TLC bundle

I have a weakness. Okay I have several. But a big one is "dolls in need". Especially vintage dolls.

This bundle caught my eye on the dreaded Ebay, a lot of broken bits and pieces but some interesting parts in there. I thought for sure someone else would notice it and outbid me but luck was apparently on my side, the bundle flew under the radar and I won it for the maiden bid.
SCORE.

They arrived a few days later and I eagerly got to sorting.

Action girl is mostly complete, she's missing a hand.
Other than that though, and a few small plugs at the back missing she's in pretty good condition.

I do enjoy Action Girl, she has such a sulky face that's so very 70s.

Action girl hips make dressing them a bit of a pain to be honest. I think she needs a skirt. 

Also complete is this unusual big eyed clone doll. I haven't a clue who she is but she has quite nice hair, a really unusual face and a body that's kinda hollow and a bit shit.

I haven't settled on clothes for her yet. She's a bit smaller than a Barbie so fits Sparkle Girl stuff fairly well.

Also intact mostly were these two. A dolly Surprise who sort of stands out for being a late 80s/early 90s doll among all these 70s dolls. Her mechanism no longer works and she has her hair switch missing (these girls had a growing hair mechanism, I had one as a kid lol)

the other doll is a Barbie of some sort with cut hair.

She has CRAZY eyes. Like holy shit I think she's about to stab someone. Her pupils are facing different directions! Wth is up with psycho Barbie??!

She has kinda tacky legs which is gross. I've handled a few Mattel dolls with this issue, I dunno how to fix it, but it's gross and I dislike it immensely.

Also intact is this girl who I was trying clothes onto. She has a shitty hollow barbie clone body and what looks like an Action Girl head, or it might be a TNT barbie head, I dunno man.
The vinyl is decaying quite badly so her head is all textured and kinda flakey. Yummy.
I have a few cheap shit clones with similar degradation.

Her hair has been hacked so she's gonna get balded.

She has an interesting face despite her damaged vinyl though, and is a rather unusual orangey tan colour.

She didn't actually have much hair but her vinyl is SO thin I had to fill her head with PVA to try to stabilise it before I even attempt to reroot anything. I looks like it'll split very easily if i'm not careful.

You can see they didn't even bother to trim the excess from the mold lol. She has flappy seam bits all around her scalp.

Also these two heads which absolutely crack me up. They look so DONE.

Yellow blonde has a dent in her face while the other one has very little hair. Both of them are SO cranky hahaha.
they crack me up.

Speaking of hilarious faces. The baby is actually kinda cute in a pouty kinda way but the other two... shrivelled wierd dolls look suspicious and one has a fin on her body! hahah.
they are so terrible.

There were several damaged baby dolls too including this one who's back is gobbledegoop. It looks like they tried 3 times to print "made in china" but half of the letters were backwards and they just gave up.

This is the only baby with all its limbs but the head is crushed.

I have no real interest in baby dolls, but I might use them for halloween props or make a Bioshock Big Daddy doll outta one hah.

Now onto the dolls I actually put some work into repairing.

Tressy had lost her legs and had one small stump left on one side. Also in the bundle inexplicably was a spare pair of Action Girl legs in perfect condition. Action Girl dolls are elastic strung with metal hooks, but this means you can loop elastic into where the hook holes are. So that's what I did upon confirming they'd fit Tressy's hip sockets.

Yes, it gives her bandy legs and super wide hips but that's what Action Girl's hips look like too hahaha. Dressed she doesn't look quite so strange AND she can now stand up!

Look at this much happier girl!

This stern looking Barbie clone head was on a really spectacularly shit clone body that was hollow and a sickly shade of greyish beige. Her face was too gloriously bitchy not to preserve though, and her hair is actually okay and surprisingly thick. She got stuck onto a Bratz body I had laying around. Sadly the neck knob is broken so I had to drill a hole and glue a paperclip in there to create a new neck hook thing.
It seems to work though, her head stays on.

It's not an ideal body though, the neck is a bit too narrow but it'll do for now till I can find her something better.

I mean come on, she's like the stern mother of Action Girl. I love it.

I really liked these heads when i spotted them in the Ebay listing but hadn't a clue what they were. With them in hand I had markings I could use to ID them. Turns out they're Matilda dolls made by Pedigree.

There's two brunettes and a blonde with a larger squishier head who might be a clone.
Sadly neither of the brunettes had legs.

I rammed some other baby doll legs onto one of them which seemed to do the trick lol. The blonde who had no body of her own got put into a Stacie Gymnast body.

the proportions are a bit odd but it's kinda fun.

I haven't worked out how to fix the other legless one, none of the other baby doll legs fit. Drat.

Now i'll admit, THIS girl is the main thing I wanted from this bundle.

She's a Havoc doll, and they're pretty dang hard to find and stupidly expensive.

She uses a Mary Quant Daisy face and I had assumed the same body, but it turns out that wasn't correct. Her body is actually elastic strung and far more posable than Daisy's.

Sadly this Havoc has seen a lot of action. She's lost a foot and has absolutely horrific melt around her pelvis. I mean i've genuinely never seen melt THIS bad. her original clothing looks to have been melted TO HER, there's scraps of the fabric stuck where it was cut away at some point.

Interestingly, despite the damage all her joints work fine and her damaged leg even still bends. Go figure.

I took a scalpel to her hip melt but it quickly became apparent I wouldn't be able to totally fix it all without removing far too much material. One hip is almost totally gone because of the deterioration, it had become very thin and very very fragile.

I scraped as much as I dared, got most of the fabric away and decided to call it done. You won't see it once she's dressed anyway.

Her hair is a bit dry but is the original length.

I haven't gotten around to the hair treatment part yet.

In a pair of boots you'd never even know she was missing a foot.
A part of me is tempted to try to sculpt her a new foot but as she's likely to only ever be used for display I don't think it matters too much.

She's a secret agent so it seems wierdly appropriate for her to have such damage in her retirement heh.

Also in the bundle was a space Action Girl head.

She needed a reroot BAD.

Initially I put her onto a DC Superhero Girl body because you know, Action Girl = superhero right? kinda?
but the grip hands bug me and the proportions just didn't quite feel right.

She got a reroot in some blue nylon I had in my box of stuff. I think it was cut off a Pixie Punk doll.

I like to use nylon on vintage dolls because it has an appropriately vintage quality to the texture and the way it falls.

I went with the blue because 1: I had a bunch of it and 2: it matches her eyes.

I kept her original rooted bang pattern and cut it into a bob because I felt she should channel a bit of a mod look with that heavy eyeliner.

She's channeling a bit of a Modern Circle Melody vibe I think.

Here she is on the DC body which just... didn't work for me.

I tweaked her makeup a little to elongated the wings of her liner, reinstate the blue eyeshadow that had faded over the years and gave her a bit more liner to the bottom of her eyes.

And she got a Made To Move Barbie body.

The colour tone is a better match and the proportions work better.

Also it meant she could steal some Barbie boots to complete her look.

I'm LOVING this hybrid actually.

So far i've managed to salvage uh.. 9 dolls from this bundle?

I haven't bothered with the Barbie because she's a 70s or 80s Barbie and I hate them. I just find them astoundingly and overwhelmingly BORING.

I figure Dolly Surprise, even though she doesn't work, might bring some joy to a child so she'll likely get donated unless someone desperately wants her.

The other clones I don't really know what to do with. And i still need to find a new body for the tiny little Sarah Louise who's body has basically disintergrated in most parts. Her hair is really nice though. But she's so small that finding a body for her is gonna be a challenge.
Unless someone has a Sarah Louise/Ocean toys doll with crap hair they'd like a nice head for.

I might take a picture of the bits i've not found anything to do with yet, see if any clever creative person wants a carepackage of fodder hahaha.