Keeping busy - Monthly roundup from quarentine

So the worldwide chaos right now means that really buying dolls is not exactly a priority. However that doesn't mean companies aren't managing to sneak out new releases anyway.

Or that people aren't selling things. In fact business on Ebay and such seems to be booming and judging by how busy the post office has been, lockdown isn't stopping people going mad with splashing the cash.

So let's have a look at what doll stuff i've had going on for the past few weeks.

Oh and as an aside, Blogger has changed how they do literally everything and I hate it. I hate it so much.

At the start of the year leaked images appeared of MGA's next OMG releases and included a surprise offering. The LE exclusive dolls from the big sets released before christmas were getting single releases as a nice big "fuck you" to all those people who splirged on the big sets assuming it was the only way to get said dolls because that's kinda what "limited edition exclusive" MEANS MGA.

Anyway,

Shadow was a doll I kinda wanted mostly because her outfit was so insane, but I couldn't justify the £80 Amazon exclusive set she came in. Knowing she was due to get a single release I just waited and hoped the UK would get her.

Well we did. Amazon popped up listings which went out of stock pretty quick. And as usual, they put stock up for sale several days before they bothered to ship my preorder because Amazon don't understand how preorders work. -_- 

Im not massively impressed with MGA for this. I mean on the one hand yeah, it's nice to not have to buy those big sets but on the other, it kinda defeated the whole point of the "exclusive doll" element and i'm sure there's plenty of people who purchased both the big sets specifically for the OMG dolls now feeling rather cheated.

At least I managed to sell the LOLs that came in the huge set uptown and downtown came in for a decent bit.

These retail for about £35 which for the OMG is pretty typical. They're about 30-35 everywhere.

The boxes are just like the previous boxes with the slide out tray. Not much to say on that front.

My camera is even more dying so i'm sorry. I can't use my phone because then I can't get the pictures onto my pc for editing without huge hassle and it makes me grumpy.

Anyway,

Shadow is a pale skinned omg with pale greyish blue eyes and red glitter madness on her lips and around her eyes. It's a bit OTT and i'm not totally sure I like it. I have never been a fan of glitter encrusted lips, they look so... chunky and uncomfortable.

She has a beauty mark on her er... well next to her nose. OMG don't really have very defined faces, they're sort of big flat cartoon profiles.

She has massively angled very high eyebrows that make her look a bit startled and mad about it.

Her hair is cut into this choppy style with triangular fringe/bangs, long braids framing her face, short choppy pieces and then long at the back.

I can't quite make sense of this hairstyle, it's frankly bizarre but the short bits look quite nice framing her face. It's quite cute.

I wonder though if she'd look less "a toddler attacked me with scissors" if the back of her hair was also short. It seems rather random to hack half her hair to chin length and leave the back long. I mean why?

Her hair is a pretty purple similar to Monster High Spectra's purple hair with fushia streaks and the braids and bangs are a paler lilac.

Unusually, she comes already partially dressed. All the other OMG have come in basically underwear that you then layer their outfit on top of. Shadow comes already wearing her skirt which isn't actually a skirt at all but rather a pair of shorts with a flap at the front to give the illusion of skirt. She has nothing on underneath it.

Her nails are painted dark fushia. I really like the hand sculpt for OMG, it's so detailed and so at odds with the very simplistic cartoon face. It's a wierd combo.

Her hair is a bit of a mess out the box.

Here you can see my doll came with some really shit QC. She's FILTHY. It looks like MGA was rushing this release. My previous OMG have all had pretty decent QC, no major paint issues but poor Shadow here has a lot going on. Part of the black of her eye hasn't actually gone on correctly so it's smeared, leaving a gap in her eyeliner and smearing black down her cheek and across one whole side of her face.

it was a lot worse in person than photos really show and for a while I was seriously considering just putting her back in the box and returning her as a lost cause.

But me being me, I had to try to help her.

A little rubbing at it with a magic eraser and some weak nail polish remover got rid of the smudges while keeping her proper paint intact and then I carefully repainted the missing chunk of eyeliner.

Sadly this wasn't going to be the end of her issues.

Having completely deboxed her I also learned that they'd forgotten part of her glasses. They have a hole in them and should, according to all images i've found, have a little chain that dangles off them. She's missing the chain.

I emailed MGA but because MGA UK fucking SUCKS they basically told me I was SOL and to talk to Amazon. *sigh*

so yeah.

Annoying.

At least it's only a minor piece but it's fucking irritating that MGA won't own their mistakes and just fob you off with "sorry to hear that but it's not our problem" responses.

Her bolero collar is also missewn so it sits wierd.

Honestly after deboxing her i'm not totally sure how I feel about her. The problems really soured things a bit. Excitement turned to disappointment the more I deboxed.

I mean, I kinda like her hair, at least the colours of it. I might see about cutting it shorter though. I also really like her outfit because it's insane. She has a little vest top and then a collared bolero with these ridiculous cape sleeves that are lined in white. The collar is made of kinda scratchy fuzzy fabric that isn't that pleasant to touch and would irritate the shit out of your neck if you wore it for real.

Over her shorts she has this wierd half skirt with lace trim and chains which are real metal chains which is always nice.

Her shoes are a matchng fushia pink that photographs brighter than it actually is and one of them has a wierd chain cuff thing that goes over it (not that the instructions tell you this. I had to search the internet to figure out where the hell this piece went. "on her foot" was NOT my first thought. )

Her handbag is pretty boring to be honest. It's just a lump of pink plastic with some chain detail. YAWN.

I'm also not sure why her stand is blue, wouldn't it work better to be black? Or purple like her hair? The blue just sticks out like a sore thumb. I assume it was the tie in with her eye colour and the tips of her boots but I dunno, it doesn't really work for me.

Her hat is a solid plastic piece with a veil attached which you can tuck inside the hat if you so desire or have with the veil down.

It's sort of military styled but like.. ultra femme goth military which is interesting a combo. I kinda dig the contrast.

Her glasses are made of that stupid silvery plastic with totally opaque lenses which is so fucking pointless. They look idiotic worn on her face because they're basically a glorified blindfold. I don't get the POINT of solid glasses like this, they always look dumb.

They are at least a cool shape with random spikes on them.

I don't much care for her makeup though. The red makes her look tired and a bit ghastly rather than glamourous and the chunky glitter lips will never do it for me.

I feel like she'd look far cooler with black or dark purple lips and some charcoal grey eyeshadow or even a nice purple to tie in with her hair and accessories.

Problem is, i'm not sure I can remove the glitter shit without removing her other face paint. So hmm.

Her clothes are nice though, and for the most part well made, as i've come to expect from the OMG dolls.

After the effort I put into fixing her face and how stressful returns are with amazon, I decided to just keep her.

But be aware, the QC on this wave may not be brilliant. Which is a shame.

Elsewhere in "impulse buys because i'm weak", this little gal was for sale from a Uk seller who had a few dolls they were letting go of as they'd apparently decided the bjd hobby was too expensive for them to justify.

Two of the dolls were msd (the scale I generally collect) and both Dollzone dolls.

This particular one is a Dollzone Mo, a discontinued sculpt and one that was, apparently, at one time quite popular.

She came on an Asleep Eidelon body which is honestly a pretty interesting combination. I'd never really paid much attention to AE previously as their headsculpts do nothing for me (they're quite traditional in that they're round little baby faces and i'm not a fan) but it turns out one of their MSD bodies is super NICE.

The doll wasn't very much and I was pining for another project so I bought her.

She arrived with eyes, wig and a full outfit which was quite a nice extra. That faceup though, was gonna have to go. It was too masculine and both head and body were quite yellowed anyway. I've found a good clean and removal of old seal often helps a LOT with yellowed heads.

I'm not sure what colour the head and body were originally. Both are now a sort of yellowy beige tone but while Dollzone DOES do a yellow resin, AE doesn't. I'm assuming, as these are both pretty dang old, that both were probably "pink" or "normal" at some point and the red pigment has just leeched out over the years. Red likes to do that.

In isolation the doll doesn't look that yellow, she just looks beige but once you put her alongside a far pinker doll she looks very sallow. Still, some people are naturally fairly sallow skinned, I have yellowy skin myself while my other half is far more strawberry milk pink (lol)

Mo is usually a male sculpt and blank I was sitting there seriously wondering if I could feminise it enough to my own eye to feel like head and body matched one another.

That body though, I really like it. It's chunky as heck. Her hips are pretty dang wide and the body is so freaking heavy compared to my slim line girls.

Cute lil' booty lol.

The jointing system is pretty damn good too. Which i'd hope so given these bodies alone are a couple of hundred bucks new.

She has double jointed elbows and knees with a mobility joint in the upper leg. Her wrists have quite limited motion though, because the ball and hand are molded as one piece rather than separate so it limits how far she can hinge her hands/wrist as the ball gets in the way.

The body is gorgeous and so well made. Every channel is so clear and neat and every piece fits together snugly and perfectly and oh it's SO NICE. I don't own many expensive bjds and now I get what people mean when they talk about the more pricey brands feeling different to the cheapies. Unusually, and this explains her heft, the lower torso is almost completely solid resin. Most dolls are hollow but she isn't, her lower body just has two narrow channels drilled through for the strings instead. I assume this keeps the strings in exactly the right place but it's a very strange system and one i've never seen before. Seems a bit of a waste of resin you know?

Another really nice touch is that her left and right pieces have a little engraved marking on the inside to differentiate left and right. I LOVE that! So often when restringing a doll it's easy to get confused and string the wrong side.

You can see the Dollzone head has the old logo plate in the back.

The inside of Mo's head is facinating as well. The magnets still work but they're disintegrating and there's a hook embedded in the resin. OLD bjd heads had the headcap attach to the rest of the body stringing to hold it on rather than using magnets, and it was a pain in the arse.

this headcap appears to have been modified by the company at a later date to incorperate the magnets and has the option for either way of attaching depending I suppose on owner preference. It suggests this is a transitional head, which is in itself facinating.

At first I thought maybe the head cap and head weren't matching and the seller had mixed up the headcaps because Mo's headcap does NOT fit the head properly. There's quite a large gap at the front.

But the head cap and head itself both have the same markings engraved into them. I asked around and no, the Dollzone fans informed me Mo's head cap just flat out never fit right and it was just a quirk of Dollzone not giving a shit.

Good to know.

From what I was told, Dollzone did at least 3 different releases of Mo over the years and made small modifications to the head cap system in the process.

This head is actually damaged. There's a massive gouge in the neck hole from where the S hook has dug in and carved out a big ol' chunk. It's sharp.

I believe this is a result of strings being too tight at some point. The S hook sits nicely in there now and the AE body, while tight enough to stand, has slackened up a lot over the years. It looks like the body must have been strung crazy tight at some point to cause this much damage. OUCH.

She fought me every single step of the way with this repaint. First the sealant wouldn't stick. Then the pastels and pencils wouldn't stick (there was a patch on one eyebrow that just flat out refused to get any tooth), then I kept smearing my work. Then I overblushed her face and had to wipe loads off.

Then I messed up my paint work.

then her lashes wouldn't stick.

Just argh.

It took me most of a day and a lot of swearing and wondering if she was fighting me this hard because she really didn't want to be a girl or what.

But I got there in the end and i'm actually really pleased with the end result.

I put her back into the wig and clothes she came in and added some accessories because why not? It's an ugly as shit wig but I kinda dig it on her. Anything else just kinda felt a bit too demure and normal lol.

She's being referred to as "Mo" because no other name came to mind.

I also picked these two up for cheap. I believe they're Jenny dolls by Takara (marked Takara on their backs). Jenny was originally Barbie in Japan and then when they lost the license they renamed her Jenny or something.

It's all a bit random.

These two are practically identical though the one in red has thicker hair. It's dry on both dolls and coarse but they are from the 80s so i'll give em a break for being a little aged.

Terrible photo but Jenny/Takara Barbie is substantially shorter than Mattel's Barbie and really looks nothing like the blonde bombshell.

She has a far more friendly face for a start.

She fits into Sparkle Girl clothing, amusingly Barbie stuff is too big lol.

When I was a child I only had one Sindy doll, she was Tennis Star Sindy and last year my husband bought me one MIB as a gift.

One of the other things I got with that Sindy was a big bag of doll shoes and a fashion pack. Tutti Fruiti it was called and I remember that I LOVED it.

But in all these years it's only proved to be expensive and difficult to find.

I finally found one for a price I was willing to pay and here it is. My favourite doll outfit as a kid for any doll (I was always so disappointed Barbie couldn't fit into it. Her boobs were too big hahaha) the Hasbro Tutti Fruiti dress!

I had to add straps though because there's no way this thing is staying up without boob tape. I don't know HOW the hell I got it to stay up on my Sindy as a kid because no matter which Sindy model I tried it slipped down.

By chance I happened to have some ribbon that almost exactly matched the watermelons and with that sewn in place the dress stays up perfectly.

Horah!