My Collection Part Five

This post is going to be a short one in number of dolls but probably quite long in blah, blah, blah, because I have a fair bit to say about these girls.

My Baby So Beautiful dolls.

Baby So Beautiful was a line of toddler dolls released by Playmates in 1995. I think they only lasted about a year but there were two spin off lines. A line of baby dolls called Newborn Baby So Beautiful and a line of teenage fashion dolls (more like Cissy than Barbie) called Young Lady So Beautiful.

All my girls were from the toddler line. They were available in a range of skin colours, head molds, hair colours and styles, eye colours, and outfits put together in a random kind of way that means there's a huge amount of variation. They're full vinyl (and it's a nice vinyl), with fixed acrylic eyes, wigged hair and applied lashes. I can't say why I like them. I'm not usually into toddler dolls, and these girls generally have issues, but for some reason I find them really appealing.

What are their issues? Well, their wigs were pretty crappy, a lot have dried out to the point of disintegration. Their eyes are prone to discolouration and their lip paint tended to fade, usually to creepy shades of lilac or orange or yellow. Even still I would love to, one day, have a bunch of these dolls. Definitely one of each head mold would be awesome. Unfortunately while I see plenty listed on EBay for $10 or $20 (Australian dollars), they're always in the US, which means forty dollars or more for postage. Ones listed in Australia are usually between $40 and $60 (plus postage), no matter their condition. And given the amount of care they can need, that just feels too expensive to me.

This is Jessamy and she is pretty much like new. She has no fading, she's still wearing her original haired, she even has her locket. Every doll came with a little plastic locket and a "baby book". She also has a headband somewhere, but it looks stupid, so I don't put it on her.

This is Emily Kathryn. Even though she's always belonged to me, and I was an adult by the time I got her, so she's only been a display doll, she's a little unfortunate at the moment. A couple of years ago, her wig was REALLY dry, so I tried soaking it in fabric softener. When I rinsed it out, all the hair started breaking off! I tossed it but I keep forgetting to get her a new one. Her eyes are turning yellow too, which is a shame.
She probably has the most common face sculpt.

This is Kirralee. She has the same face as Emily, but she's even more unfortunate. She was found bald, naked, and missing the fingers off one hand at an op shop. I repainted her lips, but the paint I used bled into her vinyl, so I removed it and repainted them again. She has a wig, but no clothes yet, because I can never decide what to make for her to wear. Her eyes are an awesome goldy colour that I love, and I am going to be heartbroken if they fade.

And this, as yet unnamed girl, arrived this afternoon. So far, I can't tell if her face is the same as Jessamy's but painted differently or a different sculpt altogether. Her clothes need a wash, her hair is like steel wool, she's very grotty, her left eye is quite yellowed and her lips have gone a purplish colour. This is what I'm talking about when I say these dolls are overpriced on EBay here. She wasn't too bad. Including postage she was under twenty five dollars but there's another girl in the same dress (different colour), in similar condition, listed on EBay right now for over forty dollars, not including shipping! Paying twenty dollars for a doll in this kind of condition, I can deal with. But paying sixty dollars for a doll with purple lips, that's going to need a new wig, and possibly new eyes - no thanks.
I got this new girl thinking I could give her body to Kirralee and use her head to test whether you could change their eyes. Unfortunately her skin is a different colour to Kirralee's so head swap is out. I'll still probably try switching her eyes out though.

There's a couple more on EBay that I have my eye on at the moment but haven't quite made up my mind over. Including one in t the US that I want because it looks like Tiny but I don't want to buy because it has the same face as Emily and Kirralee and having three of the same sculpt feels like a waste.

I'm hoping that eventually I can update you guys with some less neglected looking toddlers.


*Update*

Removed new girl's wig (the Giant Baby says I should call her "Friendia") and it has left stains on her head, which I'll need to think of when I get her new one.
And just for curiosities sake the marking on her head #1A1-A7

Kirralee's markings #4A1-3

And Emily's markings (which I expected to match Kirralee's but don't) #4-29

I wish I knew what these meant, and why Emily's and Kirralee's aren't the same.

Doll count:- 55

Birthdays and Holidays

Of course, the Giant Baby's birthday party had to be cancelled. Since it was planned for a little over a week before his actual birthday, we cheered him up by still having a party, just for us, and letting him pretend it was his real birthday, by getting all his presents that day.

He had fun which is good. It made me a bit depressed. It is so weird to me that this kid that questions everything, doesn't believe girls don't have penises (how would they wee?), and thinks we're teasing when we say that chicken the food is made from chicken the animal (that's the craziest thing he had ever heard), just accepts without question that we can't go to Nanny's house, the library, the zoo, the beach, the museum, the park, kinder, or have birthday parties because it's illegal. On top of which, the two kids, twenty four seven, with no light at the end of the tunnel, is a tiny bit completely and utterly exhausting and draining, which doesn't put me in the best frame of mind to start with.

 The Giant Baby's pretend birthday, was my actual birthday and I got a screen printing set. So hopefully at some point, I'll get five minutes to myself to try it out. Although I might need to learn to make chloroform first.

And hopefully in the next couple of days, I'll shake off my funk, long enough to take pictures for another My Collection post.

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