Christmas roundup time

 2020 is nearly over, and what a year it's been huh? Certainly a wierd one. 

I won't niavely assume 2021 will magically be any different come midnight on the 31st though, but still, we made it through another year just about so it's time for the annual roundup.

Tier 4 lockdown where I am means christmas was a quiet affair, something that suited me quite well to be honest. I've never made it any secret how little I enjoy the festive period and all the enforced "family togetherness" that's everywhere you turn. I find it a painful time of year usually and paradoxically, in the year where most people have grieved for a typical christmas i've found it rather better for my mental health not to have all the festive cheer rammed down my throat. 

We had a nice day. A zoom call with the inlaws in the morning, a phonecall to my parents in the afternoon and a nice sleep in between hahah. The kids were pretty happy to spend the day with their new toys and not having to go anywhere and just being able to stay in and take it easy worked great. 

But of course, this doesn't mean presents didn't happen. 

I got a nice wad of cash from the inlaws as usual which I put toward buying the last three Collector Sindy dolls. 

Unfortunately the big delays at Dover/border closures mean that one of the three wasn't available as she's still in transit somewhere in europe. I dunno.

But Kid Kreations sent the other two. 

 Poor Dream Date is sadly not without flaws. She arrived in her box looking rather like she'd been partying the whole trip. Her hair was all over the place and she has misrooted lashes in one eye.

Which is a shame as she's a stunningly beautiful doll with soft pink lips, grey eyes and this lovely powder pink hair. 

Unfortunately, the misrooted lashes are only one of her problems. On their own I could live with them, it's not a glaring error to me but her hair is also VERY poorly rooted and very very thin. I don't think it helps that her hair was such a mess in the box because now it won't sit flat against her scalp anyway. It doesn't actually look to have been thatched or parted correctly in the first place. There's large gaps where her painted scalp pokes through which looks bad. Her bow hides a really bad seam between her front pieces and the rest of the hair but the rest still looks seriously sparse.

She's also flat out missing several plugs which likely isn't helping.

*sigh*

I messaged KK but as she arrived christmas eve I have to wait till they get back to work on tuesday/wednesday to find out how to get a replacement. 

Poor Dream Date Sindy. A very pretty doll but at nearly £80 each this sort of qc isn't acceptable. 

The other doll however is perfect. This is City Chic who was the doll I was considering getting instead of Weekender and spent a lot of time umming and ahhing over which of the two to get in the end. 

She is absolutely beautiful. She has a short bob in a chestnut brown tone, brown eyes and bright red lips. 

Her cape/cloak is fully lined and absolutely beautifully made. Under it she wears a simple little white shirt with flared sleeves and leggings with little ankle boots.

She's beautiful, really stunningly beautiful. 

Behind her are my new Doll Leaves dolls who arrived shortly before christmas as well.

Jeremy (in the hat) arrived on his own first with Ben and Augus trailing behind in a second parcel. 

Jeremy I ordered on his original body, the "type 1" body while the other two are on the newer "type 2" body. I figured I could swap heads around as and when as they're all the same resin colour (this is doll leaves' "normal" skin and it's very very pale. Almost a creamy white tone really)

The two bodies are really very different. The type 2 body is a lot taller, standing at a more typical 44cm(ish) tall while the type 1 body is very short for a male body at only 42cm (ish)

What's also interesting is that they appear to use absolutely NONE of the same parts. The type 1 body has broader hands and limbs and is generally all around chunkier than the lean type 2 body.

They even have different shaped feet (type 1 being larger)

(excuse how dark this picture is, my camera is being a jerk)

With their heads on it's even more striking how different in height the two bodies are. 

In terms of posing the type 1 body has slightly more mobility in the knees and elbows and better flex in the wrists as they're two parts (a ball and then a socketed hand rather than molded all as one piece like the type 2) but the type 2 body has a better slouch and easier to use mobility joints on the upper thigh (they're straight rather than the strange wavy shape of the type 1 body)

Now, while Augus and Jeremy are fairly old sculpts now and fairly easy to find owner pictures of, Ben is a brand new sculpt and i've thus far been unable to find any others out there. 

Ben has a strange face sculpt with little elf ears and very pronouced features which I found facinating as it's not Doll Leaves' normal style at all. A lot of his sculpt actually makes me think more of Doll Chateau and Doll Zone's sculpts with the prominant brow ridge and very very pointy chin.

I was a little concerned i'd have to sand his chin down a bit because in his stock photos he really does have a very "crescent moon" shaped profile but in hand his chin is pronouced but not quite as charicature. 

He has a very pointed nose and his head is quite large, bigger than the other two boys with a wierd egg shape so he still fits 7inch wigs. That egg shaped head is another big "Doll Chateau" vibe heh. 

He's slightly bobble headed on his default body and I think ideally he'd suit a slightly taller body, one of the 50cm doll chateau or dream valley bodies would probably look awesome. But the proportions aren't too bad to my eye and once he's wigged and dressed it should be fine. 

I put a Ring Doll cyber arm on him to see if it fitted lol. It's not a great fit but it's good enough. it's a bit longer than his original arm but ahh well. 

I wanted to see how he'd look with a wig on so he stole one from one of my Makies for a photo. He looks very pretty and serene in pink.

Like all Doll Leaves sculpts his face isn't symetrical and has some wierd wonk. his nose is crooked as is his mouth but this is fairly realistic, people have wonky faces normally anyway. 

He's going to get a cream coloured wig eventually (when it ships) which i'm hoping will look gorgeous on him.

Meanwhile Jeremy and Augus swapped bodies as I decided Augus' cute big eyed face suited the shorter body better. Jeremy has such a sulky face, i've loved it for years. He has a REALLY wonky nose but the wonk kinda endears me to him all the more (I have a really wonky nose myself hahah). 

This outfit came with another doll who i'll talk about in a bit. It fits the Doll Leaves body pretty well and looks great on Jeremy. 

I've renamed him Oscar because he makes me think of Oscar Diggs dressed like this. <_< >_>

 

And Augus got his faceup eventually too.

He's another clown boy though he's currently channeling a bit of Pennywise thanks to the default yellow eyes Doll Leaves sent all three dolls with. He looks substantially less demonic with normal eyes in, I just don't happen to have any in the right size that aren't already IN a doll. Drat.

Here he is stealing Zynfi's eyes for a moment (which sounds super creepy doesn't it? lol) which really softens his look a lot. 

It's amazing what eyes and a wig do to change a doll completely. 

I still haven't fully decided what this boy's full outfit will look like, he needs to fit in with the other two clown dolls but both of them are pretty random in their attire. *snort* whoops? 

Little clown boy has been renamed Felix and should make an interesting counterpart to my other clown boy Hugo.

Overall i'm really impressed with Doll Leaves. I got my three boys on sale via Clover Singing for an absolute steal. Doll Leaves do regular 10-15% off sales throughout the year and Clover Singing also wrangles extra deals to get a few more percent off on top of that (no idea how). So i got these guys for about 20% off back in July, making them around £100 each. 

£100 for an msd doll is a bargain and Doll Leaves bodies are surprisingly well engineered expecially at such a low price. I've got substantially more expensive dolls that can't pose as nicely as these boys can. 

Doll Leaves heads aren't of course to everyone's taste, some of them are downright wierd looking and they only generally offer two resin colours. White and this very pale "normal" tone that's a peachy cream colour. So... white or cream basically lol. Some sculpts they offer in grey but only one or two which is a shame as i'd love the option to order any of them in grey. 

The wait time was about 5 months which is a fair wait but it's down from what it was. There was a period of time where they were running at closer to 8 months wait so they seem to have caught up. Unfortunately the more popular a company gets, the more their wait times creep up and Doll Leaves are slowly gaining some interest as a "budget" brand. Their engineering is definitely superior to Resinsoul but their colour options severely limited so for a similar price it's an option if you don't care about fun resin colours and just want a doll who can pose beautifully. 

I'll definitely be getting a few more Doll Leaves dolls. They have a few more elf sculpts that tempt me. Ahem. 

So, that other doll I mentioned? The one who offered up both the Ringdoll arm and the full outfit? 

This is his auction photo (so not my picture)

He's a Resinsoul Song and I spotted him on ebay and was like "ooo Ringdoll arm, ooo cool outfit, ooo doll that needs serious tlc!" and these are things that... welll... they make me weak lol. 

I wanted to see if I could restore him and he was pretty cheap and in need of a fair bit of work but I decided it'd give me something to do during lockdown. 

 I've wanted one of these Ringdoll arms for a long time but they no longer make them which is a bummer. They're just really cool looking things and I never had a character who it made sense to have one so I never ordered one. 

I had no idea what it would look like under all the green paint. The original Ringdoll arms are silver and I could see some silver under there but it was a bit of a chance to see if I could fix it up. 

The person who was selling him had apparently made the outfit themselves and it's a really dang nice outfit. There's some rough parts (the pants for example are unfinished) but it's a cute ensemble with some funky little details. The price I paid was worth it for the outfit alone imo.

He arrived quickly and I immediately got to work removing the stuff from his face. It turns out a lot of the stuff glued to him is either tiny gears from a watch of warhammer bits which amused my husband who could identify several of the pieces hahahaha. 

Song's ears have been modified to sand down the elf ears and make them more human. You can now get a human earred Song (he's called Jian I think) because a lot of people did this sort of mod but those human ears are different to these modded ears which I honestly think are pretty cute. They're sticky outy and slightly pointed still which I think is cool. They're also pierced several times, though he only had one earring in the box with him. 

He's covered in glue and old sealant and quite yellowed. I'm not sure what colour he was originally but i'm assuming it was "normal" because it's somewhat more pinkish than coffee but a lot darker than Resinsouls' current "normal" which is very very pale like the doll leaves stuff. 

He was also strung quite loose with strings that are far too narrow but I haven't got any spare elastic to restring. 

As I took him out of the box the fingers of his cyber arm started to snap off one by one which was a bit scary. I didn't even touch the arm, I just lifted him up and snap, snap, snap.

erp.

thankfully they superglue back on fine but they seem to be quite fragile as a result of the way the fingers are actually sculpted. Maybe this is why Ringdoll don't make these arms anymore. 

You can see here I had already started scrubbing the paint off. The arm was indeed silver underneath and I can't quite work out how they did it because the inside of the arm is white and if you scrub too hard you get white under the silver but the silver doesn't seem to be paint so much as a sort of... coating/surface? I don't know. it's a bit odd. 

His other hand was also painted green and scrubbed pretty clean which I was relieved about, I thought I might have to replace it completely. 

He needed more scrubbing to remove sealant residue which clouded up when I wiped him down to remove the faceup, thankfully it was just sealant residue because I was for a while there concerned i'd damaged the resin or something.

I gave him a new wig (he came with a wig but it's horrible), strung him as tight as his loose narrow strings would allow and put him back into his original outfit (minus the hat) which gave him a rather piratical look. 

I'm honestly not sure what i'm actually going to do with this doll. I bought him to pass some time and for his outfit and arm. I might have some spare resinsoul parts somewhere but I havent' found them yet, but it'd be nice to be able to give him a replacement arm now that Ben has stolen his cyber arm. 

Thing is, I already own two Songs and adorable though the sculpt is, do I really need a third? 

I do like his ear mods though and I think he's quite sweet but right now he's with my mother being used as a dress dummy for doll outfits. 

I took part in a Secret Santa exchange on one of the Sindy facebook groups for the second time this year as well. This year's person really went all out and I actually gasped when I opened her. She has a tiny little needle felted dog and a fully hand made outfit which is gorgeous. And she has so much lovely curly hair styled into dense bunches. 

She's a stunning doll and i'm delighted by her. 

The secret santa person did an incredible job. 

Husband got me the last two Creatable World dolls I didn't have so now I have all of them bwhahaha. I love this line, so many clothes, so many shoes, so much fun figuring out pleasing combos of bits and pieces.

And Mini Monk got some proper glasses and a more appropriately "me" shirt (that is, tacky and ugly as fuck. yessss) 

Apparently the wigs I ordered for the doll leaves dolls have hit the UK but are just waiting for customs to process them. So hopefully I can get these guys finished soon. 

We'll see. 

Hope everyone is safe and well and had a good christmas. see you in the new year!