it's another roundup! Yehaw?

 I don't know, i'm sick man. 

But I did order some stuff which is arriving in dribs and drabs.

Of the incoming stash I have some action figures I ordered back in JUNE (yes, june), the reproduction Sindy dolls which are due to ship at the end of the month/beginning of next month and a bjd order that won't likely be here till dec/jan sort of time at the earliest. 

And of course, waiting for stuff makes me itch for more stuff even harder.

also feeling sorry for myself makes me want to buy stuff.

funny how that happens.

So anyway, here's a brief little update of the few things i've purchased recently. There's not much because Sindy repros kinda blew most of my doll budget and dolls are getting priiiiceeeey.

but let's just do this thing.

So the first thing isn't technically a new thing, but it's me jumping on a ridiculous tumblr bandwagon because I COULD.

I've had these Sindy dolls laying around on my sofa for months now. The Pink haired one has a terrible haircut and I had considered rerooting her but vivid's dolls have rock hard heads and it's just flat out painful and miserable to do. The other girl is a Hasbro girl (they use the same bodies) who came in a big bundle o stuff and who I haven't been able to rehome despite repeat attempts.

So 

anyway, 

the topic turned to "centaurbarbie", an abomination of hilariousness and thing that I believe was started by Sleepytoycollection who made a Barbietaur for everyone to enjoy/flee in terror from.

Anyway, a few other people have since tried their hand at the madness and I had these Sindy dolls laying around and I though "you know what? let's do it."

And thus the concept of "Sintaur" happened.

Step one is preparing the sacrifice. She's still smiling, she doesn't mind.

OFF with her head! and her arms and chest too! BWHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH.

So this will make the back of the Sintaur body which will be affixed with milliput.

Et voila! She stands pretty solidly on four legs which is cool.

And thus the abomination is born. 

And i'm in no way sorry.

She makes me laugh every single time I look at her.

I also found a nude charity shop Hairdorable in my "box of junk to sell" pile and realised her skin tone pretty closely matched a very battered Bratzilla body I had. So the two were combined to create this characterful hybrid. I like her. The Bratzilla body isn't great but she stands a hell of a lot more steadily than the actual fashion doll Hairdorable dolls who have really weak legs.

I had a voucher for Amazon so I decided to order the last Failfix doll. 

You know it's been a while since a doll line has inspired me to collect every single character in a line so kudos Moose, you got me good.

They're overpriced for sure, this girl is £30 at retail! but I really do like their face sculpts, I think they're very very pretty little dolls.

Dreami is the "playset" doll so she comes with a whole host of random shit, including an ACTUAL FABRIC ROBE! I mean yes, it's made of cheap fleacey material and it has printed on like.. everything with velcro up the back but you know what? it's better than the plastic ones as at least this one can be actually REUSED which adds playability. 

For a line that's whole focus is "makeover" including a bubble mask thing you really would think robes would be a standard for the whole lot of them.

Dreami comes with two outfits as well as the robe for her "day" and "night" looks. I really like the long rainbow dress, it's extremely pretty though mine is not very well sewn and doesn't actually fit the doll quite right. It's very baggy in the waist and the velcro is sewn wonky. 

The other little outfit is a single piece made to look like shorts and a tee. It's cute, but I wish it was two separate pieces.

This is all of Dreami's crap. She comes with the following:

A tangle teaser brush (which has splotches of pink on it which made me suspicious that the pink dye gel had leaked but it hasn't. So I have no idea where the pink splotches came from)

two little dye cream gel dispensing thingies (the blue and pink things)

a pile of assorted coloured elastic bands that have little to no elasticity in them.

6 differently coloured hair... button... thingies. 

A chair.

a big chunky base the chair slots into as well as the stand and a sticky base piece so it can theoretically stick to a table or floor if said table/floor wasn't unvarnished like mine is. 

A winged "tool" for doing her fishtail braid

Shorts and shirt one piece outfit

Rainbow dress

A hastily sewn rainbow underdress that's unhemmed and serves only to give her some modesty.

two pairs of shoes (in her hair)

A fleecey robe

one necklace

one pair of earrings

mask

fail face

Instructions (not pictured)

Unlike the other dolls Dreami doesn't come with variations, she only has the one face. Her eyes are blue and her lips are a pearly pink. She has little stars on her cheeks and her eyemakeup is purple and pink with a bit of white in there as well as more stars around her eyes.

then there's a thick layer of silver glitter.

Her hair is white blonde.

She has a pale skin tone and is on the short body like Kawaii q-t which means that each body type is used twice in this line. Two curvy, two petite, two slim.

Her stand can technically hold two dolls, one standing and one sitting but i'm  not sure why. It's a bit of a squeeze to get two dolls and if one has a ponytail she'll need to be the standing one as it knocks the standing one otherwise. 

The problem I have with this is that the stand itself is REALLY chunky and there's no extra base piece to have a normal stand like the other girls. So if you're like me and don't want to display the doll with her chair you need to have her without a stand. I find that annoying. The stand is too chunky to fit on my shelf and too big for me to really have anywhere to put it. So hmm. 

The stand also doubles as the hair play station. The doll slots into the chair and the tool for her braid slides over the stand prop. 

Now, I tried. I really really tried to get her hair into a nice fishtail braid like the instructions said! and while the tool does make it fairly straightforward the fact of the matter is that 1: I suck at hair play and 2: such a small scaled doll looks wierdly unbalanced when you give her such a chunky braid. The scale of the braid was all off for me and I couldn't get it to taper nicely like in the pictures so it just ended up a big chunky log of hair which is NOT a good look.  

Yet again I feel like the instructions could really benefit from more step by step pictures OR a link to a video tutorial because it's really confusing to try to make sense of two short sentences and vuage cartoon images.

I was curious how her hair dye would work though. I was kinda dubious about it but I followed the instructions as best I could.

(you can see she looks to have one slightly misaligned eye in this photo, huh.) 

The hair dyes are in little tubes and they're not really dyes, i'd say they're more like some sort of oily makeup. They leave a shimmery residue on my fingers and it's very greasy stuff. 

The gel itself is thick like paint but dries in such a way that it leaves the hair still soft, albeit maybe slightly more oily than it was previously. 

What I DID find a challenge however was getting the gel into her scalp as the little comb piece of the applicator is thick as hell and doesn't get nearly close enough to her parting. I ended up using my own comb to spread the gel where it needed to go.

The hard plastic of the face is an advantage here as the oily dye doesn't seem to stain it. I ended up with blue on her forehead while I was doing all this and it just wiped right off. It left an oily sheen but that came off with a dry cloth.

I also found that the dye stuff washes out with hot water if you so desire. It's like hair chalk or whatever. Cold water didn't work so well but very hot water got it.

I do like the soft colours it produced. 

The blue was really bright when it first went on and I was all "mmmmm" but as it's dried and been brushed it's faded a lot. 

The pink is very subtle. I still have a little of the gel stuff left so I could probably do more if I so desired but I don't care enough to get it all perfect.

Middle kiddo found this doll headband laying around and insisted I put it on a doll. I think it works quite nicely for Dreami.

I ended up wrapping an elastic band around her dress waistband because the bagginess was annoying me. Ideally i'd get a new piece of ribbon and use that instead but it's fine for a temporary measure. The whole garment is just a little bit too big in the torso and it gapes. I think it looks a lot nicer cinched in.

I brushed most of the gel out of her hair before I dyed it and then rinsed it under my hot tap. I didn't bother to try to get all the gloop out, I just wanted to get it smoother and less crunchy. 

Her hair is soft enough, though it has a tendency to sort of frizz slightly rather than fall into nice waves like i'd want it to. Because the dye stuff is water soluable I can't really boil wash it into curls without having to redo the hair colour either, bah. So right now i'm finger curling her hair and hoping it'll get the hint.

One of her pairs of shoes are a pair of purple sneakers that look to use the same sort of mold as the black doll but have a textured effect on the sneaker part. And her other shoes are these cute wedge heels with a little er.. I think it's a butterfly? on them. 

All in all, she's a nice doll but I do feel that £30 is pretty steep for what you're getting.

As is often the case with gimmick toys, you're very much paying a premium for a gimmick you don't even neccisarily want.

now I have to say, I don't mind the hair dye aspect. That was pretty straightforward and allowed you to make her have all blue hair, all pink hair, keep it all white or do any combination of the three which was a nice option for customisation. 

But I still think the fail face and bad hair is offputting to consumers and a LOT of work to get the doll looking anything like the box art. 

I've never been big into hair play anyway so the gimmick on these is most definitely NOT my cup of tea, but I do feel like without the gimmick and maybe with some hair tutorials for two different styles and some accessories to mix and match instead of the fail look they'd have been far more appealing on shelves and how beautiful their faces are could really be showcased. 

They have such pretty faces! Why hide them behind a grimacing mask!?

The dolls definitely are simple in terms of their clothing, some of the bits are perfectly fine while others are frankly terrible and ugly as sin but thankfully they do seem to mostly be able to fit into Bratz stuff which gives options. 

Still, I would like to see more fashion options for these girls as well as a focus on hair styling and accessorising instead of the bizarre "oh no I fucked up my makeover and somehow got my shoes in my hair and then dipped it all in glue" thing they have right now. 

because come on, it's WIERD. 

it's really really wierd.

Pretty dolls, stupid gimmick.

The second thing I got on Amazon was one of the newer Creatable World dolls that i've been eyeing for a while.

ALSO expensive, i've been waiting in the hope they'd drop in price. 

as it stood, this one did, AFTER I ordered and it dispatched. -_- *sigh*

Anyway,

worth mentioning that the new Creatables come in a different box. It's still just as big and bulky but no longer has the outer sleeve and instead has this wierd flap thing. The box itself doesn't seem to be quite as sturdy either. Mine came all battered up because it was at the bottom of a box of other bits and bobs for christmas and got squished. So hmmm.

The back of the box shows the outfit variations as usual and the fashion packs and single doll packs are listed at the bottom which is a nice idea but I wish they'd not just recoloured outfit pieces for the fashion packs. Feels lazy and cheap you know? There are a few bits I wouldn't mind from those in the other colours (the blue version of the letterman jacket for example) but i'd have preferred a whole new set of bits.

Anyway,

this doll is DARK skinned. Like holy crap that's a dark plastic. It's Mattel's gorgeous deep ebony tone that they don't use very often (probably because it's a bitch to photograph) and it's really quite striking. 

The new sets ALSO come with less stuff than the original deluxe sets did. 

You get two shirts, a jacket, a hat, three bottoms, three shoes, a wig and a pair of glasses. There's no bag this time (a shame because the fabric bags were really nice) and the glasses have painted lenses rather than clear plastic ones which is again, a cost cutting measure i'm sure.

Bummer. 

But oh I love how these dolls are packaged because there's NO TABS at all anywhere. you simply snip the tape holding the plastic lid on and bam, you can grab everything out without any problems. YESSSS.

interestingly, the little tab thing doesn't actually show the OTHER new doll. That one seems to have been released entirely on their own and it's quite wierd actually. It's a straight haired brunette with pale skin. Rather similar to DE-965 but not. 

Anyhoo, as usual the wig sucks. It's actually not a bad wig in that it's very soft and well rooted but the design of the cap is terrible and means that the division between curly afro hair and longer curls is VERY jarring and the plastic lip very obvious in person. 

I also just don't like this wig on this doll. Honestly none of my Createable dolls wear their wigs, I prefer the shorter hair anyway.

This doll has short very curly afro style hair which is adorable. 

but have you noticed how strangely this doll stands?

That's because one of the feet is miscast. The entire foot is actually twisted and it sits in the ankle joint at a strange angle. There's no damage, the joint is strong and structurally sound, it looks more like the actual foot piece itself was either still pliable when it was shoved into the joint or was cast incorrectly in the first place. Whatever the case, the foot is warped and cannot lay flat meaning the doll is perpetually club footed. 

Now, I admit, this was initially slightly disappointing but upon inspecting the joint and being satisfied that it's not DAMAGED I admit, I kinda... felt a wierd surge of kinship with this little dude. See, I have a borked up foot too. My right foot is twisted and I walked with a turned in foot as a kid as a result. 

So you know, club foot rep! lol. Also it's not worth returning to amazon unless the joint was actually broken. it isn't, so I shall accept it as a character trait. Gives the doll personality right?

I agonised over clothes because while there's several bits I like from this set, very few of them look good together or looked good on THIS doll (to me anyway). I don't much like pale denim, I think it's ugly but paired with a skirt over the top like some early 2000s kid I can tolerate it heh. 

I dug out the skirt and hat from another of the sets as the red hat didn't quite work and the camo skirt this pack came with was a quite different style. 

I will for sure use a lot of the other bits though. The aviator jacket is neat, the knitted hat is a great piece to have and the camo skirt is really cute. 

I hate the silver shorts though. But I never like sportswear and it reminds me of sportswear.

New guy and my first Creatable World doll "Seven." Seven was already a fairly dark brown but this hopefully gives a good idea of how much darker the newer doll is. 

It's I think the same tone as the Rainbow dress Fashionista, so dark it's hard to photograph but looks amazing in bright colours heh. 

I'm not sure what to name my new guy yet. I'm leaning toward a G name. Maybe Gale? 

I really do enjoy this line because I like how much freedom it gives the owner. You have what is basically a blank slate from every angle. Are they a boy? are they a girl? Are they neither? what's their style? And with more packs you end up with so many clothing options that you really can spend a lot of time putting together many many looks. 

Now i'll admit that as a kid putting together looks was the ONLY way I played with dolls. I had no interest in hair play as I mentioned before, I didn't find them inspiring in terms of roleplaying but I could happily sit for HOURS with a big box of doll clothes and dress each and every one up in something new. 

Creatable World are  the sort of doll I think i'd have been pretty into as a kid because you know.. CLOTHES! and gender neutrality! 

I always loved toys that I could attibute my own genders and personas and all that onto which meant the more ambiguous the toy, the more I found it inspired my creativity. I collected Trolls and Littlest Pets which both are very gender ambiguous and can be whatever the heck you want them to be because you know.. one are wierd little trolls with no sex characteristics and the other are small plastic cats and dogs! Lol. 

Another bonus for the Creatable World dolls is that their shoes fit Sindy dolls, so my Sindys have a whooooole wardrobe of shoes to pick from now hah.

it's a good line and for what you get the price isn't really that terrible, it's just a bit "oof" paying £30 per doll these days. I really wish dolls weren't so expensive now. 

But the Creatables are on sale on amazon atm. And it's tempting me to grab the last two I don't already have. <_< 

Buuuut I might have to wait on that one. 

So that's all my "new stuff" for the time being. 

A lot of stuff either in production or in transit but who knows how long that'll take.

I bought a load of stuff in June and July and i'm still waiting on it. Such is the peril of preorders. 

Dang.