it. I'll bring my sewing machine around tomorrow and help you." Except she was always too busy to actually show up. Eventually she came on the day of the party, made the dress herself in about an hour and a half and then breezed off again. In the end, I was grateful that she'd made it but I really wished I'd hand-sewn it because Mum had made it how she wanted it to look, not how I wanted it to look. And because it was made in a hurry, almost everything we'd planned was left off and frankly it fitted fairly terribly. That dress, I've decided is the bar for this costume. I know this dress may not turn out fantastic or exactly how I want but as long as it turns out better than that dress, I'll be happy. At the end of the day, I suspect it will either turn out amazing or I'm going to look like a couch.

The old princess dress. If not a couch, I could have definitely passed as a footstool.

Shibajuku Girls Namika

Shibajuku Girl Namika's big eyed stare.

  Is it weird that I bought this doll even though I didn't like it? . . . I didn't dislike it. Mostly I was just curious and wanted to know more. When these dolls started appearing in Australian stores earlier this year, I didn't pay too much attention. I dismissed them as a new Cutie Pop doll but over time their chalk pale faces started to haunt me. I was intrigued and had to have a look at one.

  When I went to buy mine, the only two in stock were Namika and Shizuka. Shizuka nearly won the day because she has one blue eye and one green eye but her white and powder pink outfit seemed washed out to me, I preferred Namika's school outfit and odd socks. Plus Namika has pigtails, so it wasn't really a hard decision.

Artwork of the dolls from the back of Namika's box.

  Shibajuku Girls are inspired by Harajuku fashion, they even have a section on their website that explains what that's all about. To me this explains their bizarre pallor to an extent and their almost anime style eyes and features. The strange matte pallor, I'm guessing, is supposed to resemble a resin ball-jointed doll. And their facial features are almost anime style, but weirdly not. And this is the problem I have with these dolls. Everything about them is almost and not quite which means even though I'm a relatively articulate person, I find it almost impossible to talk about them, or describe them, or even decide what I think of them.

  One thing I can explain quite clearly is that I think they've missed the mark on the Harajuku thing. Yes most of the characters have brightly coloured hair (I'm disappointed that Shizuka's is blonde with pink streaks in real life, and not the ombre it is on the box illustration, though) but they're fashions aren't "wild". They're quirky but not close to Harajuku. To me, these outfits look more like what an Australian woman that admired Harajuku fashion but was too self-conscious to actually wear it, would wear. Yoko and Koe aren't wild or crazy at all. And Suki looks like a hipster who sells jewellery she's made out of vintage buttons at farmer's markets and she probably made that dress from vintage pillowcases while sipping a gluten free, all-organic, soy mocha frappe. This bugs me because they're dolls! You don't have to be coy, or self-conscious, or shy about what you dress them in, because they're dolls. They don't care. Be as wacky and wild and crazy as you like. Your average six year old when allowed to dress itself, is dressed more creatively than this! They could have so much fun with this, creating crazy, fun outfits for them, I'm pretty sure I could entertain myself for about six weeks designing wild and crazy clothes for them and they'd all be better than these designs, which quite frankly are a tad boring. I really hope if these dolls continue, they have some more interesting clothes in future.

  On the Shibajuku website there are little bios of the characters. Koe loves animals - a LOT; Namika loves learning - it starts by saying all learning but the rest of the bio focuses on science so I'm thinking Namika likes science; Suki loves colours and food and is possibly on drugs (the bio doesn't say that explicitly, I'm reading between the lines); Yoko loves reading, and writing, and music and spooky stuff and possibly would've been goth or emo if the designers weren't too self-conscious to do that. And Shizuka of the odd-coloured eyes loves everything that hasn't already been mentioned - she's shy but likes decorating herself (?), kittens, fashion, music and being the most under-developed character in the line.

 I always feel weird about these bios for doll lines. They're either an annoying list of stereotypes "Namika likes learning, no wait - Science!" Or completely random "Shizuka likes kittens and pretty things and playing drums and all the other things I didn't manage to fit in the other bios!" Why not have someone that likes learning but for once not have maths or science be their pet subject? Like maybe history or geography. And why does the almost goth/emo girl always like writing or art? Why not gardening or cooking or competitive swimming? Why not go with something different for a change? They're always either the same old things or completely without cohesion at all.

  The big selling points of these dolls are supposed to be the hair accessories they come with that kids can share with the dolls. Each doll comes with four. I'm not big on sparkly hair accessories to begin with so I wasn't overly impressed by these but I can see how they'd appeal to a six year old girl. Unfortunately they're not particularly well made and even though they'd hardly been handled, two of them were damaged within two hours of unboxing the doll. Although realistically, most little girls will have lost them within two hours of opening the package so perhaps this isn't a massive issue anyway.

Dang it! Tiny glittery things falling off all over my house!

  Anyway here's Namika in her box.

Help! I'm trapped in a cardboard tomb!

And out of it.

 I spent a while inspecting this doll, trying to decide what I thought about her. Her skintone is strange. She's very pale but it's not a luminous Apple White type pale. It's a matte pasty "I live in my parent's basement" kind of pale. Her eyes have an anime sort of style to them, but then the irises are shaded like they're trying to make the anime style realistic which comes off a little weird. She has real eyelashes but the shape of her eyes makes it hard to tell where her upper eyelid starts and finishes, and they look like they're not quite in the right place. Also such fine eyelashes clash a little bit with the bold, chunky, cartoonish facial screening. I don't mind the glitter eyeshadow, but I think that the glitter they've used is too big to be in scale with the doll.

Giant confusing eye!

Her facial sculpting too is almost anime but then there's a little too much detail in the nose in particular to actually come across as anime in person. And what's with the purple lips? Did she drown?  And most perplexing of all (to me at least) her hands and feet are freakishly tiny!

There's NO chance she's standing on her own with these!

  There's also a seam down her lower leg from her knee to her big toe which on my doll's left leg in particular is not as closed as I would like it to be, and makes me wonder if it's going to open and possibly fall apart over time.
  Her jointing is as impressive as it is disappointing. Her head has no up or down movement, it only turns, and the further it turns, the further upward her face points. This is irritating. Her shoulders, hips, elbows, wrists and knees all have full rotational movement though, and move nicely, which is excellent. But her ankles have no joint at all which is annoying. And since she can't stand on her own, doesn't come with a stand and doesn't fit other doll's stands particularly well, how useful is posability to her?

  Her clothes are nice, if a little boring and cliched, and I definitely like the socks. Everything seems to be fairly well made although the woven tie on her blouse is not sewn in place or hemmed which makes me wonder how it would hold up to ordinary play. And the skirt, while it's clearly supposed to represent a pleated skirt, isn't pleated and tends to stick out weirdly. But the strangest part of her outfit is this . . .

What horrific dolly orphanage did these underpants come from? I despise painted on or moulded on clothing on dolls, but I would have preferred painted on underwear to these. These should be the underwear she hides in the back of the drawer for emergencies and never ever wears.

  But my big question was, since she's thirteen inches tall, can she share clothes with other dolls? The answer is a resounding maybe. I couldn't find any shoes amongst my junk to fit her. Her feet are so thin and brittle feeling that I was only willing to try flexible shoes on her and her feet are flat which rules out most Barbie shoes right away. But clothes were a different story.
  Her proportions are actually quite different to most other dolls but I decided to swap some around for fun.

  I started with Barbie and they swapped fairly well. Barbie's bust made Namika's top sit weirdly and the skirt was almost indecently short. And Namika's socks did NOT want to go over Barbie's legs. But Namika looked kind of cute in the Barbie dress, even though it is a little longer and looser on her than it is on Barbie.

It doesn't look like they like each other very much.

  Next up was Monster High and Ever After High. I only have one standard size doll from each line and the seventeen inch dolls' clothes were clearly not going to fit. Nor did the standard ones. Namika couldn't even get her hands through Frankie's sleeves and Darling Charming's dress came nowhere near being big enough around Namika's torso. They both got to try on Namika's outfit though. But there was no way her shoes were fitting them.

 I think Frankie looks kind of cute like this.

But I don't think Darling is a uniform kind of girl.

  Next I tried a clothes swap with Moxie Teenz Tristen. Tristen's top fit Namika a lot better than I would have expected but her skirt was way too lose. And Tristen frankly looked like a stripper in Namika's clothes.

  Next I tried a swap with a Mary Kate and Ashley doll, I think they have one of the Skipper bodies but I'm not one hundred per cent sure. This was a pretty good fit but also weird. Mary Kate or Ashley's clothes looked way too mature for Namika and Mary Kate or Ashley's face looked too adult for Namika's outfit.

  Then I tried a swap I really didn't think would work, I was just messing around by this point. Moxie Girlz and Namika. And the fit was surprisingly good! And the proportions of each dolls outfit actually suited the other which was nice.

Lastly I tried Namika's outfit on a doll that's either a Wee Three Friends doll or a Star Team Stacie - they're the same doll and I have boxes of them. Unfortunately, their clothes were accidentally thrown away years ago, so I didn't have anything of theirs for Namika to try on. Which is upsetting since Namika's clothes were such a good fit on Stacie that I'm pretty sure they'd fit well the other way around too.

  So after all this what do I think of Namika? In all honesty, I'm still as confused as hell. If I had to describe Namika in one word, that word would be inconsistent. She's anime,but she's not. She's posable but you can't pose her because she can't stand up. Her clothes are fairly well made, except for her underpants which are an abomination. They're touted as having Harajuku style but if they do it's an ultra-conservative westernised version. For every good point, there's a bad point. It's almost as though someone had a vague idea for these dolls and they got rushed into production before anyone was clear about what they were making. 

  Having said that Namika has grown on me. I think she's sweet. She's cute and as long as I don't look at her too closely, I like her. She's going to sit beside my computer as a mascot until I get tired of her. But I have no interest in buying another one. I think there's still hope for this line of dolls. Give them chunkier shoes so they can stand up and clothes that are actually bright and colourful, wild and crazy and you could actually have a really cool doll. But mostly, I think Hunter Toys needs to actually decide what kind of doll these dolls are before they're going to go anywhere.

A Little Light Rambling

  I haven't gotten much of anything done lately. The Giant Baby and I took turns having a bad cold. Then it was time to try to wean him off the antacids he's been on his entire life. We're supposed to try this every three months to see if he's grown out of reflux. He hasn't. Not only has he not grown out of it but the experience was so harrowing that right now as far as I'm concerned, he can take the antacids forever. Then, just as he was starting to seem more like his usual self, his Dad left him in a dirty nappy while I was at work and he got his first ever nappy rash and it was nasty. And he was miserable.
  All of this has made the Giant Baby uncharacteristically fussy and clingy. Even now I can't get him to nap in his cot. He will only nap in my arms, on the couch or in the car. Which limits what I can do at nap-time. I don't want to spread sewing stuff out and then have to madly scramble to put it away when he wakes up. Mostly because I'm pretty sure I'd miss something and he'd get hurt. I can't spread doll stuff all over the lounge room to take photos. Partly because turning enough lights on to take photos will wake him. Partly because if he wakes up, he will turn into a tornado of rage grabbing dolls and my camera and anything else he can reach.

Mega-Toddler! He'll hide the tv remote and then scream because you take too

long changing the channel.

  And he's turned into Mega-Toddler. Can't reach something? Screech. Can't find Mum? Screech. Don't want to do something? Screech. Want to do something? Screech. Every day he falls over or bumps into something at least once, gets told no, tries to do something he's not allowed to do or doesn't have the skills for yet or that isn't physically possible. And his response to all of these things at the moment is screaming. Which is super-fun.
  His Grandmother taught him to say please. I honestly had no idea he was old enough for manners. So now, if he wants something he shrieks "Ease!" in a voice that makes Elmo sound like Barry White. Even better, when he gets angry (usually because the first please didn't work) he'll keep yelling "please" but it sounds more and more like "arse" each time he says it until I start to wonder if he's going to turn into Father Jack Hackett from the tv show Father Ted. Although if I could teach him to say "drink", "girls", "feck", and "that would be an ecumenical matter." perhaps we'd have some kind of routine on our hands. The Giant Husband says this is not allowed.
  Meanwhile between the Giant Baby, housework, work-work, and everything else, by the time the Giant Baby goes to bed at night, I'm too tired to do more than scroll listlessly through my pinterest feed for five minutes before going to bed myself. So my projects have been temporarily put on hold.

  The dress for Not-Glinda in particular has hit a snag. The bodice is done. I need to make the skirt and attach it. Except I have no intention of hemming it by hand which is a problem. I can't use the sewing machine when the Giant Baby is sleeping because it wakes him. I can't use the sewing machine when the Giant Baby is awake. Because there is nowhere in the house that I can set up the sewing machine that he can't get to. . . actually since the doors in our house don't close properly, there's just nowhere he can't get to full stop. So it has to wait until there's a weekend when I'm not working and we don't have plans, when I can talk the Giant Husband into taking him somewhere, even the other end of the house would do.

  The Baby So Beautiful dolls are progressing. Slowly. I'm putting money aside for a new wig for the bald doll. I want screamingly red, wispy ponytails for her. I have a vague idea of what kind of clothes I want for her, but I want to see her finished with her new hair before I make my final decision. At the end of the day it will almost certainly be a simple, high waisted dress. I don't think I will try to make her clothes that disguise her injured hand after all and I think I'll go for something cute rather than something fashionable so it dates better.

  I recently bought a new play doll. A Shibajuku Girl doll. I want to write a review of her here because before I bought her the only reviews I could find of the line were Mum-blog reviews which more or less read "Amphetamine and Lobotomy received this doll for review. They both thought she was pretty. Amphetamine loves her long hair. Lobotomy hasn't stopped playing with the accessories since we opened the box. The end." Which is great but doesn't answer any of the questions I have. Like how is she different to other dolls? She's taller than other fashion dolls but is the extra height just her giant head? Can she wear other dolls clothes? What's her jointing like? What sort of quality are we talking about? How well made are her clothes? And most importantly do I like her? Strange as it may sound I don't know if I do or not. I'm intrigued. But I don't know what I think yet. Possibly because I haven't even had a chance to open the box yet. I have a few extra shifts at work this week, but if I survive that, the Giant Husband has promised to amuse the Giant Baby on the weekend so hopefully I can get that done then. And hem Not-Glinda's skirt.

And now back to the battlefield.