It's frustrating and kinda stressful.
then Mattel barges in with new stuff you want and it's like "WHY!???"
it's made worse when fate decides that this is the point all those things you've been lusting after for ages should pop up on Ebay as well.
I swear the universe loves it when i'm broke. It loves to MOCK ME.
Anyway, here's the stuff I bought this month that I probably couldn't afford but whatever:
Another Capsule Chix.
I didn't actually buy her new, i got her secondhand off Ebay. I wanted a different head and some new pieces because my second new one was such a hot mess and a huge disappointment.
It was actually 2 full dolls for the price of one so I got a bunch of parts to mix and match including a new hair piece (the long one with the multicoloured bangs) and two new heads.
The gold boots were pretty garish and didn't go with anything so I took some paint to them and made them PURPLE.
everything's better purple right?
Likewise the pale purple hair of the girl with glasses bothered me because it was so close to her skin tone and I just thought it looked a bit bland and washed out. So I painted most of it black except for purple bangs.
I think it looks nicer in dark colours but I really wish I had a decent top for her. She's wearing a lil Bratz hoodie but yeah...
I'd like a nice dark shirt.
I feel like Capsule Chix was an interesting idea very poorly implimented. There's a lot of pieces I LIKE but finding them is an excercise in massive frustration.
Ebay is my biggest weakness, I seriously need to ban myself from Ebay.
This is one Sasha I always wanted because damnit she has big natural curls and I love em.
she looks a little bedraggled in this picture but irl her hair isn't bad. it just can be a pain to get to hold shape.
I love the dark lips, dark skin and dark lips are one of my dolly weakness for real guys.
And then my local charity shop came up trumps for me with Birthday Bash Sasha! Another one I always loved.
She was burried under some other dolls and was £4 which is.. ouch, but she'd cost me more than that off ebay once you factor in shipping so yeah.
The other girl I THINK is a 90s Beauty and the Beast Belle. She's wearing Jasmine's dress.
I thought she had a really interesting face and she was 50p in another charity shop so yeah...
though as I was buying her a toddler came over, took her and RAN! hahaha. i got mugged by a toddler!
The mother gave me back my doll but I admit, I kinda felt a bit bad.
She was literally the only doll in the store!
She has such a pretty face. The grime on her face actually came off with a wipe.
She doesn't look like Belle at all though, she reminds me more of Kaylee from Quest for Camelot lol. Yes yes, not Disney, don't care. Put her into some medieval stuff and she'd work a treat.
And DAMNIT Sasha, why you gotta be so gorgeous!??
in the same charity shop I got Belle I also found Roadkill. Least that's what i'm naming this demented little thing.
It's a Scruffalove rabbit and quite interesting to see in the clearance charity shop (this particular one is where all the crap that hasn't sold elsewhere goes to die). He was 50p as well.
It's funny because I was watching a review on these only the night before and the reviewer was talking about how understuffed they were and I thought "damn they look like they've been run over"
But this isn't an old line, they came out what, last year? Some kid clearly lost interest fast.
then again, once you wash and brush the damn thing, it is a pretty wierd looking plush.
I spent the night brushing the thing more and nope, this is as good as it gets You can get the fur smooth sure, but it just highlights the bald patches.
The body is massively understuffed and too skinny for the big head so it just looks like roadkill and it amuses the hell out of me.
Poor Roadkill the bunny.
Speaking of wierd big headed plush.
I somehow missed the adverts for these but Hotpoint, who make Washing Machines and shit, decided the best way to sell more washing machines was to offer a free teddy bear with every purchase of a large white good.
because uh.. yeah... I know when i'm looking for a new washing machine I think "what random freebie can I get?" not "how well does this thing work"
I spotted one of these in the local white goods shop and was all "wtf is that!??"
I think they were going for cute, but they really didn't hit that.
I mean from some angles MAYBE
But look at the size of his noggin!
It's HUGE
and his face is so small!
From some angles he looks positively PISSED
When I think Hotpoint, I think teddy bear.
The haunted house on the hill? The abandoned amusement park? The closet of your deepest nightmares?
He has a hashtag but when I searched it most of the posts were "holy fuck this is a scary bear, wtf?" comments.
Lol.
Abbey for scale beside scary bear.
Of course, being ME I had to have the scary as shit bear.
He's simultaniously adorable and terrifying, like. I fully believe this thing could if it so desired eat my soul while I sleep.
But ebay people wanted stupid money for the scary bear and I kept getting outbid. Boo.
finally one popped up cheap and I pounced.
So I have my very own terrifying washing machine teddy.
Believe me, when you look up at this thing from below it seriously looks like it wants to rip your face off.
Back when Monster High was HUGE a lot of knockoffs and such hit the market. One such bandwagon jumper was the short lived Zombie Girls line. It never made it to the UK and getting one imported proved more than I was willing to pay, but gosh I lusted after this particular girl.
Her name is Rhoda Kille, no, i'm serious, that's her official name.
I mean.. she's an 80s themed zombie! COME ON!
"Bringing fashion back to life" ahahahaha.
With MH for comparison.
Now, I was browsing Facebook marketplace, as I do when i'm bored (It's a sickness I tell you!) and i spotted this girl listed under "Bratz" and was all "OMGWTFBBQ!???"
I got her for like a fiver and I was DELIGHTED.
I think these were made by Jaxx Pacific and use the Winx body, which is really gangly. She has jointed elbows, wrists and knees but the range of motion is honestly pretty shit.
this is about as far as she can bend her elbows for example.
She has one grey/white eye and one brown and for some reason a sort of lightening pattern across her face (cracks?). She has loads of amazing pink and purple curls and I love them.
I think originally she would have had gloves too but she's otherwise complete. She even has legwarmers eheheh.
I think she also would have had a tombstone with a cause of death. This girl "danced till she dropped" hahaha. Sadly I don't have that, alas.
She's a cheaply made doll for sure, but after like years I finally have her! YES!
Facebook also brought me these two boys.
Yes, i'm slowly but surely obtaining every hairdudeable I can.
I just need the Max that comes with DeeDee now.
I hadn't actually seen anyone do a side by side of the boys two varients yet and it was annoying me.
So here are both Logans. They look in opposite directions which is cute.
Surfs Up has fully rooted hair while Lockin' Logan has flocked hair in a sort of undercut style.
The Gregs meanwhile are REALLY different.
Gamer Greg has blue flocking and a red and black mohawk while Graphics Greg has blue flock as an undercut with this multicoloured hair over the top. He should have also come with a clip in man bun but mine didn't come with his and I don't honestly mind, it was a silly accessory.
Graphics Greg has side glancing eyes while Gamer looks forward too, which is a nice touch of difference.
I think they look more like brothers than the same character.
And now it's story time.
Okay so I didn't buy this, this was a gift and I got it last month, not this month.
In August my sister came over from Australia and brought me a belated birthday gift.
but to understand this I have to tell a story.
This story takes us waaay back to the early 90s. I was a young kid and my father would sometimes take me into the city to this random indoor shopping center on Queen's Street. In this place was a toy shop, a toy shop like no other.
It was fairly dark in there, it played wierd musical sounds over the speakers. It was decked out like a forest complete with giant fibreglass tree with a face and a trapdoor behind the counter beyond which lay "the otherworld" where all the critters these toys were of came from.
EVERY toy (mostly plushies) in the place was a strange creature from this mythical otherworld and every single one had a backstory. From the mushrooms to the book worms to the cats with more lives than most but rotten luck. There were cats that sloshed when you shook them because their bellies were "full of milk", flying pigs that flapped their wings when you bounced their strings, winged koalas, smiling peas in a pod and of course, their main toy, the Puggle.
tiny little critters that fit in the palm of your hand that were apparently DELICIOUS and needed to hide inside a pouch to stop people from eating them. (or something, WHAT?)
The Puggles were displayed on a large shelf against one wall, set up as an "adoption agency" or something. They came in a lot of different colours, the baby ones with a little diaper/nappy in a different colour to the puggle itself.
When you "adopted" one it would be sent down a chute from behind the till and the kid was supposed to "catch" it. It was all very silly but there was a ritual man. I think there were magic words too but I don't remember them. You didn't see people buying stuff that often.
It was a magical world but the toys, while awesome and wierd, were quite expensive.
they did birthday parties there too which I always thought was amazing.
So my father would take me and sometimes a friend there every so often to look around, to lust after things we couldn't afford with our allowances, to read the stories and immerse ourselves in this bizarre little world for an hour or so.
It was awesome.
So, one day I finally had saved a chunk of change and decided I wanted to go back to this store and finally buy a toy. I had it all planned out, which toys I wanted, what colour and so on.
I finally got a chance to go into the city with my Dad and so we went to the shopping center, we took the escalator up to the correct floor and ...
it was gone.
Not closed, no, GONE. There was just an empty husk of a shop, no signs, no evidence this wonderful place had even existed. The trees were gone, the shelves were gone, the trapdoor, it was ALL GONE.
We asked around the other stores, nobody knew what we were talking about.
I admit, I thought maybe my dad had gotten the wrong shopping center, they did all kinda look the same.
but no, the shop was gone, worse, it was as if it had never existed in the first place.
For years I wondered if i'd dreamed it.
Was all this just a really realistic fantasy? Had this store ever existed?
It bothered me for decades.
My father couldn't remember the name of the shop or much about it, making me further question if my memories of the place were real and if it maybe was just a normal toystore after all.
Finally I reconnected with an old friend on facebook and I asked her about it and she confirmed that yes, this place totally existed, she remembered going there with me.
She remembered the Puggles.
But she couldn't remember the name of the place either.
Something forest. Enchanted forest? Lost forest?
I searched online for toy shops using these descriptors, the talking tree, the description of the toys I couldn't at the time remember the names of. Lemme tell you, plush mushrooms brings up wierd results.
FINALLY I stumbled upon an article about an Australian company called The Lost Forests. There were photos.
THIS WAS IT!
https://theregister.co.nz/opinion/2017/06/remember-lost-forests-toy-store-its-its-way-back
And best of all it explained why the store had disappeared.
It turns out there had only ever been ONE store in NZ, on Queens Street, the store I spent all those hours in as a kid.
Financial and inter company disputes led to the closure of the stores across australia, NZ and the US.
further investigation told me that a lot of them effectively disappeared overnight, like the NZ store.
Better yet, the brand had been ressurected in 2016 and had ONE store in Melbourne Australia, which just so happens to be where my sister lives!
I posted on facebook about it, all "HAH! I'm not crazy! this place was real!"
And oh the nostelgia from browsing through their catalogue.
not everything they made back in the day has been recreated... yet. They said it's because there's a fair few products they either don't have the patterns for or can't remember, as they churned out a LOT of toys and the majority were sewn by in house seamstresses rather than factory made (explaining why they were so expensive)
they're still expensive, theyr'e still made by in house seamstresses, but thanks to the internet they now take commissions and have people from all over the world sending them info they'd forgotten or pictures of products they didn't even know the company had created.
it's actually quite amazing how much of a cultural impact this place seems to have had, particularly on young Aussie kids.
Here was I thinking maybe i'd halucinated it all and it turns out, nope, Lost Forests was real and it was HUGE for australasian 90s kids.
Well damn.
I still want that cat with the milk in it's belly lol.
There's also a HUGE amount of info on ths flickr account including scans of the books (yeah there were books, what?) and pictures of the vintage toys.
SO COOL.
Anyway,
story done.
My sister came over in August for a visit and brought me a belated birthday present.
So what's in this soft fuzzy bag?
TWO PUGGLES!
an adult and a baby!
they're SO FAT
They're called Puggles because uh... it stands for
Peace, Understanding, Gentleness, Generosity, Love, and Energy
*snort*
Look at these cuties! They have really long whiskers and are made of some sort of soft velour type fabric.
The baby wears a green diaper.
So chonky
Here's Abbey again for scale.
Adult Puggle is a bit too chunky to fit into the palm of my teensy tiny baby hand.
Baby fits nicely though.
SO CUTE!
they have like beans or something in them and are very very overstuffed
Look at these chonkers!
I LOVE THEM.
Oh and the bag, that's so they don't get eaten. The little hole was for their nose to peek out according to the little cards they came with (lol) and this means a lot of the vintage ones have really flat unstuffed noses ahahahaha.
Whoops?
These hurt me right in the feels man. Right there.
SO MUCH FEELS.
Ahem.
Lost Forests will post globally too for a fairly reasonable price so if you don't happen to have a relative in Australia, you can still get your own wierd as shit plushie.
I totally have my eye on a Catastrophy Cat <_<
Oh! I had a Puggle in the early 80s! There were picture books too, I still have a couple of the books!
ReplyDelete