Happy New Year!

 Good riddance 2020, oh god it's 2021. 

lol. 

Still, Happy New Year to everyone. 

This time of year in the UK usually means a massive drought in terms of toys. Restock isn't till the end of the month so January is a BORING month. You have all this christmas cash and nothing to buy. And that's when you're not on lockdown as well. *sigh*

In London we're being told not to even leave the house unless we HAVE to so it's pretty major. And what do you do when you're housebound? Why, you go crazy on ebay don't you?

Well, I did. <_<

So what did I buy off Ebay? 

well not all of it has arrived yet but some things turned up already.

First we have a tlc bundle from Ebay that I took a cheeky chance on. Honestly I didn't actually expect to win it, let alone for my maiden bid. 

this was the auction photo. The ONLY auction photo and there was little to no information about the individual dolls beyond what you can see in the pic. 

But Sindy! Even in poor condition they're worth a gamble to me. 

and the middle doll is a Sleeping Beauty doll from 1991 who has a lovely face and wierd colour change eyes. 

£2:20 this cost me, plus postage. Yeah, ridiculous right?

So I was already very pleased with my luck there. 

Here's Sindy straight out of the parcel. First thing I noticed was she was in better condition than I had honestly expected.

Her feet are chewed and scraped to hell and she has some scuffs on her body and two missing hair plugs but otherwise she's pretty decent.

I've definitely rescued substantially more mangled dolls than this girl. Her lashes are retreating into her head as often happens and she's absolutely filthy from head to toe, but I can remedy that! 

(seriously though, her hair should be yellow blonde and while photos don't show it, irl it was a dingy blonde colour and felt disgusting and her face was caked in decades of grime. Ewww) 

She got a good scrub, her hair was washed with actual shampoo to get the grossness out (she now smells lovely) and I reblushed her cheeks because they'd faded over the years. I also boiled her head so it could fit the neck knob properly. Over time the heads start to sorta... creep upwards on those ball jointed necks. 

she has a VERY soft squishy head but I believe she's a late 70s doll judging by her head markings (80s dolls usually say 2nd gen on them) and her hands look more like the 70s doll hands than the later ones which are a bit more flattened. 

Her hair is still dry and frizzy and not overly pleasant but she's old, i'll give her a break. 

Dressed in Creatable World clothing and boots you'd never know she had chewed up feet. 

Beside her is the Sleeping Beauty doll. She was made by Mattel and has a really interesting face mold.

I tried putting ice on her eyes but nothing happened so i'm not sure the colour change thing works anymore. I'll try warm water. She's supposed to "close" her eyes with the colour change but as is often the case with these old colour change toys not only does it stop working over time but it also results in this wierd faded looking paint as it sticks between states. 

My plan for her was to wipe the colour change eyes and repaint her eyes from scratch. 

She seems to use a regular old Barbie body with the teensy waist and ugly wide shoulders and massive upper torso. Poor girl. But dressed it's not that obvious how ugly her body sculpt is (I REALLY hate the old Barbie body sculpt okay? it's hideous.) 

I do think she has a very sweet face though. She reminds me a bit of the Steffie face sculpt but not as pouty.

the other dolls in the bundle are boring as shit. 

Fairytopia doll is in okay condition, no chews I can see but BORING. Elsa seems to have little contacts in her hands so I assume she sings when you hold her hands but I can't be bothered checking this as I will punch something if I have to hear a tinny rendition of Let It Go again. (that damn song has been massively overplayed and it pisses me off. I'm grumpy okay?)

The Barbie has a badly chewed up leg as well as arm chews. She has some sort of lever in her back that makes her wave one arm like she's having some sort of fit. I don't understand it at all. 

I think that's the generation girl face sculpt too which is BORING. 

I am really not a huge Barbie fan huh? lol. 

the last doll is this little kelly/shelly doll. I think her hair might have been cut or was supposed to be in some sort of complicated style because it's short but has even shorter bits in there and it's just bewildering. 

I also don't quite understand why she's wearing makeup. She has glittery eyeshadow. Why?

Her hand and feet have been chewed but it's not too bad, she still has play in her and may end up claimed by the kids. 

the others are going into my "to sell or donate" pile for later. 

I did however decide to have a go at repairing or at least reducing the damage on the barbie doll. I feel like this was probably a puppy, but yikes. poor doll.

First step was to carve away all the sticking out plastic with a scalpel.

Which for this part was quite a lot of damaged plastic to remove. The holes are quite deep. Yeouch.

Then I sanded the heck out of her leg with a dremel to soften up the gouges.

and the final stage was a sanding with my high grade sandpaper. I probably could have gotten things smoother had I been able to find my 1200 paper and a new piece rather than the used scraps that were in the dremel box but oh well. 

In the end she still has obvious wounds but they're shallower and smoother to the touch. She'll be able to be dressed to cover the damage now. 

I believe i've mentioned before that as a kid I collected Littlest Pet Shop toys. I stopped some time in 1994-5 and missed a fair few interesting releases as a result. My bff was still buying so we sorta had this unspoken agreement that we wouldn't have duplicates with one another. 

Anyway, I periodically find these toys for a decent price and they make me feel very nostelgic. 

This is the Bombay Kitten from 1994, she has a strange gimmick where she licks her lips when you move her tail. it's a bit bizarre but I suppose at this point Kenner were kinda running out of ideas for gimmicks. 

My set isn't totally complete. She's missing her crown and her little fact card. I have no idea WHY a cat would wear a crown but hey, by this point the lps toys were getting increasingly random.

She has a metalised tray that slots onto her er... throne? but it's a bit annoying to get to stay there. On that she has what looks like a glass or crystal goblet of cat food which is extremely random. 

Being a later littlest pet she also has a little bit of rooted hair and an embedded gem in her collar. The later ones became more and more my little pony-like as time went on. They eventually ended up fantasy coloured with rooted hair and extremely cartoonish which is the point I most definitely gave up on collecting them. Sorry Kenner/Hasbro but nope. I liked them as semi realistic animals.

From the same seller I also got this near complete set from 1993. I had the 92 version of this which has a white dog and a black and white one, for whatever reason for the 93 run Kenner elected to recolour all the 92 releases and release them with slightly different names. 

What's interesting about that is that in NZ we didn't seem to get these 93 versions. We got the single pets in both 92 and 93 colourways but none of the larger sets. I have to assume this was simply because stores sold the individual pets more and ended up restocking them while the larger sets sold slower and there was still plenty of existing 92 stock for store shelves. 

whatever the case, i never even knew these variants existed till I started collecting again as an adult. 

So this set has a grey fluffy dog and a brown spaniel style dog. The grey one has a bobbing head/tail wagging gimmick while the other dog has a magnet that pairs with a bone (which is missing from this set but I think I have a spare one somewhere anyway. They were pretty common across the sets)

This is a european release which you can tell because the newspaper is different. In the American sets (which we got in NZ) the newspaper has a different logo at the top and the headlines are in clear english with the lines emulating text for the rest. 

the euro version at first glance looks like gibberish (or simlish) but looking closer it actually IS english, it's just been fragmented so parts of the letters are missing but it's still legible if you catch it at the correct angle. 

The front headline says "dog days of summer begin" while the one above the cat picture says "cat burgler apprehended" which is also what the US versions say. 

I think it's kinda cool they made english look like gibberish for the euro market, it meant they didn't have to translate the paper into multiple languages which would have saved a bit of money but I think it's wierd they bothered to do a US version AND a Euro version when just doing this one version would have arguably saved even more pennies. 

still, the european pets tend to have less writing on the sets in general which is, in a way, sort of nice. 

I was on a bit of lps fix so these also came into my possession.

Like the pair of dogs above, these are ALSO a 93 colourway change set. I've never seen the full set for sale, they came with a little dog kennel with a picket fence. I have the original 92 version and the colourings are quite different. 

The poodle is no longer white but a sort of apricot colour (she scratches with her back leg when you press the tail)

The spaniel is now brown and white rather than the traditional black and white (another magnet in the head dog) and the collie has gone from tan/golden to this black, brown and white cutie (his tail wags when you 'shake' his paw). 

I'd love the playset that goes with these but the 93 sets seem to be quite hard to find.

This is a set I did not have as a kid but was aware of. One of my friends had it. It was a bathtime set which was pretty wierd. They came with a dog scaled bathroom which is... pretty messed up when you think about it. 

I've never really had any desire for the playset but I like the dogs. There's a couple of new sculpts here. 

The retriever I think was supposed to have a colour change gimmick but I can't remember.

The white dog oddly doesn't have a gimmick, which is very unusual for littlest pets from this period. Go figure. 

The pug-like dog is rubbery and "spits" water. 

and the poodle is another of the scratching ones like the apricot one above, only in grey this time.

Kenner really got their use out of these sculpts, the spaniel and poodle particularly are reused over and over again for different sets (along with a couple of the cat sculpts)

There's also the other "pal around pups" set which was sold in the same case assortment as the bathtime ones above. This one is called "prize winning pups"

I actually DO have the playset for this set and a couple of the scotty dogs. Last time I bought what was supposed to be a full set it was missing the pets so I got a refund but it was disappointing. 

Anyway, 

the set has a Scottish Terrier who has no gimmick but did come with a very stylish jacket thing. 

There's a Shih Tsu who's on wheels, the tail wags when you push it along. 

The Beagle has one ear that moves when you push the tail for... some reason.

and the Husky uses the magnet in head gimmick the spaniels use to "chase" a bone. 

At the time of release I think all four of these dogs were new sculpts. The Shih Tsu would be reused in a later set and I think the Husky was reused for a german shephard in the same assortment.

Finally another of the "Collie" sculpt, this one is from the "real pets" assortment. I have both the cats from the same assortment but there's another three dogs I don't have (including the Shih Tsu and German Shephard I mentioned). They all came with a little cushion or bed and a trophy.

 The set also came with some spare bits. 

A duplicate beagle, another of the brown spaniels who is wierdly painted with some glitter (ahh creative children) and a dalmation who I already have. Also a hamster. 

Yeaaah the scale of LPS was all over the place. 

the rodents are especially huge. 

There's also a pet bed for the Sparkling Pet Yorkie (who I don't have), the pet cage that came with the Prize Winning Pups, another pet cage with the incorrect door on it, the cage for the variant 93 mice (Which I really really want damnit!) and some pet food. 

It took a while but my replacement Dream Date Sindy also arrived. I had to return the first one because of how badly her hair was falling out and then because of covid there was nobody in the office to recieve the return and arghh. I was getting pretty stressed and worried about it but it's all sorted now. 

I'm still waiting for Skater but she's been delayed by the ports so goodness knows when she'll turn up. 

I was worried when I first picked up the box because it was rattling but it was just her stand base having come loose. The doll herself looks great. Her hair is properly secured which was a big step up from the first one who arrived with her hair looking like a troll (clearly she'd been partying hard huh?)

I always felt like the pink dress with pink hair was a bit too much pink, it made her pale hair wash out and just not feel as striking and special as I wanted it to be. I mean I quite like pink hair (which is wierd as i'm no great fan of pink as a colour) but pink hair with pink clothes results in a doll who's just kinda... too much of the same. Contrast is important to me, I love me some contrast and Dream Date's black headband, black handbag and black and white shoes SCREAMED "I should be in black" to me. 

I got this velvet dress in a bundle of old handmade doll clothes a few days ago and after repairing some of the fraying edges and adding a Rainbow High jacket for a little touch of colour and i'm delighted.

I love this look on her. 

This doll has substantially better rooted hair. Unlike my first dream date girl there's no big bald patch, I can't see her scalp through her hair and hair isn't continuing to shed in my hand as I touch her. 

Also her lashes are correctly rooted, so yay! 

She's a lovely doll. Not sure the collector Sindy dolls are quite worth the hefty price tag but I don't feel like collector Barbie or Disney are either. *shrug*

I also grabbed this girl. Avery Styles from the Rainbow High line. She was £40 down from £50 as a warehouse deal on Amazon and I figured given the amount of clothes she comes with, it was probably worth it.

She has wonky eyes. One of them is set too low and leaves a large open gap between the done of the eye and the lashes while the other wasn't actually set correctly and was buldging slightly out of the socket so I did my best to realign them but I CANNOT get the too low eye to rise up or the other eye to meet it. In trying to fix the eyes I messed up her lashes on one eye which i'm grumpy about but ahh well. Her eyes are better than they were.

Her pale purple wig had a lot of gel in it which was gross and the tinsel gives it an unpleasant texture. I combed it out which removed a LOT of the tinsel inadvertantly and helped a bit but the pink wig is substantially softer and the colour I feel works better anyway. Pale purple is pretty and all, but against this doll's tan skintone it just looked washed out to me. 

if you're gonna go rainbow, go bold or go home!

 

She comes with a LOT of outfit pieces but quite a few of them don't really go together. There's red pieces which look awful with the pink wig and clash with the pink and purple pieces, there's several tees, one skirt, one pair of jeans and two wierd dress-ish things (the silvery one she comes wearing requires a shirt underneath and the pink one my doll is wearing in photos is transparent and so short I can only assume it's actually supposed to be a top). only the one jacket though, (which sindy stole) and a hoodie which I feel is a shame. Another jacket would have been great, which is why Avery is using Sunny's spare one. 

Also no jewellery which again feels like a miss. She came with a lot of coloured hair pins that are bulky and serve no obvious purpose yet has no earrings and no necklace or anything. I dunno, i'd have preferred a simple necklace piece to the pins personally. I think that would have been more versatile.

 

She also comes with four pairs of shoes which is impressive. The long boots are amazing but kinda tacky to touch, these little sandals are adorable, the sock boots she comes packaged in are ugly as fuck but apparently quite fashionable and her final pair of shoes have an ankle strap that I COULD NOT get over her foot so gave up on. Either you need long nails to sort of pry those straps over or you'd need to heat up the shoe, either way, dumb design MGA. 

There's four little boxes made of actual plastic for the shoes which is neat. Useful for storage. I can't help but wish there was a case or something to keep the clothes rail and clothing in as the rail is quite flimsy. 

I like most of the pieces Avery came with, the real challenge though was finding pieces that went together AND went with either of her wigs.

Unfortunately while the jeans and tees are very versatile pieces, a lot of the rest just doesn't quite work together and just a tee and jeans looks unfinished to my eye. I feel like i'd have preferred another jacket piece instead of 4 tees. 4 tees really does feel like overkill on the shirt front and along with 4 tees there's also a basque thing that doesn't fit very well and the tunic dress thing. So that's 6 tops which is... yeah a bit odd. 

But all the bits alone will be useful to have. Sindy and Barbie can just about fit the jackets and skirts but the rest is far too tight over the bust and ends up looking silly but i'm sure i'll end up with smaller dolls who need clothes at some point and there's a lot of new rainbow high coming out soon. 

Stuff i'm waiting for includes some aliexpress heads and a wierd plushie because eh, why not? lol. 

And i'm impatiently waiting for amazon to restock so I can use my vouchers damnit.

Hope 2021 is treating everyone okay. Stay safe out there everyone!