seriously.
see, I had such fun with my last tlc bundle and even though I was still working on a few of them I was itching for MORE and this is a dangerous thing.
So when I stumbled upon another random bundle including a Debbie Glitter doll that i've wanted for a while ... well... I couldn't resist.
Like my last bundle it cost me about £10 but was a much smaller and far less mangled bunch of dolls.
Here's the auction photo.
From this I can ID two Sindy dolls, 1 Steffie Love, a Skipper clone and Debbie Glitter (in the striped dress)
Also what looks like a petra and two unidentified brunettes.
Interesting.
The two Sindy dolls were pretty uninteresting. A Hasbro with a plush body (probably the sleep one rather than hilarious Hat sindy) and a Vivid Imaginations Fairy doll who came with batteries and apparently could interact with little baby dolls that came with her originally. She long since lost the babies so alas, no idea if she still worked or what she did.
And Steffie Love is well.. Steffie Love. All three went straight to charity after a little wash and comb.
but the others:
Both these girls haven't got any markings. The Skipper Clone has okay hair but a pretty cheap body. She came wearing an original 60s Pepper outfit though so that's cool.
The brunette has no obvious markings and a pretty cheap body as well (it's not hollow it's just kinda meh) and she's a similar size to skipper. Her face is REALLY interesting though. I can't help but feel she's supposed to be someone. A celebrity or a tv character or something? I don't know. I cannot ID her. (edit: I found her! She's an Angels Hospital doll and was made by Denys Fisher in 1976! Whoo)
I haven't had a good dig for clothes to fit her yet, she's an odd size. She rattles and i'm not sure why.
I mean genuinely this face is really really unusual.
Skipper clone has purple lips. What the heck?
PURPLE LIPS!
It's awesome.
The Pepper outfit is in fairly good nick too. I like it. It doesn't fit her that well because Pepper is a lot chunkier but I might dig my Pepper or Patch dolls out and have some dressup fun some day heh.
Debbie Glitter was an interesting doll. She was made for Debenhams in the uh.. 70s? and was effectively a cheap Sindy alternative.
Her body was the same sort of size and dimensions, her head was on a similar ball joint and she came with a bunch of affordable fashion packs you could also use for Sindy.
What's interesting about THIS Debbie is that she's actually on a proper Sindy body. It's a 70s skinny leg body with some chew marks but it IS an authentic Sindy body and not the body she originally came on (which is marked "made exclusively for Debenhams")
I have to assume she was in a collection with Sindy dolls and that, like many kids, the owner realised that if they popped the heads off they could swap clothes far easier and quicker than undressing the doll and redressing lol.
Or a more loved Sindy head got her less damaged body.
Either way, it's an odd hybrid but the colour match is good and the head fits fine.
Interesting.
She came wearing this Mommy Made sparkly dress which is quite cute on her.
Her hair is cheap nylon and won't sit flat even with a boil wash. It's an interesting colour though, different shades of blonde.
You can definitely see the Sindy relation in her face. She's far simpler, a little more vacant even, but you can definitely see the inspiration.
It turns out what I thought was Petra from the blurry auction photos is NOT a Petra but rather inexplicably, a Petra CLONE. Who the hell clones a Petra? It's like making knockoff Steffie Love dolls. It's wierd man.
Her body is super cheap and flimsy and her head is quite sloppily painted. She has a LOT of hair though.
I believe she came with the three shitty plasticky dresses that were included in the bundle, those went straight to charity as well because they're gross. They'll spare some poor doll her dignity till she can get some proper clothes but that's about all theyr'e good for.
The final girl was actually the one I was most interested in. She is, it turns out, on another authentic Sindy body that's fairly chewed up and has mildew stains on the arms. The colour match is horrible because the head has turned a very jaundiced yellow but upon investigating her terrible troll hair to figure out if I could reroot her I realised her hair was actually rooted to be in a short style like this. Someone had just pulled it back and tied it up for 30+ years and made it look awful.
Her strange goofy face is suddenly a lot cuter with a fringe.
Her hair is dry, it's damaged, it's old and it doesn't like to sit down regardless of my attempts to make it do so. I've resorted to headbands.
Her lips had also turned a ghastly yellow that was doing NOTHING for her and her eyes were mispainted with wonky dots that were annoying the shit out of me.
So I fixed it.
Her head is still quite yellow but some careful lighting helps reduce it.
I repainted her eyes completely because the paint was actually peeling off and part of the iris chipped off when I handled her, so I redid the eyes in a pretty periwinkle blue which was the closest I had to her original eye colour, redid her white highlights and painted her lips pink.
She also got some blushing to try to reduce her sallow complexion.
The Sindy body she's on has chewed feet and a broken elbow but it works. I couldn't get all the stains off the arms but it's okay, she's old, let the poor girl have some scars.
Her head isn't this yellow in real life, my camera is just a jerk
this is closer to her actual complexion.
I didn't do a brilliant job with her lips because they're REALLY difficult to paint. She has a tiny almost smile but they were originally painted kinda lopsided and wierd and I was trying to just overpaint the original paintwork to retain as much of her vintage look as possible.
I'm not totally sure I picked the right colour, they're quite uh... pink.
lol.
Still, she looks healthier.
But her face is familiar and it's bugging the shit out of me. She's unmarked and her vinyl is pretty thin and very discoloured, her head is a tight fit on the Sindy body and I get this feeling that maybe she should have been on a slightly smaller body.
Maybe a scouts or cubs doll or something?
I don't know.
She's very cute though.
I also got to work on finishing up the other reroot from the previous bundle.
Remember this action girl looking lady with her cheap crappy Barbie body and awful pockmarked complexion?
I knew she would be a challenge to reroot because of how fragile her scalp was. Her vinyl was SO damaged and so thin that I wasn't really sure I could save her.
the actual vinyl appears to be delaminating almost, there's chunks that have just flaked away giving her a very uneven texture.
Poor old girl.
The original rooting had been too dense in the partline as it often is, so I didn't think I could really fill those plugs without it just tearing open. So I elected to move her part line to the side.
I selected a black Saran from my small pile of doll hair and some red for contrast that I felt would match her lip colour and add a little interest.
She had very very few plugs beyond her part so I had to stab 90% of them in myself.
I don't seem to have a long needle anymore so I used my tool, which means her hair is about as fragile as her vinyl but eh.
I also did some touchups to her paintwork which was fading, aded some freckles to disguise her blotchy vinyl and filled her dang head with glue in a vain attempt to keep the hair in and to give her head some sort of stability.
I think she suits the black.
It was a difficult reroot, the vinyl kept tearing, plugs kept dropping out, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth and regrets at even starting, but she's DONE.
She's "good enough" and a vast improvement over how she WAS.
She's a cheap crappily made clone, to be honest I doubt whoever made them expected them to survive play, let alone still be around 40 years on, so we gotta cut her some slack.
She can retire here at last.
All in all, not too bad for a few days work.
But I uh.. I really need to lay off the ebay tlc bundles for a bit.
It's addictive.
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