Bundles galore, and trying to be good.

 I've been trying to buy fewer dolls this year but of course, that's always easier said than done when you're a doll collector. 

Still, I think i've been doing fairly well in that I haven't been buying much brand new at least. 

But bundles of tlc dolls are my weakness, and the joy I get from bringing wrecked dolls back to some degree of respectability is worth the money. 

So today i'm going to tell you about the last few bundles i've bought, what I kept, what I rehomed and all that jazz. 

 

 

 

First up we have this random little bundle which cost me less than a fiver. 

I don't collect Disney dolls, but the My Scene doll caught my eye. She's Nia, one of the very late additions to the roster and quite a difficult character to find. I used to own one, but when I did a big purge many years ago I sold a lot of my My Scene dolls and can't help but wonder what the hell I was thinking.

Anyway, this girl needed tlc. 

I knew that when I bid. But I figured she was a rare enough doll that it'd be worth the work. 

When she arrived it became clear that she was not only missing a few hair plugs but she also had quite a bit of staining to her face. 

I spent a few days destaining her with peroxide solution which worked really well. Then I tackled the missing hair plugs. 

I couldn't find a colour to match her unusual strawberry blonde tone, but she has blonde streaks and I had some blonde nylon in my stash which was "close enough" to fill in the blank spots. 

 One strand of the rerooted hair does stand out a little more than i'd have liked because it's a thicker fiber than her original hair and it's shinier but it's a lot better than bald patches. 

She has a gorgeous face. 

I think she's Glam Beach Nia. 

Whatever the case, i'm pleased to have this rare girl back in my collection. 

The other dolls went into the rehome box. 

 

The next bundle was this huge bundle of doll clothing with a couple of random dolls. 

There were a few things here that caught my eye. The Lace black and gold dress at the bottom front, the various Fashion Fever outfits and so on.

But above all else was this girl in the green knitted top. Her face fascinated me. I couldn't stop coming back to this listing to stare at her, trying to work out who and what she was. 

so I put a bid in.

The clothing was almost all in really nice condition and included some gorgeous pieces. There were also two Barbies who went straight into the rehome box. 

 

The mystery girl turned out to have a much larger head than I was anticipating. In the auction pictures it looked a similar size to the Barbie heads but she's got a more Sindy sized head. 

Marked "Famosa" she is, I discovered, named Gina. 

I didn't know Famosa made Barbie sized fashion dolls, they're more well known for their large doll Nancy and various baby dolls. But it turns out that in the  80s and 90s they made a couple of forays into the standard 1/6 scale fashion doll market. 

Gina is one such attempt. This girl was made in 1991 and i think she's this specific model

 She's the only one I could find with the crimped hair.

She has a Barbie-like Body with a twist waist and click knees and an oversized head that's more reminiscent of Sindy or the older Steffie Love than Barbie. 

She fits vintage Barbie stuff well. This is Share a Smile Becky's outfit which was also in the bundle. 

I think these might be Liv doll shoes but i'm not sure. Her feet are too big for barbie shoes but they're similarly featureless pointed things with no toes. 

Next bundle had a lot of Sindy dolls but they are not actually what I wanted here. I've started trying to collect all the Sindy outfits I don't have, so this bundle featuring several 60s and 70s pieces was quite alluring. 

We have a 1960s Sindy Nurse dress, a couple of 70s sindy skirts, a 60s Sindy blouse and a few clone pieces like the ever amazing Strawberry dress which i've seen a few times in bundles and am OBSESSED with. 

(not my photo)

Look at this thing! 

It's glorious! It's ridiculous with the oversized strawberries. I love it. 

 

Meanwhile all 3 Sindy dolls needed some TLC. 

70s Ballerina had no hands, a hair cut and faded lips. She also had a very damaged leg that was barely hanging on at the knee. So I swapped that out for a leg from my stash which only had a small tear in it (I don't have any perfect legs left in my stash, alas) and repainted her lips in a coral shade to attempt to match what she would have originally had. 

She had some unique hip pieces which i'd never seen before. 

 

Typical Sindy hip pieces have this cutout which allows you to slide them on over the elastic AFTER you've strung the two legs together. Because of the length of the elastic piece and the lack of give it has, the best way to string a Sindy's legs is to hook the elastic over the first pin and secure it into its little hole, then pull the leg through the hip piece a little bit so you can hook the OTHER leg to the other end of the elastic and secure that pin into its hole. 

then you pull the legs back to their respective sides and attach the hip cups. 

But this design with the lack of cutout means that's not actually possible. I tried to restring her legs with the correct original hip pieces but I just couldn't do it. I think they must have connected them before they sealed the pelvis section together because I simply couldn't get enough give to attach the elastic with them already installed. The elastic has to thread through the middle of them which means they have to be attached first, before you secure each end of the elastic to the pins. Then you can't pull the leg through the hip socket to attach the other one because the cup prevents that. 

It's very very annoying. 

I don't know if all 70s Ballerinas have this attachment or not, i've never seen it before but i'm not often in the habit of restringing ballerina legs if I don't have to. 

So to give her a new leg she had to get some regular style cups from my stash. She also got some new screws because these ones had damaged drives that were almost impossible to get a screwdriver to bite into. 

Baldy had her original lip colour but of course had lost most of her hair and had some issues with her lashes. She also had some damage to her chest. 

But her biggest issue was she had no legs! 

so she got some mildly damaged legs from my stash so at least she was complete. 

 

Finally this brunette needed her lips repainted as well and needed her lashes replaced.

All of them were rehomed and I hope they make their new owners very happy. 

Meanwhile the rest of the dolls in the bundle weren't that interesting. A hasbro Sindy with a molded to her head crown, a fashionista Barbie, a DC superhero girls Harley with cut hair and two articulated clones. Their bodies are cheap hollow plastic but they're articulated like the old fashionista Barbies from the 2010s so not completely without hope. 

Millie Barbie clone head with really crap shiny plasticky hair. 

 

Very lightweight but articulated body.

I may use the bodies for something at some point.

As for the clothes, I ended up keeping a fair bit of the bundle because it's mostly 70s stuff which I love. 

There's some Barbie stuff, some probably home made stuff, several Sindy items in absolutely perfect condition and a few clone bits and bobs too. 

Plenty to play with. I love vintage doll clothes so much.

 

 After a few weeks of not buying anything I was itching for some tlc dolls again. This bundle from a regular uploader or random bundles caught my eye. Two Tressy dolls, an Action Girl, some other vintage dolls and a bunch of really random stuff including the two villains from Strawberry Shortcake. 

Random. 

The vintage dolls looked ROUGH, and of course my itch to fix kicked in. 

I didn't want to pay too much because I have zero desire for any of the Barbie dolls or the Kens, they're all 80s and 90s kens which I absolutely detest. 

Anyway, 

the bundle was sent out really fast and was with me within 2 days of the auction ending which surprised me. Kudos to the seller for being super efficient.

Of course, the first thing I did was sort out the vintage stuff from the modern. 

Alongside two tiny doll house dolls, there were 5 dolls dating from the 60s and 70s. 

 

The first is a little doll made by Perfekta in the early 60s. She is marked "Penny Wise" I think? which I thought was quite amusing. She's not a demonic dancing clown though. She's a sweet little Holly Hobby-like character with simplified black eyes and thick light brown curls. 

 

I tried to look up more info about her but all I could find was a sister doll called "Penny Sweet" which I have to assume means there was a whole line of them with different suffixes. Sweet appears to have a very similar outfit, just in white with a slightly different cut. Sadly the dress is fraying very badly. I don't think it was properly hemmed and given she's a good 60 years old, the fact it's not in worse condition is frankly remarkable. 

But sadly Perfekta are one of those old companies who made a LOT of dolls and small pocket money toys and for whom the vast majority simply are not catalogued or documented anywhere online. 

 

The little baby is a Uneeda "baby Pee Wee" and yes, as the name suggests, it's a drink and wet doll. 

It looks like Uneeda made two different sorts of Pee Wee doll. These baby ones and slightly bigger toddler ones. 

And they made a LOT of them in the mid 60s. 

It's a cute little thing but I don't really DO baby dolls and I always found drink and wet dolls made me a bit uncomfortable. I dunno, there's just nothing cute about pee you know? Having dealt with real babies and their bodily fluids, I can safely say it's not my idea of "fun". 

The two Tressy dolls are in rough shape. 

One is a first edition Tressy with light brown hair which is very dry. She has one chewed hand and she is FILTHY. 

The other is a second edition Tressy with dark brown near black hair which has been hacked viciously short. Surprisingly both have their "secret strand" (the extra hair that comes out the hole at the top of their head) but I believe this one's has been cut as short as the rest of her hair because it can't unwind any further. 

she's also gotten some uh.. nipple piercings. 

and like her sister has some chews and is filthy. 

Let's see what we can do to help these poor girls.

First Edition Tressy's face scrubbed up pretty good. She's got good colour to her vinul and her paint looks to be intact. Her hair however was like straw. I combed it, I conditioned the shit out of it and while it feels a lot nicer, it's still very coarse and very damaged looking. But let's be fair to her, she IS about 60 years old. 

Honestly aside from one chewed hand she's looking pretty good for her age. 

Second Edition Tressy needed a lot more help. 

Her lips were scuffed and the black of her eye line and pupils was faded (not sure if they were supposed to be like that but they made her look a little deranged) so I fixed those, evened her pupils out a bit because they were wonky which wasn't helping her crazy expression and got to work on her hair.

She had all her plugs but they'd ALL been cut short. Her hair should be about double this length, a full curled bob more like first edition's bouffant but with bangs. Her bangs had been hacked to nearly nothing and there were so many bald patches as a result of the hair being far shorter than it was rooted to be. Even her hair switch was cut short. 

I didn't have a dark brown to match her hair, but I did have black so I blended some of that into the front of her hair to lengthen her bangs. The colour match and blending isn't great, but it's better than nothing. I broke 3 needles JUST doing her bangs so yeaaaah... I don't wanna try that again. 

A hat helps to keep her fringe DOWN and also helps hide any other bald patches that I couldn't carefully comb her hair to cover. 

I think she came out quite cute. 

She has quite pitted vinyl on her face which photographs don't really show but it almost looks like tiny freckles or pores all over her face. It's just age related degradation sadly.  

I also filled in her uh... nipple holes (lol) with milliput so she didn't have big holes in her torso. I should paint them to match but as she's clothed you can't see them anyway. 

I see that damage quite frequently with dolls, what's up with that? Why are kids stabbing dolls like this? I will never understand kids who vandalize dolls but apparently it's a really common thing. The boob damage always makes me cringe though, I mean OUCH. There's painting all over the doll's face in crayon and marker and then there's stabbing her breasts you know? These are not equal. 

Anyway, both Tressys look a lot happier clean and dressed. 

They came with the white pair of shoes which was nice. The red shoes are a little bit tight but I managed to force them on. 

Finally the last doll was Action Girl, who it turned out was actually in pretty decent condition. Her hair was all present but kinked from being in a ponytail for so long and she had a chunk of her kneecap coming loose which I glued back into position but she was solidly strung and all bits accounted for. 

However, she DID have wonky eyes. Really really wonky eyes. And it was bugging the shit out of me. 

Also I already have a redheaded Action Girl and these dolls don't sell well so there's little point reselling her, especially as she had a crazy expression in her wonky eyes. 

I could have just repainted the pupil and white shine dot to even her eyes up, but that's too easy. I wanted to make her more interesting and turn her into a doll I would actually keep rather than just another duplicate.

The suede wrap dress thing came with the bundle and it turns out is Action Girl's (also Mego... yeah...), it would have originally had a matching belt but that's long lost. 

Anyway, her hair is stuck in this sort of flip curl because of her hair tie and while I could straighten it with boiling water, that's effort and I actually think the curl is quite flattering anyway. It curls a lot better on one side than the other unfortunately, i'll have to have a think about how to even them out. 

 Anyway, I repainted her eyes. I was pondering between green or brown but went with green because it was the first pot of paint I laid hands on. 

I painted over her original paint to position her irises but went my own way with the pupils and eye shines so they'd be a little more even. 

I also expanded her black eyeliner to give her a slightly more narrowed eye and a little brown eyeshadow to tie it all together. 

I always like how DONE Action Girl looks. She has a fantastically annoyed/bored expression. 

For some reason the darker eyes and the curl to her hair is making me think of Yukko Chan. 

So that's the vintage dolls from the bundle. What else is there?

There was a modern Fashionista Barbie on a petite body wearing this dress. I believe it's "I can be pet vet" or something similar. The dress is cute, simple, but cute. I like the animal pattern. 

Action Girl was wearing this green velvet dress which curiously ties at the back rather than using poppers or velcro. It's a beautiful dress but I wonder if it might be home made because the seams are pretty bulky. 

This dress is painfully familiar, it's driving me mad. 

It has no labels and I thought maybe it was Action Girl but I can't find anything like it online. Again it may be home made, certainly the hem is very strangely done with a sort of criss crossing pattern of stitches that look more hand done than machine. 

The bodice is a very soft velvet while the rest is a scratchy silver fabric. 

It fastens with metal poppers.

I can't articulate why but this feels factory made to me. Those little flowers were really common in clothing for dolls in the 70s, as was this exact lace. But it's more the shape of the garment. As I said, I can't really articulate it. 

it also ties on, which is very odd. 

This is labelled "Mego" but also appears as an Action Girl outfit piece. I think Mego sold on a lot of their stuff to other companies during the 70s. 

I've had this jacket before, but this one is in much better condition than the previous one I had which felt like it would disintergrate in my hands. It still has an unpleasant tactile feel to it. The fur is scratchy and thin and it's all very itchy feeling. Don't like.

 The apron belongs to Sindy and is from the 70s, but the other two pieces are ALSO Sindy and were on Action Girl, hidden under her dress. Wahey for surprise Sindy undergarments! 

the bra is from 1963 while the pants are from the 70s. 

These three tiny little dolls are also vintage, but as they're baby dolls they didn't get added to my vintage doll pile. 

The first two are rubbery german dolls called "Ari" after the company who made them. These were cheap little dolls made for dollhouses and appear to have come in a variety of sizes and ages. Sold throughout the 50s and 60s they were very very successful. That was til the fall of the Berlin wall. 

their whole history looks to be fairly complicated and you can read about it all over here if you're interested. 

 

 

But as for the dolls themselves, well, yeah, they're small rubbery baby/toddler dolls. 

The smallest one is marked "ari germany 1025" and has jointed arms and legs, though the rubbery texture means the legs are very very difficult to get to move, they more want to pop out of the socket. 

the whole doll is only about 2 inches tall. 

the bigger Ari is also rubbery and stands just shy of 3 inches tall. She has jointed arms but her head, body and legs are all one molded piece. she has little red painted shoes and white socks which is apparently typical of this sort of doll even though I can't make out any markings on her back but there is the ghost outline of a triangle on the neck, so hmmm. 

Their companion is I think a little more convoluted because from what I can tell, this is a Tiny Tot doll from Pedigree (who also made Sindy) but they aren't marked Pedigree, they're marked with a Q with I think a little tree in it which is the logo of Giocattoli Querzola, an Italian company (hence the "Made in Italy). This isn't the only time this happened either, Pedigree had another line of anthropormorphic eggs (yes, I know that's freaking weird) who Querzola also were involved with. It's likely they had a fairly long standing working arrangement.

My assumption is that Querzola were the manufacturer while Pedigree was the distributor for the UK and Commonwealth.A fairly common practice, you still see it sometimes these days. 

Sadly this little tot has lost both her arms. But that yellow wrap thing appears to be what they originally came in. 

Sour Grapes and the Purple Pie Man from Strawberry Shortcake. Before my time certainly, but I know my sister had a few of the bigger strawberry shortcake dolls. 

Pieman has lost his moustache and his apron which is a pity but Sour Grapes is fabulously campy and looks to be mostly complete.

Elbow gloves, a snake boa and purple boots that go ALL the way to her hips! Damn lady. 

She's a very strange doll honestly

I mean um.... all of this was definitely a choice.

She even has visible spine.

And this face sculpt is really quite something isn't it? 

It's weird though because she's not a very good likeness to her animated form. 

But she's definitely distinctive. 

Pieman is rather weird too in that under his hat he has a big rectangular flesh toned tumor that the hat is glued to. I mean yeah it's effective, but it does make for a pretty bizarre situation underneath that hat. 

But yeah, a pair of strange dolls. I wonder how popular they were with kids. Do villain dolls sell well? Especially dolls of adult villains in a show that predominantly features cute children characters? 

I dunno. It's weird. 

I have no nostalgia for Strawberry Shortcake though, so into the rehome box they go. 

These three Barbies are mostly just meh to me. Bedtime Barbie has a plush body, Pearl Beach has a broken neck which I repaired with milliput and twirly ballerina or whatever she is has a ripcord that makes her spin like a sky dancer, complete with hard pointy fingers to whack your friend in the eyes as she twirls chaotically. 

seriously, she is a damn danger. Stick her arms straight out to the sides and you get a weaponised dolly. Bwhahahah.

Amusing as she is, they're all bound for the rehome box. 

Also a modern Barbie, she's the one who was wearing the cute cat and dog dress. Her shoes are um... purple crocs... yeah.. they're hideous. 

 

there's a really shitty clone doll with next to no hair and the shiniest body i've seen, and a little action figure of Bo Peep from Toy Story 4. Whatever. These all go in the rehome box.

Have I mentioned how much I fucking HATE 80s and 90s era Kens?

Prince whatever his name is has got to be one of the ugliest dolls imo. I think he's absolutely hideous. Rooted mullet isn't much better but at least he has an okay nose. 

I really really hate that tiny pinched in nose the prince has, it's giving Michael Jackson after his botched nose jobs. Just.. yikes. He also doesn't look like he's smiling so much as his face is stuck in a grimace. I find him deeply deeply upsetting to look at. 

Mullet Ken at least looks happy. I still hate him though.

This 1983 guy is I think Crystal Ken, who originally would have come in a seriously ugly suit. He has wonky eyes which make him look slightly stoned lol. He's the least offensive of the Kens to me because at least he's a somewhat iconic face, but he's still not a doll I have any warm feelings toward.

To the box with them! 

I don't want to look at that prince any longer. He's making me feel a bit ill. 

Two Hasbro Sindy dolls. Pre lawsuit faces. 

I think i've talked about the Mattel/Hasbro lawsuit before but if you're not aware, back in the late 80s Hasbro bought the rights to Sindy and after a few years changed her to be more Barbie-like in proportions and features. Mattel sued claiming the face was too similar and won. Hasbro ended up having to give her a whole new head sculpt and also gave her purple eyes after this point as a further point of distinction. 

This new sculpt was selected in 1992 and marked the end of the legal battle between both companies.

And that's where the doll on the right comes in. Because while the first doll (Twist and twirl Sindy) was made in 1991, when the legal battle was still raging, her sister (Beach Dazzle Sindy) was made in 1992/1993 and is a curious case of Hasbro producing the same doll in three different variations. This one with the original "too much like Barbie" face and green eyes, one using the new sculpt but the same screening with green eyes and a third with the whole new purple eye face. 

It's possible that the first one was already in production and about to hit shelves when the lawsuit was agreed, but why they then made two variations with the new sculpt is a bit more confusing. Did the old spray layers not quite work as well on the new sculpt? or did they just want to run with a consistent "Sindy will always have purple eyes from now on" decree so Mattel had even less to bitch about?

 Prior to 93 Sindy had pretty inconsistent eye colour, some had green eyes, some had blue, some had purple. After 93 it seems they settled on all blonde sindy dolls having purple eyes while most brunette ones would have green. So my theory might hold some water there.

I've never much liked this 1989 face sculpt for Sindy anyway. I don't like her little pug nose. 

I do like the green eyes though. I think they're pretty. 

I DO find it kinda odd that Hasbro's sindy STARTED with purple eyes, lost them, then got them back again. Her original 87 dolls which used Pedigree-like proportions mostly had purple eyes, so why'd that change anyway? 

I also find it interesting that as soon as Vivid Imaginations got a hold of the Sindy license she got blue eyes in every release. I suppose by that point Mattel had stopped caring so much about her being mistaken for Barbie, they'd already won the majority market share. 

I already have an example of this face sculpt and feel no burning desire for another, so into the rehome box they go. Sorry girls. 

And that's about it for bundle number 4. 

All in all I think I kept 6 dolls out of uh.. over 30 dolls. 

 I was good right?

 

I also finally finished my first full reroot in years. 

This girl is NOT a Sindy doll, but she is a very very good clone. 

She came to me a fair while back in a bundle and at first I thought she WAS a legit one, just with really badly damaged hair. Until I tried to boil wash her and her hair shrivelled up. 

Real MIE Sindy dolls have saran hair, it's very heat tolerant, but whatever this girl had wasn't, meaning she couldn't be a real Sindy doll. 

so i started looking at her more critically and noticed a few more subtle tells. Her eyes were a little sloppily painted, her rooting pattern was off, her lashes were too long and glam. 

but in my defense, as I said, she's a very GOOD clone. 

her body looks like a legit Sindy body with the same hollow but tough as shit legs, the strange composite looking but actually just plastic looking torso, the same highly detailed rubbery fingers that break off and leave the doll without any at all. 

And legit Sindy dolls, being hand painted, DO have a lot of variation in their eyes, their lashes and their eyebrows. 

and being 60s dolls, they don't always have any markings. 

I don't know which clone this one is, she hasn't got any markings of the usual suspects like Evergreen or Camay, she isn't a Linda or Randy. She might be a Wendy? 

Point is, I just don't know. 

It's even possible the body IS legitimately Sindy and the head isn't, because they did come to me in pieces. 

But because i'd destroyed her hair completely trying to fix it, she was now a reroot project. 

And if I was going to reroot her, I may as well brighten up her face paint to make her a little more unique. 

She came to me in a sorry state with missing fingers, a broken leg and string threaded through holes drilled in each hip. 

 So I rerooted her in bright red "milk silk" from Ali express, a colour I felt matched one of Sindy's friends from the era Mitzi so wasn't anachronistic. I considered giving her bangs but ultimately decided I couldn't face trying to figure that out, so instead she got a nice side part. I had to make a lot of the holes myself as she didn't really have a clear part line or anything going on. Oh she had a lot of holes, but nothing that was really clearly a parting. Despite filling every hole her hair still feels a little sparse but I think that's simply because she wasn't rooted for long silky hair, she was rooted for a short coarse bubble cut. And the milk silk is insanely soft, it's gorgeous to touch.

I repainted her lips even though they were already a nice bright red because they didn't quite fill out her bottom lip and I wanted her to have fuller lips. I also painted a thicker black lash line above both eyes to narrow them a bit and make her look slightly less startled. 

I am really happy with how she came out. I'd like to get her new arms to replace her damaged hands but ultimately, she's an old doll who came to me in bits, that she's in displayable condition is in itself a miracle. 

Like seriously, for a bit there I wasn't sure i'd get this reroot done because I hate rerooting, my needles kept breaking and I was getting cranky.

She needs a name.

But also, I think i'm out of dolls to show you and Blogger is giving me problems with freezing so I think it's time to call this done. 

Til next time.