Well the truth is, often I can't. I pass on a lot of things because I simply cannot afford it.
The budget is tight. I get £75 a month to spend on frivolous junk, which generally in my case means dolls dolls and more dolls. This used to go a long way, but these days it really doesn't go far at all.
Playline prices are absolutely sky high with fashion dolls coming it at around £20 or more for anything even vuagely interesting and I just cannot justify it.
Meanwhile the dolls I like to buy right now, things like bjds and high end collectable dolls are well over £100 EACH. So that means if I want a bjd or something of a similar price I have to save like heck and find money in other places.
Now, often I get money from inlaws and relatives for my birthday and christmas which will get me one or two dolls depending on deals or offers etc, but outside of those times I have to scrape together what I can by selling stuff I already have.
I trawl charity shops for vintage and collectable items, not just for myself but also to sell. Sometimes I find something I desperately wanted or fall in love with, other times I find something I KNOW is worth something to the right people and just needs the right audience.
But i'm not an expert at all dolls and often I do pass on stuff and later realise it was gold (like disney dolls, argh. I do NOT know much about disney dolls and i've missed several absolute treasures as a result)
While I might hit gold every so often though, the majority of the stuff I sell comes from my own collection. Stuff i've held onto for years that's all stacked in boxes in my closet because I don't have the display space.
Every so often I have to do a purge because a big expense comes up, there's something big I want and I cannot make the money the standard way (waiting a month) in time.
this is one such occassion.
When I first got into BJDs a few years ago I also found the term "shelling", a concept i'd always found quite cool. The idea is that you use a doll to "shell" a character of yours, and as a roleplayer, I have a LOT of characters.
I held off on doing this for ages because I have a very clear view in my head of what my characters look like and finding a sculpt that was "just right" was too much of a headache.
that was, till I stumbled upon Souldoll's site. Soulkid Joelle.
This sulky as heck face reminded me very very much of one of my characters, Kay.
Can you see it?
Of course, this meant I knew I HAD to have this face sculpt. But if I was going to go down the rabbit hole of shelling rp characters I knew I would have to also find dolls to be Kay's siblings.
As it was, Souldoll came through again with their Vito line,
Lester reminded me very much of Kay's half brother Esk, even down to the height difference between the two dolls.
Only problem was skin tones.
See, bjds are hard to find in brown tones and for whatever reason, most of my OCs are various shades of brown.
Still, that's what dye is for right?
Still it was a nerve wracking proposition. Shelling these two of course would mean i'd have to shell their OTHER brothers, twins Web and Matt. None of Souldoll's sculpts worked and finding something that would be "in scale" proved very difficult. To get their heights right, i'd need a doll that was 53-54cm tall and that is a really really tall order in the bjd world.
"SD" dolls pretty much start at 60cm while "MSD" stop at around 47cm, so there's this huge gap between where there's next to nothing to pick from.
Souldoll's "kid" line are about 47cm while their Vitos are a really unusual 52cm.
Another added complication was that I didn't want a "beefy" body for the twins. While Esk is fairly well built (he IS an ex soldier) the twins are willowy as shit.
Finding a slender 50 something cm body is even harder than finding ANY 50something cm body.
I resigned myself to never finding a shell for the twins and thus put off buying these two.
Of course another factor was the price. most of the bjds i've purchased the past two years have been Resinsoul dolls, and thus they're pretty "cheap" (for bjds). At £140ish they take me only 2 months to save for (approximately) which isn't so difficult to manage. Resisting the urge to buy other junk for 2 months is way easier than say, a year or more.
Souldoll dolls are about twice the price of the dolls i'm used to buying and at a price range that makes me feel anxious about spending the money. I still suffer a lot of spend guilt and while i've managed to get to a point where I don't feel TOO cripplingly bad about spending £140 on a single doll, £300 for a doll of the same scale makes my chest tighten and I start to feel seriously anxious.
Soulkids are £288, Vitos are £376, that's the base price with no wig, eyes, clothes and no interesting skin tones.
That's a LOT of money.
and so I waited, assuming, perhaps foolishly, that as Lester especially was a very good seller, Souldoll were unlikely to stop making him.
Then a few months ago I stumbled upon Magic Mirror studios and her doll Levon.
at 53-54cm tall and kinda willowy, he had the body type I was looking for for the twins!
And he's not a bad likeness. He'll only need a little modding to his ears (which are crazy long anyway whoo) and his nose to work.
But now of course prices were getting a bit scary.
Levon hasn't been released yet, but as an artist cast doll he's gonna be expensive. Getting two of them may be out of my budget completely, but it's an option. The artist is also super nice so getting a long layaway could be viable.
Anyway, this rekindled my interest in this idea.
But I wasn't quite willing to take the plunge because as soon as I got one, I knew it'd mean i'd NEED to get the other three and I needed a hefty chunk of cash in my pocket to be ready to start paying off something like that.
but today Souldoll pulled the rug out from under my feet.
Today, they announced they were discontinuing 90% of their dolls. Lester and Joelle are both on the list.
Come September, both will be gone for good.
I'm absolutely devastated. I CANNOT afford to buy both dolls right now. I have literally got £160 in my bank account and a few preorders already placed that I may now need to cancel.
Even with a generous layaway from the UK dealer Angelesque I cannot affford the monthly repayments for both dolls.
And so I have to make an agonising decision.
I'm not happy about the idea of just abandoning this idea. These four characters mean a lot to me.
I don't think I can afford to buy both full dolls right now, realistically it's just not practical even if I literally sell everything I own. But Souldoll have said they'll sell the heads individually.
So my thought is to buy Joelle in full, who is the rarer sculpt, and buy Lester's head when they make them available for order. Then I have a few months (okay realistically like 6 months), hopefully, to save up to buy a vito body for him.
But I also have to hope like hell Magic Mirror doesn't release her boy till i'm done paying off these and can afford to place a deposit on those too.
ARGHHH!
so yeah, i'm stressing about money.
so there's only one solution. Another PURGE.
I'm going to be going through my boxes of things, finding things I just don't really NEED to keep and listing them for sale. Ebay takes a huge chunk of my profits though, so i'd rather not have to use ebay (that and i'm struggling to sell things there anyway) as I kinda need every single penny.
As I go through the collection i'll post up here, with a little info on what the thing is and where I got it and so on.
Even if you aren't interested in buying perhaps it might be interesting to see what kinda weird stuff I have?
to start us off, here's my ebay link: https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/flying_purple_monkfish/m.html?_nkw=&_armrs=1&_ipg=&_from= for some stuff I had already listed up for sale before this announcement.
and the few things on my desk:
I picked this little LPS Blythe a few days ago in a charity shop. I thought she was cute. She has no shoes. I like her hair and her dress is super pretty.
Anyway, as needs must, all things I don't actively collect need to go. so she's £10 plus shipping anywhere in the world. (all prices will be quoted like this okay? UK postage is like £3 but send me a message if you want international shipping quotes. Or you know, email me at Kill_all_the_bunnies@hotmail.com for bundle deals and stuff)
This is a Russ troll. Okay so, when I was a teenager I used to cycle into town on a friday before college and pop into the charity shops on the high street to kill some time. I ended up with a lot of little plushies and all sorts, and I have to assume the troll was a nostalgia purchase way back then. I used to collect trolls as a kid, I loved the dang things, and while I didn't have this one as a child, I guess he reminded me of them and was probably stupidly cheap too.
For the past er.. 15 years or so he's sat in a bag in my mother's attic with all those plushies. My nieces were over from Australia this month so we got the bag of toys down for them to go through and pick out anything they wanted to take home. After so long in the attic it was better they got a loving home right?
Anyway, the troll was in the bag and I brought him home because as I said, I used to collect them as a kid.
It's in good condition and seems to be complete. I dunno if it ever had a name though.
He needs a new home.
£2
This is a big My Neighbour Totoro plush. I found him in a charity shop and fell in love with how cuddly he was.
But I have waaaaaay too many plushies, like omg we're drowning in plushies.
He looks to be an official licensed product and he's er, about 40cm tall.
He's near new, aside from a few squishy cuddles ever so often from me, he's just sat on a pile of other plushies since I bought him.
£10
This is a 90s Littlest Pet Shop set. I collected these when I was a child and a while back started to rebuild my childhood collection by buying big bundles. So I ended up with spares and sets I just didn't much want or need.
This one is the sea lion/seal from the zoo line.
It isn't complete. Missing the bowl of fish I think.
£4
This is another of the Littlest Pet Shop Zoo sets. I actually had a set like this as a child but I sold most of my zoo sets a while back as I decided I wanted to only focus on the "pet shop" pieces.
The bird is really grubby but the tiger is perfect. go figure.
the set is incomplete too. Missing food and the ball thing that clips into the roof.
£4
remember these guys from a recent review?
Yeah I don't need them.
They're Hasbro's Lost Kitties. Meowzart and er... the gamer one.
I have their stickers as well.
£3 for the pair.
Kidrobot Kiro kiiro? I dunno. I think this is called Kirex but i'm not honestly sure. It's a chase figure so rarer. These are like 2 inch tall vinyl figures.
It reminds me of Peanuts Woodstock mixed with a rubber ducky hahaha.
£4
This girl is about 2 or 3 inches tall as well. She is a "mybu perfect pair".
She comes apart for some reason.
And can be put back together to show off her underwear. It's random.
£3
A kidrobot Dunny called "Reach" or something. Again it's a small vinyl bunny figure okay?
As you may recall I had planned to keep these last two, but needs must. They really are just cluttering up my shelf. £3
Finally this old girl is a Moondreamers Ursa Major. Or something like that.
She's a bit grubby and old and has lost her saddle.
She's also lost some of her nose paint.
I bought her because she was cute and looked vintagey. She reminds me of mlp which makes sense as she was made by Hasbro at a similar sort of time.
£4
More will come, and i'll be listing things on my flickr too simultaneously.
Help me out guys, I desperately need to scrape together every little bit of cash I can. So if there's anything you want, drop me a line and let me know! I take paypal, goods and services only.
Honestly, it was never my habit to count other people's money. The question I always ask myself is "where do they stash all this stuff?" Good luck with the purge and getting the dolls you want.
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