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beccastareyesSo, I collect dolls. And one of these days, I need to do a guide to my haul. I also customize dolls, and am getting slowly better* at it.
I prefer cheaper dolls rather than some of the nicer dolls my friends have -- the most expensive thing in my collection are a couple of American Girl Dolls, all of which were purchased second-hand**. Plus, I want something I can mess around with -- I'm not really a collector as much as a crafter and still mentally a little girl about dolls. I'm also a bit of a sheep -- witness being dragged into the Monster High fandom because all my doll friends were cooing over them. At first it was just a 'hey, unusually-colored or sculpted cheap dolls***'. Now I own a Frankie and kind of want the others. And, hey, $20 is not bad for impulse buys.
But anyway, one of the neat things about the Monster High collection is the customization properties for someone who occasionally comes up with characters with blue skin or animal ears. Problem is, I have this thing for wanting matching sets of things, so if I do a Monster High custom of my character, Phillee, I want the other dolls from that comic to match. Which doesn't quite work when they don't have the exotic skin tones that they other dolls have and that I don't want to use Cleo for everyone who is female and Jackson (or Clawd or Deuce once you remove their hairpieces) for all the males. (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dark_skada does have a nice custom Draculaura and Ghoulia that pass for human, and technically Alriai has more of an 'ivory' skin tone than anything human.)
A related matter is that I own two Italian-produced Slayers 11.5" dolls (Amelia and Lina). Now, both need new hair (Lina's is fading from flame-orange to gold on the top, and Amelia is... well, the toy company decided that her hair was totally blue rather than black/dark purple (old anime) or royal purple (new anime). And Monster High conveniently has a blue skin-tone male doll. And I do like the Monster High articulation -- Barbies can bend at shoulder and hips, plus turn their heads, while Monster High dolls have articulation at shoulder, hips, neck, knees, and wrists, plus rotate their elbows. (But I do like the Slayers dolls faces, actually...)
So, I'd like to re-body the Slayers dolls when I fix their wigs (and maybe throw in a custom Zel and Gourry (at least)), but that means finding something that would work with a Monster High-sized Zel. And I know next to nothing about what's on the market for doll bodies.
So, doll-collecting friends -- help for things that are roughly MH scale, cheap but look closer to human?
So, American Girl dolls can have some really exotic customs. So far, the only one I've done is wig-swapping, which is pretty easy (assuming AG doesn't use gobs of death glue) -- get doll, get wig, pry off old wig with a spoon, glue in new wig with Tacky Glue. I have a practice head in the mail to learn how to remove and replace eyes to do an eye-swap -- American Girl dolls have sleep eyes, so you can't just repaint them. Plus, there are some eye colors that are rare (despite the umpteen million My American Girl dolls and 10+ named dolls (ignoring retired ones), grey eyes are hard to find) or skin color/face mold combos that tend to have a characteristic eye color (Want a non-classic mold or non-light-skinned doll? She'll probably have brown eyes!)
So, one night while hanging with my AG friends, someone (dark_skada?) mentions that she doesn't see many folks who use Kaya (the only American Indian character AG makes, a member of the Nimi'ipuu (Nez Perce) tribe) as a different character, other than 'Kaya as depicted in her books' and 'Kaya, moved to the modern day'. So I start joking about doing a Water Tribe (from Avatar: the Last Airbender) custom doll, and, well...
So I get the supplies (which means two dolls, since I need some blue eyes and heck if I can get those separate -- if I don't want the other Franken-doll, I can resell her****) and wait for the practice head so I don't Screw This Up...
... And think to myself, as I reread 1491, you know, a Haudenosaunee doll would be a cool idea. Or, hell, if I want to not limit myself to 'USA-ian'(5) dolls -- and heaven knows, given my other two aren't from Earth and I was going to do an A:tLA doll as #4, so it's not like -- a pre-Columbian Central American or Andean doll. There's a lot of cool cultures I could read up on and make clothing from, not to mention that cotton was being cultivated in the Americas, so I could use something other than 'fake leather'.
On the other hand, I don't want to be someone who is Doing It Wrong, though some of the second-hand fail I've heard of from AG collectors makes me think that would be pretty hard. And I then would have to find a use for the blue-eyed doll...
... Then my brain notes that the Girl of the Year (a limited edition doll AG releases for a year) is multiracial Hawaiian/Japanese/white, and might be able to pass for an Inuit-like group of people. And I did promise myself a new AG doll when I graduate...
Thoughts?
--
* I am slightly embarrassed by the Calla I made my friendmirisa_ardruna -- since she was my first custom, I could do so much better now. For one, I could give the right hair and eye colors, and not just glue wefts on to make bangs.
** Plus AGs are huggable -- they have cloth bodies, even if they also have vinyl heads and limbs.
*** It's one reason why Cleo de Nile doesn't excite me much. Yay, a vaguely-Egyptian looking doll who is supposed to be a mummy and occasionally has bandages worked into her clothing. Good for customization, but not too interesting in a line where all the other dolls are supposed to be cute monsters.
**** And get flack, since I decided I wanted a Josefina-mold doll, and the only ones with blue eyes were retired. Eh, my money -- besides, 'normal' people buy these things for kids to play with.
(5) In before someone notes that Kaya and Josefina wouldn't consider themselves USAian, and Felicity's era was actually fighting over that. (Though even the loyalist colonists probably had some identity as Virginian or Bostonian or whatever, even if they didn't want to sever ties with Britain.) And Kirsten's first book start out in Sweden, while Addy's starts in an area that's currently seceding from the USA. Not to mention they made a doll of Molly's friend, Emily, who was a British girl living with Molly's family because Germany was bombing the tar out of Britain. So the criterion for 'American' in 'American Girl' seems to be 'lived in some part of the region now called the United States of America'.
I prefer cheaper dolls rather than some of the nicer dolls my friends have -- the most expensive thing in my collection are a couple of American Girl Dolls, all of which were purchased second-hand**. Plus, I want something I can mess around with -- I'm not really a collector as much as a crafter and still mentally a little girl about dolls. I'm also a bit of a sheep -- witness being dragged into the Monster High fandom because all my doll friends were cooing over them. At first it was just a 'hey, unusually-colored or sculpted cheap dolls***'. Now I own a Frankie and kind of want the others. And, hey, $20 is not bad for impulse buys.
But anyway, one of the neat things about the Monster High collection is the customization properties for someone who occasionally comes up with characters with blue skin or animal ears. Problem is, I have this thing for wanting matching sets of things, so if I do a Monster High custom of my character, Phillee, I want the other dolls from that comic to match. Which doesn't quite work when they don't have the exotic skin tones that they other dolls have and that I don't want to use Cleo for everyone who is female and Jackson (or Clawd or Deuce once you remove their hairpieces) for all the males. (
dark_skada does have a nice custom Draculaura and Ghoulia that pass for human, and technically Alriai has more of an 'ivory' skin tone than anything human.) A related matter is that I own two Italian-produced Slayers 11.5" dolls (Amelia and Lina). Now, both need new hair (Lina's is fading from flame-orange to gold on the top, and Amelia is... well, the toy company decided that her hair was totally blue rather than black/dark purple (old anime) or royal purple (new anime). And Monster High conveniently has a blue skin-tone male doll. And I do like the Monster High articulation -- Barbies can bend at shoulder and hips, plus turn their heads, while Monster High dolls have articulation at shoulder, hips, neck, knees, and wrists, plus rotate their elbows. (But I do like the Slayers dolls faces, actually...)
So, I'd like to re-body the Slayers dolls when I fix their wigs (and maybe throw in a custom Zel and Gourry (at least)), but that means finding something that would work with a Monster High-sized Zel. And I know next to nothing about what's on the market for doll bodies.
So, doll-collecting friends -- help for things that are roughly MH scale, cheap but look closer to human?
So, American Girl dolls can have some really exotic customs. So far, the only one I've done is wig-swapping, which is pretty easy (assuming AG doesn't use gobs of death glue) -- get doll, get wig, pry off old wig with a spoon, glue in new wig with Tacky Glue. I have a practice head in the mail to learn how to remove and replace eyes to do an eye-swap -- American Girl dolls have sleep eyes, so you can't just repaint them. Plus, there are some eye colors that are rare (despite the umpteen million My American Girl dolls and 10+ named dolls (ignoring retired ones), grey eyes are hard to find) or skin color/face mold combos that tend to have a characteristic eye color (Want a non-classic mold or non-light-skinned doll? She'll probably have brown eyes!)
So, one night while hanging with my AG friends, someone (
dark_skada?) mentions that she doesn't see many folks who use Kaya (the only American Indian character AG makes, a member of the Nimi'ipuu (Nez Perce) tribe) as a different character, other than 'Kaya as depicted in her books' and 'Kaya, moved to the modern day'. So I start joking about doing a Water Tribe (from Avatar: the Last Airbender) custom doll, and, well...So I get the supplies (which means two dolls, since I need some blue eyes and heck if I can get those separate -- if I don't want the other Franken-doll, I can resell her****) and wait for the practice head so I don't Screw This Up...
... And think to myself, as I reread 1491, you know, a Haudenosaunee doll would be a cool idea. Or, hell, if I want to not limit myself to 'USA-ian'(5) dolls -- and heaven knows, given my other two aren't from Earth and I was going to do an A:tLA doll as #4, so it's not like -- a pre-Columbian Central American or Andean doll. There's a lot of cool cultures I could read up on and make clothing from, not to mention that cotton was being cultivated in the Americas, so I could use something other than 'fake leather'.
On the other hand, I don't want to be someone who is Doing It Wrong, though some of the second-hand fail I've heard of from AG collectors makes me think that would be pretty hard. And I then would have to find a use for the blue-eyed doll...
... Then my brain notes that the Girl of the Year (a limited edition doll AG releases for a year) is multiracial Hawaiian/Japanese/white, and might be able to pass for an Inuit-like group of people. And I did promise myself a new AG doll when I graduate...
Thoughts?
--
* I am slightly embarrassed by the Calla I made my friend
mirisa_ardruna -- since she was my first custom, I could do so much better now. For one, I could give the right hair and eye colors, and not just glue wefts on to make bangs. ** Plus AGs are huggable -- they have cloth bodies, even if they also have vinyl heads and limbs.
*** It's one reason why Cleo de Nile doesn't excite me much. Yay, a vaguely-Egyptian looking doll who is supposed to be a mummy and occasionally has bandages worked into her clothing. Good for customization, but not too interesting in a line where all the other dolls are supposed to be cute monsters.
**** And get flack, since I decided I wanted a Josefina-mold doll, and the only ones with blue eyes were retired. Eh, my money -- besides, 'normal' people buy these things for kids to play with.
(5) In before someone notes that Kaya and Josefina wouldn't consider themselves USAian, and Felicity's era was actually fighting over that. (Though even the loyalist colonists probably had some identity as Virginian or Bostonian or whatever, even if they didn't want to sever ties with Britain.) And Kirsten's first book start out in Sweden, while Addy's starts in an area that's currently seceding from the USA. Not to mention they made a doll of Molly's friend, Emily, who was a British girl living with Molly's family because Germany was bombing the tar out of Britain. So the criterion for 'American' in 'American Girl' seems to be 'lived in some part of the region now called the United States of America'.
