When i'm grumpy I impulse buy dolls.

 I have a new problem, and it's Mattel's fault. You see, every time I miss the restock of Howliday Draculaura I get annoyed and go impulse buy something else in a fit of rage. 

this has happened too many times so now I have a lot of impulse purchases. 

and still no Howliday Draculaura. -_- 

I could rant for ages about mattel's absolute incompetence with their distribution but i'm tired and i'd sooner talk about pleasant things. 

So let's see what random secondhand stuff i've obtained this month. (and okay only HALF of it is Mattel's fault.)

Let's start with this lucky find.

Now, i'm trying really hard not to buy too many more 80s Sindy dolls, I have so many already, but I didn't already have a Masquerade Sindy. Masquerade Sindy has very very curly hair tied in a high side sort of ponytail thing so it looks all bundled on top of her head and it's very cool. She came in three hair colours, brunette, blonde and red. This girl is a redhead. Sindy was never a very firey red, her "red" is more accurately a sort of brownish tone but it's pretty. It's also quite rare. Substantially more blonde and brunettes were made, making the redheads substantially harder to find.

I don't own many redheads so i'm always interested when I see them and this girl was BIN for an honestly ridiculously low price. 

I jumped. A style I didn't already own AND a redhead to boot? HECK YEAH! 

She came in her original dress which is a cream ballgown sort of number and was quite grimy and not my taste anyway. But I knew I wanted to dress her up in a sort of late 80s garish sort of look and this is what I could find in my stash to fit the bill. 

I think she needs sneakers instead of these silly boots.

But damn she's beautiful. 

Her earrings are pins, Masquerade Sindy came with earrings which is in itself very unusual. Most Sindy dolls don't have pierced ears. this particular girl had long since lost her earrings though. 

Her outfit is a combination of 90s hasbro Sindy and Barbie. I absolutely LOVE the little peplum ruffle thing on this denim jacket. It's adorable.

This odd little doll caught my eye on Ebay. She was listed as a clone but looking at the auction photos I got the impression she wasn't. For a start, her limbs looked too good, her legs too solid and her arms too well sculpted and clearly vinyl (clone arms are often hollow plastic like the rest of them or very very cheap vinyl with a lot of flashing) and the hair was also too good. 

I also recognised that this was a Patch head on a Sindy style body, and my gut feeling was that it was a legitimate Sindy body at that. 

She got a good clean and I touched up her paint to fix a few of the more glaring issues and brightened up her orange lips so they were a more natural shade.I could have wiped her wierd extra under eye lash but I elected instead to duplicate it on the other side because I thought it was quite characterful and unique. 

She was also missing a finger (common for Sindy dolls of this era) so I sculpted her a new one.

Her facepaint is unusual. Clearly hand painted, you can see the brush strokes in the eyebrows. It's not the best paint, it's a little messy and thin in places, with dribbles in others and overspray. 

I added the black line to her upper eye which she seemed to be missing and blushed over her lips to restore their red tone as age had yellowed them. And I painted in her right cheek lash... line.. thing. Other than that, aside from a couple of little dots of paint to fix chips or missing paint, this is her original paintwork. I even left the dribble of black from her right eye lol. Looks like they had too much paint on the brush when they did that pupil.

Her body appears to be a legitimate 1963 Sindy body with hollow (but firm) unbending legs, a similarly hollow body and unwired squishy vinyl arms. 

This MIE Sindy is the closest body I happen to own, though she has wired arms as she's a year or two younger. 

Having gotten Frankenpatch out to handle I recognised the feel of her plastic. Legit Sindy dolls have quite distinctive hard plastic for their bodies and legs that i've never known a clone to be able to emulate. Almost all clones are blown plastic which is very thin and has a translucent quality that genuine Sindy parts simply don't have. 

 

 

Patch is Sindy's little sister and as a result she's on a shorter child-like body. Pepper (in red) is Tammy's younger sister. The two have fairly different bodies but very similar heads. They may in fact share a head sculpt like Tammy and Sindy do, i've never been entirely sure. What I do know however is that their head markings are the same. Both say "sister" on the top of their heads which Frankenpatch also has. 

 

FrankenPatch has a squishier head than my legitimate Patch but that doesn't mean a lot as Patch was made for a fair few years and some have harder heads than others. Her hair seems to be saran which is another factor that makes me think she's not a clone doll. Saran is expensive, clone dolls tend to use crappy cheap nylon or even cheaper crappier polypropylene which literally rots out of their head and falls out in clumps. I've never known a clone doll to have hair this soft and shiny. 

 

It IS however not rooted correctly. There's a whole section to one side at the front where they missed the guide marks. This may explain how she came to be how she is today.

 You see, Pedigree had a very "waste nothing" attitude particularly in the 60s and 70s where post war mentality was still strong. This is quite probably WHY we have so many Pedigree dolls coming out the factory cobbled together from random parts, but it's also likely why we see legitimate Pedigree parts being used for third party products and novelties. 

 

Center Part Sindy heads for example have been found used by a third party company to make hand puppets and jack in the boxes. Likely they purchased the surplus stock Pedigree had left over when they switched to their new style dolls. Trendy Girl sindys have been found in sealed celophane baggies sold under a generic "fashion girl" title by some third party too. 

Other companies obtained old clothing stock. 

So it's very possible that factory reject parts could have been combined with old stock parts to get rid of them. It's not like they could melt them back down or something, the plastics these dolls are made of tends to just burn rather than melt, so what else can you do with them? 

 

My current working theory is that Frankenpatch was one such cobbled together doll, chucked into whatever body they could ram the head onto to clear old or reject stock and sold to a third party who would have sold her LIKE a clone doll. A clone, but not a clone. Kinda like those "Factory Blythes" I suppose. 

FrankenPatch's face paint really feels like it's trying to emulate Sindy more than Patch,which is facinating. 

Some people wondered if she'd been put on this body at a later date but I don't think she was. 60s Sindy heads aren't easy to remove, they have a rather fragile vinyl washer molded to the end of the neck which appears to have been inserted before they glued both sides of the hard body together. Trying to pull it out, even with warming the doll up, can result very easily in torn vinyl and a broken neck. An awful lot of 60s Sindys have broken necks just from play, it wasn't a very robust joint. I really doubt any parent would have been able to do this without causing damage or at least some wobble to the head. I'm pretty sure I couldn't do it and i've been customising dolls for years. Given the difficulty of swapping these heads I am rather inclined to believe she came from a factory like this. Much like dolls of the same era who have mismatched arms or legs. These parts just aren't easy enough to swap for me to believe a parent would do it. Most fixes are pretty obvious. 

Patch looks left, Sindy looks right. Frankenpatch is also missing the freckles and her eyebrows are substantially more arched. Not to mention those wierd misplaced lashes under her eyes. They remind me of something but I can't quite place it. There's some vintage doll or something she reminds me of and it's bugging the hell out of me.

Her hair looks to be the same as this Hong Kong Sindy's hair, though FrankenPatch's fringe has been pretty poorly cut. That said, i've seen a fair few legit Patch's with similarly shit fringes so *shrug*

I've had this dress in my stash for ages. I bought a whole clothing bundle pretty much FOR this dress and have been waiting for a doll who'd suit it for a long time. Patch fits it perfectly. I paired it with a hand made necklace made from a broken old bracelet, a Makies jacket and some Descendants boots. I feel like clompy boots are a very Patch thing lol.

She's a very odd hybrid but she has so much character, I genuinely love her.

I haven't a clue who she was sold as and we'll never know how she came to be like this, but she's definitely a curious little piece of Sindy history. A real oddity. But she must have siblings out there like her, surely? Maybe one day i'll find another. 

 this sad girl also caught my eye on ebay and as you can see from this auction photo, she needed some help STAT. 

she's a mini sindy, so called because they're quite a bit smaller than standard. I've heard theories that this is to do with misjudged shrinkage percentages but nobody really knows for sure. What we do know though is that mini sindy dolls have very wobbly, very hard heads and are rather prone to broken necks. 

In this doll's case it looks like some creative parent tried to repair her but in doing so cracked her hard brittle torso. They then glued the shit out of it all to try to make do, an ugly but effective enough repair.

from the auction photo what I couldn't tell however was what the hell was at the bottom of her neck. Was it dried up yellow glue? A stick? 

well it turned out to be a piece of nicely turned wood shaped precisely to fit.

someone's parent was super clever. 

But what should have been an elegant fix unfortunately, as I said, resulted in the brittle plastic of the torso cracking and a lot of glue residue.

I scraped as much of the glue off as I could, reinserted the neck piece into the body and tried to glue the cracks but alas, they refused to seal. All I got was a mess of glue for my effort, just like the original parent who tried to repair her I suppose. 

In the end I opted for a less elegant but more sturdy repair. Nail acrylic.

 

 

I had hoped i'd be able to use it rather like plaster to fill the gap but it wouldn't smooth enough for that. In order to keep the crack from opening back up I needed to give it some texture and while I did lightly sand it to try to get it smoother, I didn't want to sand too much for fear of damaging the rest of the doll. 

 

I also couldn't paint match  her skin tone well to hide the wound so she got a gnarly scar. 

I also used the chance to add a lip to the inside of her neck so that her head wouldn't wobble as badly. This worked quite well. Her head still wobbles slightly, but it doesn't flop about loosely like it did. 

 

If I had the right tools I perhaps could have sanded the acrylic smoother or matched the paint better, but as it stands I don't think it matters too much. She'll always wear something high necked to hide the wound. 

  

She got a vintage Barbie dress that's just a fraction too big in the bust but works quite well I think. 

See how tiny she is compared to a typical Sindy sized body? DINKY! Absolutely dinky.

but so so pretty.

The mini sindys have really gorgeous faces. Very high colour, vivid blush and usually really good hair too. I don't know why their faces survive better than standard Sindy dolls, maybe the hard shrunken vinyl holds the colour better? Whatever the case, I have a real soft spot for mini Sindys.

And this girl, if you didn't know she had a wounded neck, looks perfect.

When I was a child I had a Magic Nursery doll like this one. Mine had long brown hair and purple eyes. My mother opened all the boxes at the store and checked under the hats to find one that had hair like mine (lol). I can't remember her name, or her outfit, but I remember the gimmick and I remember her face. 

I've wanted another one for a while. 

The whole gimmick of these dolls was that they came with their hair covered with a hat and dressed in a paper gown. This gown was put into water and dissolved revealing inside a plastic bag with a surprise outfit and a birth certificate that told you if the doll was a boy or a girl or even, if you were super lucky, a twin! (you had to send off to the company for a second doll if this was the case and they'd send you one) 

From what I understand of it, the boy dolls were quite rare. It certainly wasn't 50/50 in split. In fact, I think it was closer to only 10-20% of the dolls being boys. I guess the logic was that most little girls would want a girl doll right? 

but it does mean that the boy dolls are really hard to find. 

it doesn't really help that the "boy" outfits were also used for the girl dolls and that several of the dolls have rather androgynous looks anyway. 

this doll for example I THINK was a boy because of the hair style and outfit, but there's no real way of knowing without the certificate that came with the doll and that's lost to time. 

But for me, this is a boy doll so I shall refer to them as such. 

He was very cheap because he was FILTHY. Poor doll had gross feeling hair, dirt all over and little spots of what looked like mildew on the fabric. Ewwww. 

But for the price I figured it was worth an attempt to fix him.

He has a sort of dark blonde toned hair with a curl to it, big blue eyes with stars in them and a star on his cheek. 

This star would have originally been a heart that changed when you "kissed" it (read: Blew warm breath on it). Sadly colour change paint doesn't survive so it's faded out to its star state with the faintest shadow of the heart around it. 

The Magic Nursery dolls came in white or black variations, though again, the black ones are pretty rare and i'm not sure were actually sold in all regions (typical). The white dolls come with either blue or purple eyes, for some reason. I think that's a shame because plenty of white kids have brown eyes, but none of them have purple eyes. Wth Mattel? What the hell? 

Anyway, 

this boy has horribly feeling nylon hair. I remember mine having not very pleasant feeling hair too, it was coarse and plasticky, but this guy's hair is also engrained with grime which adds extra "ick". 

He has felt pen on his face, grazes on both cheeks and a lot of surface dirt. 

The cloth body is also FILTHY and those mildew marks make me feel like I have no choice but to unstuff him and wash the hell out of him. Gotta make sure that shit is DEAD.

As it turns out, the head is held on with a zip tie and then had this... cone... thing that holds the head stable inside the body. I wasn't expecting the cone. 

The cloth body is pretty well made with a little outie belly button, molded butt cheeks (seriously they had stuffing inside molded to the shape of the buttocks lol) and sewn toes and fingers and little knee dimples. 

Cute. 

I ended up only unstuffing the main body as I couldn't figure out a good way to unstitch the limbs which are all stuffed individually. I didn't find any surprises inside so I figured it was safe to soak the whole thing and let it all dry before putting him back together.

He got a good soak in detergent, then vanish and I was surprised that the stains all came out except for a little bandaid/sticky plaster residue on one knee. A magic eraser got rid of all the face dirt and stains, though the grazes remain and a good wash with detergant helped clean his hair. It still feels dry and plasticky, but that's just the fibre. Nothing I can really do about that. 

I also washed his outfit which had turned rather a dingy grey tone with age. 

He's long since lost his shoes and hat but oh well. Magic Nursery dolls use the same shoes as My Child (also made by Mattel) and as a result replacement shoes are NOT cheap, or that easy to find. So for now he remains barefoot. 

I'm very pleased to have a Magic Nursery doll once more. It's one of the few dolls I remember from my childhood and while I don't think I really played with mine much (baby dolls were never my thing) I did think she was cute and the gimmick was super cool. 

I'd rather like to find one that looks like her, but these dolls aren't very common here in the UK and the ones that tend to show up on Ebay are either really expensive or the bald baby style ones rather than these toddler ones. 

 

Now you all know I love me a bundle of tlc dollies... especially if Sindy is involved. This auction photo caught my attention. Sindy front and center, with her hair a mess and her arms strung the wrong way around. And I know I said "no more 80s sindy dolls" but i'm dumb and weak okay? And I was annoyed about missing a preorder so impulse kicked in.

The rest of the bundle was pretty meh. Two very mangled Barbies, an EAH doll who probably had a broken neck, a one legged Bratz, A winx doll with one arm and two OMGs. Now yes, they ARE OMGs i've had my eye on for a while to restyle but neither of them have hands and hands are expensive. 

I put in a cheeky starting bid and ended up being the only bidder. Doh.

So, as it turned out Midge had lost a whole hand but also had some nibbles to her face. I filled those in with nail acrylic but she'll always have scars. I also put her onto a new body. It was Princess Kate's, now it's Midge's. 

 Like seriously, WHAT HAPPENED!?? My assumption is dog but YIKES. this was her ARM! That stump is all that's left of her hand.

The Winx doll is Musa but I don't know WHICH Musa. She's marked "rainbow" on her back but none of the ones I found online had the same makeup. I dunno. Her arm had broken off but was included in the box. It turns out that the little hinge that holds the arm had frozen, which is likely why the arm came off in the first place. I glued her arm back on and it can move backwards and forwards, it just can't hinge outward due to the frozen hinge. But you know, that's not too much of a problem to me. 

I thought her outfit was Bratz but I actually think it's original to the doll. The skirt is made of very thin floaty fabric and the shoes are marked with the Winx logo on the underside. 

Her hair is very thinly rooted and had kinks in it that suggested to me that it was probably originally braided. Several dolls with similar makeup online had their hair in a big braid so I tried it and I think it's correct. It explains the very thin rooting at least. Thicker hair results in a fatter braid which doesn't look as good. 

I don't collect Winx dolls but I have this Bloom from another bundle. She's a much later doll I think and has a strikingly different body and face. I don't think either really quite manage to look like the animated characters but whatever.
 

 

Sindy it turns out is in mostly excellent condition. Her hair is soft and while thin like all ballerinas, appears to be all present. Her lashes are thick, her body solid and even her ankles pose!

However, one of her arms has a broken shoulder hook which is likely why she had her arms restrung in the first place. This picture shows how the arm SHOULD look with a little hook that the elastic slides over. 

The other arm unfortunately the whole hook part has sheared off, leaving only the hinge section of it but nothing for the elastic to hook onto. 

I don't have any spare ballerina parts so I just updated the original fix to tighten it all up. The original owner had repaired it with a little bit of thread tied around the hook stump and then threaded through the loop in the arm elastic. I took this one step further and threaded cotton through the hole in the hook stump (there's a little hole in the hinge piece) and then through the elastic and back again a few times till it was good and tight. It'll hold and works fine for a display doll. Her arms can still pose no problem and bonus, they're now on the correct sides of her body! 

Finally Apple. Apple's body was, as I anticipated, broken. The neck was shattered. I happened to have a spare Apple body here with a head that had such bad glue hair that i'd given up on it completely. I figured that I could swap the decent Apple head and have one complete doll so that's exactly what I did. 

I don't know which Apple doll she is. She has a little glue but her hair is mostly soft and decent which is a relief after the absolute disgusting mess that is her signature doll. Just.. ew ew ew ew ew. 

I'm not honestly a massive fan of eah anyway. Big fancy dresses and princesses were never my thing and I always found their big flat faces quite disappointing when compared to their predecessors Monster High. Given how unique each MH face was, all the dolls having this identical broad moon face was quite a pity. I can never help but wonder how EAH could have looked had Mattel kept the same sculpt aesthetics for the heads as MH.

Also in the bundle were these dolls. 

Jade has lost a leg. It was not in the box. I don't know what to do with her honestly. I suppose I could wipe her head and paint it up but I don't know if I can be bothered. Bratz heads are really difficult to wipe the paint from and these 2016 bratz have especially flat featureless faces. 

The OMGs scrubbed up nice. I never understood Cosmic Nova's design, her LOL tot was 80s space themed so why on earth was the big sister western cowgirl themed? It was wierd. Her hair is really cool, it's a soft greenish tone with tinsel shot through it and honestly I feel like it's absolutely wasted being in the original bubble pigtail style. So I put it in buns to emulate her little sister. 

She had glitter lips which I hate, but I noticed as I handled her that the glitter was just coming off in chunks. It took no effort at all to simply wipe the glitter off with my fingernail, it wasn't sealed at all. 

I tried the Winx outfit on her which looks pretty nice on the OMG body I think. I don't think it works for Cosmic Nova though. She needs something far more spacey. 

interesting to see that the shoes fit though. 

She is missing one hand.

 She's currently leaning more 80s with her look than space, but it's what I had available.

 

Meanwhile Chillax is missing both hands. Her hair is extremely long because it's meant to be in bun things but I couldn't be bothered working out how to restore them. It took me long enough to figure out how to do buns on Cosmic Nova. 

The MH outfit emulates her little sister's outfit which I thought was cute but I initially had her in the Winx outfit which looks really good on her. 

Her hair is so soft. And such a gorgeous colour. I've wanted Chillax for a while purely because of this hair colour. It's such a vibrant blue-teal and I adore it. 

Apple's broken body DID have two good hands. Sadly they aren't a good match for Lizzie who has two of the same hand. *sigh* but for the time being they stay with their hands swapped. I don't think I can repair this body, but I can harvest it for parts.

 I wasn't sure i'd end up keeping the OMGs because I didn't much want to have to buy hands for them, but you know... i think I will have to now. Yes sure, I could probably get intact ones for very little money but I don't like wasting dolls and these girls are perfectly fine, they just need hands. I'd rather bring them back to display condition than replace them. 

So for my £15 + postage I got a Sindy doll who's in substantially better condition than I expected, two omgs that I need to find hands for (and thus spend more money on. Whoops?) and a few other dolls who i'll rehome. 

there was another barbie but I didn't bother to take her picture. She wasn't interesting enough for me to care. She also was missing a hand/arm. Another victim of the maybe dog.

Another "cheap" ebay auction was this girl. The hard to find and often quite bloody expensive Monster High "Love's Not Dead" Ghoulia. She came in a two pack with Slo Mo and a very different outfit. And stupid Marge Simpson hair that never translated well to actual doll form and just looked silly. 

This particular doll was sold simply as "Ghoulia Yelps" with no acknowledgement of which dolls she was, just that she was wearing Ghoul's Night Out's dress. 

I wanted this Ghoulia becuase of her distinctive makeup and extra dark blue hair. Most Ghoulias have a pale blue hair colour but this one and Geek Shriek both got this very dark blue instead. It's really pretty against the grey skin. Love's Not Dead Ghoulia also has this intense blue and pinkish redish? makeup and red highlights in her eyes along with very intense dark rings around both eyes. It's quite a dark look for a playline doll and I dig it. 

Her hair was designed to be done up in this stupid beehive updo which Mattel fucked up so it just looked like a sad noodle on top of her scalp, but this means her hair is quite thin and a rather odd length. That said, it's lovely and soft. The previous owner clearly rinsed the shit out of it to get all the gel/glue out because it feels really nice now. 

I ended up styling the front to make it look a little neater but it's still a bit awkward to me. It is parted properly at least, which is unusual for an intended updo, but it's quite ratty at the ends and i'm tempted to trim it to a more even length. I'm not sure though.

As mentioned her dress is Ghouls Night Out and I think the brain handbag might be as well. Her shoes are from one of the Inner Monster dolls I think. Her earrings i'm not sure about and i'm fairly certain the headband isn't MH at all, but it looks suitably "brainy" with that texture on it. I'm also fairly sure the glasses are bootleg. They're a much more flexable and shiny plastic than any legitimate Ghoulia glasses i've ever had. But they serve their purpose. 

Maybe at some point i'll be able to find her original outfit for a good price but i'll be honest, it's a fairly cheap looking outfit anyway. There's some cool bits to it, but Mattel's overuse of the same printable super shiny polyester just reads as "budget" to me now. And feels like a huge downgrade compared to dresses like this one which are made from multiple different fabrics with different weights and textures. 

She does have another issue though, one the seller didn't disclose. Both her arms have lost their stoppers on the elbow pegs. I'm not sure how that's happened, but it means both arms are loose. I got them to stay in place with my trusty nail acrylic but it's not perfect. 

Kinda frustrating but she was pretty cheap and this damn doll is really hard to find for a decent price. 

as she'll only ever be displayed it's not really a big deal.

Just a bit of a shame to see. 

Much as I wasn't a huge fan of Monster High's g2 "everyone gets a baby sister!" nonsense, Kelpie at least had a vuagely interesting design. But because g2 was cheap as fuck of course they didn't actually do her justice. 

Lagoona's younger sister from the g1 Great Scarrier Reef movie, the one that kinda kickstarted the whole "everyone gets baby siblings!" thing by giving Lagoona baby siblings and a whole marketable family. 

Anyway, 

movie Kelpie was super geeky with braces and glasses and very curly hair.

her actual doll? eeee not so much.

For a start her hair came in sort of wet looking deflated curls which I had to puff up and sew to her scalp to get to emulate her screen hair. She also came with only part of her screen outfit (no tights), sunglasses instead of glasses that barely fit her face anyway and a static body that's stuck in the most awkward pose. 

But still, I thought she had an interesting face and wanted to see what she looked like up close. I wasn't going to buy her new, but for fairly cheap secondhand I figured she was worth a punt. 

Her outfit is pretty boring. It's a swimsuit with a wierd bubble skirt thing over the top and a pair of kelp flipflops.

I sewed her glasses to her head as well <_< they kept falling off and it was pissing me off okay?

Anyway, Kelpie has a whole new body sculpt with molded scales on her arms and legs but curiously, not very webbed fingers. I don't fully understand why Mattel elected to mold the body in such an awkward stiff pose either. I mean, if you're gonna do a static pose at least make it look natural you know? the way she's holding her hands just looks so stiff and uncomfortable, I don't understand why they went that route when they could have had her arms straight with her hands in a far more relaxed state. It's bloody wierd.

She's purple, while her movie form was purple and teal splotched. She's actually a fairly similar tone to Twyla.

For some reason her ears are separate to her head. They're made of a harder plastic and there's a huge and very obvious seam where they're glued in. I don't understand this either. At first I thought it was because they were maybe too large for the mold to work but her ears aren't that much larger than Kjersti and surely it would have been easier to just make her ears smaller? It's not like they were really trying to be screen accurate with her, so why fuss about making her ears as large as possible if it means you have to do this ugly seam thing? 

The way her ears are affixed also I suspect is another reason her glasses don't stay on. That coupled with her very thick poofy hair and slightly too large glasses means they just have nothing to hook onto and simply fall off immediately. 

it's irritating. They don't fit her face anyway, they're too big, but come on Mattel! Why bother giving her glasses if she can't wear them properly?

She also has a headband but like all Mattel headbands, it's not actually long enough to tuck behind her ears or into her hair and thus also doesn't stay on her head. -_- 

this shouldn't be hard Mattel. Headbands shouldn't be hard.

Anyway, Kelpie's hair is blonde with teal in about a 50/50 blend. Lagoona uses these same colours though usually with less of the teal/blue bits. It's rooted to be in a ponytail... I think. it's kinda hard to tell with the mess of lank curls she's got going on. 

Here you can see what her doll was SUPPOSED to look like and how she was advertised. 

But this sad frizz is what we got instead. 

*sigh*

If I had the tools here i'd attempt to curl her hair properly but I don't have anything that I think will work for those tight curls and her hair is so frizzy anyway it likely won't look any better than it does right now. 

And it's a real pity because she had potential to be quite a fun looking little doll you know? Mattel wussed out in the execution and swung hard away from the afro. Cowards.

I really wanted to put Kelpie onto an articulated body but she's such an awkward size. She's about as small again to the little sister body as they are to the regular MH body. 

Her head is also really small and the neck hole is teensy tiny.

I've seen people put her head onto Twyla's body but for me I don't think it's going to work because her head is so much smaller than the other "little sisters" on those bodies. I don't want her looking pinheaded by comparison. 

but man those arms are so damn awkward. 

What the hell were they thinking with that pose? 

I think she's an interesting addition, but I do wish she had at least some posability in her arms, or you know.. wasn't stuck looking like she was doing an impression of a mummy with the stiff outstretched arms you know? 

Maybe i'll figure out something to do with her. For now she's just on my shelf. A curiosity to sate me.

Speaking of curiosities, I spotted a bundle on facebook marketplace that had these two girls in it. I recognised them as a short lived kickstarter line of dolls called Middle School Moguls (or IBesties... they changed the name at some point). 

I think they were sold in some US stores, but they weren't sold in the UK. That means the original owner either backed that kickstarter, or imported them from the US. Either way, quite a surprise to see them here. 

These dolls were made back in 2016, yet another of those "get girls into STEM by making dolls!" lines. You know those aspirational doll lines that tend to appeal more to parents than actual kids and disappear before the year is out?

yeah. Those.

But I find those flash in a pan lines facinating. They're a snapshot of a trend or issue and curious bits of toy history. 

IBesties apparently lives on as a nickolodeon series, but the dolls are long gone. 

The dolls apparently came with books too, which i'd have been curious to see but alas, those are lost to time as well. The whole shtick of this line appears to be very #girlboss with a big push for CEO and leadership positions. So... not so much STEM, more... business. 

Now I mean, i'm rather of the attitude that CEO is a job that flat out shouldn't bloody exist in most cases so I don't much care about encouraging girls into the role but eh. Politics aside, let's look at the actual dolls.

I believe this girl is called Izzy. She's described as a "digital diva" on the kickstarter but I don't know what that means. I did a little more digging and the vibe i'm getting is that she's an "influencer". She likes to make hashtags and make stuff go viral. Yeah, because there's a special button you press for that. Don't you know? The "make viral" button? God don't you know anything about the internet? *scoff* 

I always find it bloody painful watching middle aged people try to get teen culture, it always comes off as super cringy and silly. It's especially glaring when you have people who know nothing about the internet try to make influencer characters. It's just.... yeah that's not how any of this works. 

"invent new hashtags" would do jack shit because nobody else would be using them so you wouldn't get any hits. 

Please hire younger people if you insist upon doing internet jargon shit. I'm begging you as an old fogie myself, stop this. It's embarrassing. 

Anyway, Izzy comes wearing a cotton tee with a moustache and glasses on and a pair of leggings with a houndstooth pattern. Her shoes are cute pink hightop sneakers. 

She has no socks but according to online should have originally come with a pair of glasses. She did come with her knitted hat, it's very very cute.  

The clothing pieces are all nicely finished and honestly look fine. The leggings are made of stretchy polyester stuff and the tee feels like an actual teeshirt. It fastens at the back with velcro. Both pieces are easy to get on and off despite the doll's big hands. 

I do feel like she should either have a longer tee or should be wearing something... else over the leggings. Leggings on their own always make me think you forgot to finish getting dressed lol. 

Her hair is a really pretty shade of purple but it's some sort of mediocre nylon that's kinda plasticky and frizzy.

The dolls are chunky with a pronouced pot belly and a pear shaped torso. The heads are enormous. Alongside Barbie they look very small but they're 11 inches tall (okay half of that is head but you know...)

They're actually closer to Rainbow High in terms of proportions. Though even Rainbow High doesn't have such massive heads.

Their jointing is... wierd. The head can only move side to side, there's no up/down motion at all so she can't look up or down or cock her head to the side. I always find this especially frustrating with big headed dolls. Like come on, how hard is it to make it so the doll can tilt their head?

Her arms have a shoulder joint and an elbow joint but no wrist joint. The elbow joint doesn't even manage 90 degrees, making it fucking pointless imo. 

Also for some reason one of her hands is molded into this splayed pose which looks awkward no matter what you do. Why? What was the purpose of this? I don't get it. 

She can't even sit properly. Not only will her knees not bend the 90 degrees neccisary for this to look natural, her butt/hip shape is such that she rocks backward on it and then the weight of her oversized head tips the tentative balance and the whole doll falls backward. She can ALMOST support herself with one hand, but it results in a very awkward drunken sort of sitting pose that's not exactly condusive to play.
 

 (undignified pose lol)

Her legs are especially wierd. The joints at the hips are very very loose and far too mobile. They twist all the way around and yet her knees can barely bend at all. In fact, I think they bend more forward than they do backward at the knee. Wtf? Explain that. 

Her ankles have a rotational joint which means you can spin her foot around in a circle, but it cannot be pointed. I don't understand this joint, it serves no clear purpose other than to make it so her legs are even more annoying to try to get oriented for photos. Her hips spin, her knees slip around and her ankle also spins so it's frustrating to try to get all three pieces to line up so her leg is actually straight. 

I also don't understand why they did ankle spinning but made her hands static. What kind of priority is that? 

Generally the purpose of an ankle joint is to allow the foot to be pointed so that tight trousers and things can be put onto the doll. Flat immovable feet limit what sort of clothing you can put on the doll because tighter or thicker fabric won't pull over the foot. Spinning feet adds nothing you can't get from the knee joint being able to rotate in the first place. 

I think this is an example of a company adding joints for the sake of adding joints without actually understanding the purpose of or the design of said joints. 

Only her shoulder joints work the way I would expect them to work. All the rest are either far too mobile and floppy, or barely move at all. It's bizarre. It's like someone looked at an articulated doll and copied it without ever actually handling it or studying those joints. 

And I get that this company were not experienced with making dolls but you'd think they'd do some research there or I dunno, hire someone who knew this shit? 

Kinda meh joints are one thing, but outright baffling ones like these? That's a level beyond the typical "it'll do" of most doll designs and delves right into "we have no idea what joints are but we're gonna fake it anyway."

The doll can legitimately barely stand up half the time because of how floppy her hips are. And it's not because she's old, it's because the joint is designed so shittily. 

Anyway, put simply, her jointing sucks.

But the similar size to Rainbow High here got me thinking. Can they wear one another's clothing?

I figured the Rainbow High doll would be able to fit into the IBestie clothes pretty easily because the tee is quite generously sized and the leggings are stretchy. I didn't expect the Rainbow High clothing to fit the IBestie as well as it did. 

now granted, things sit higher on the IBestie body and her lack of any real bust changes how tops sit, but ultimately, the stuff fits.

Even the shoes aren't that much too short, the bigger problem is the heel on them because the IBestie foot can't point.

So i tried some other RH stuff. This stiffer top was a little harder to fasten but DID do so. The skirt I found that if you used the integral panties/strap thing that stops the skirt from rotating on the doll the waistband sits too low and the skirt won't fasten. But if you ignore it and put the skirt on without using the strap, it sits higher than on a rainbow high doll, but still looks correct and fastens fine.

The flat shoes however confirmed to me that the RH shoes are indeed slightly too short. They otherwise fit fine, but the toes overlap the ends. You might be able to ram her feet into boots with a little force as the fit is only slightly off, but i'd be more inclined to just use the IBestie shoes on RH rather than the other way around. 

Anyway,

the other girl was called McKenna, which is the most mid 2000s name I could think of holy crap. But then it was changed to the equally mid 2000s "McKinley" (what was it about the 2000s and giving girls surnames for first names? It was a big trend. Has it died yet? I think it has. All the girls in my younger kids' school have old lady names instead) 

Anyway, McWhatever is the "business" girl who supposedly can turn ANY idea into a business "success" 

Lol. 

Pretty sure that's hyperbole. I could come up with a load of stuff that would make terrible business ideas. Not all ideas are good ideas Mc whatever your name is. Some ideas... are shit.

She likes Math and Cheerleading which I actually... kinda like as a combo. Cheerleading, despite being a hugely athletic sport is generally seen as very girly as well as something "popular" kids engage in while Math is seen as being very nerdy, especially for a girl and you know, nerds are never popular. 

so having her into both makes for an interesting contrast and makes her feel a little less like a stereotype. It presents a tiny glimpse of character. Though I have to wonder how she has time for cheerleading AND study AND running her countless "no idea is a bad idea" businesses. 

is it one of those "d'aaw" fake businesses little kids have where they like.. try to sell rocks to neighbours or do chores for pocket money? 

what's interesting is that McKeeble here has with two words managed to make me substantially more interested in her as a character than Izzy's bland "I like making hashtags and trending videos. I know internet words wheeeeee" thing. 

Izzy feels very one note. 

But eh. 

whatever. 

 

 

McWhoosywhatzit wears a pink drop waisted t-shirt dress... thing... over a pair of mismatched footed leggings with a pair of black high top sneakers that use the same mold as Izzy's. She also has a tie which likes to spin around her neck which is really annoying. 

She was supposed to come with a black jacket too but this girl lost hers. 

She has blonde hair with pink streaks and like Izzy's hair, it's frizzy and kinda a pain in the arse.

She has a big fabric bow which I like. It's plastic stapled to her head though so i'm not sure it'll stay on if I snip those and I don't want to find out. 

Her face paint is like Izzy's with these dramatic sharp lashes, but McNackPadyWack has hers painted in brown. I assume it's to look more like blonde lashes but I find that without any dark lines it makes her eyes look washed out or unfinished. 

She also has scattered freckles that are higher on one cheek than the other. 

Both dolls use the same face mold which has a kinda cute profile, though it's also pretty alien. The head is elongated with a receeding brow and strangely placed, very detail lacking ears. 

go figure. 

Cute nose though. 

Now I mean, these dolls are cute and interesting. But they suffer from a lot of the same problems all these small startups have. The end product ends up very expensive due to overheads, isn't as refined as it should perhaps be and often cheaps out on quite important elements to keep costs down. In this case I feel like forgoing the included book and opting for a better hair fibre would have made a HUGE difference. These dolls have such HUGE heads and as a result, so much hair, that it being an annoying plasticky frizzy mess is all the more obvious. 

It's not the worst hair i've ever handled, but it's still pretty annoying and will require work to get to look decent.

Even looking back at owner photos at launch, the doll's hair looks frazzled at the ends and coarse. this isn't a case of "it's old doll hair", it was never good hair to begin with.

And I don't mean to shit all over small companies who are trying to do something new. I love these sorts of lines because of the passion behind them. I just wish that they could get better help to make a product that passion deserves. 

The Ibesties have extremely nicely made clothing (Izzy's hat is particularly gorgeous), their shoes are decent and I can see what they were going for with the stylised bodies and oversized heads, but the dolls are let down but bad engineering, strange choices in regards to that inexplicable splayed hand and cheap hair. 

People pay over the odds for these sorts of product because they believe in the message, but a message isn't enough. There's no point in a doll that a child won't play with and so many of these "dolls with a messsage/purpose" fall into the trap of marketing to adults, not the children for whom the toy is intended. 

A doll that can barely sit down and who's hair frizzes up the moment you touch it with a brush is NOT going to be a fun doll to play with. I'm sorry but it just isn't. You can add as many books or cutesy hashtags as you like, but ultimately if a kid doesn't feel drawn to the doll as a doll, you've failed in your mission. 

The IBesties are quite cute, in their wierd alien sort of way and they're definitely chunky enough to feel solid and the joints are pretty solid, but they're also clunky and difficult to pose. They often won't stand on their own, the wierd splayed hand looks perpetually awkward and in some poses, broken, and the inability to position the head I find quite limiting. I don't mean from a taking photos perspective either,  I mean I want the doll to be able to look DOWN at her laptop or her lunch or something you know? Almost all playline dolls can look up and down, not being able to do it is just wierd. (remember how Rainbow High couldn't and then MGA fixed it because people were all wtf?)

I also can't help but wonder if their size is, itself, an issue. I have tiny hands and I found holding these dolls and playing around with them quite awkward due to their massive heads and very chunky bodies. I wonder if scaling them down would have been advantageous there. 

I remember reading Arklu talking about Lottie dolls and their decision to make them as small as they did being to do with scaling them to a child's hands. It's not something you often think about but larger dolls are awkward and having watched my own kids play, I have to admit, they tend to opt for the smaller toys by preference. 

Given the limited expertise of the company I have to wonder if small little figures with limited shoulder and hip joints would have been a more successful product than attempting to create a fully jointed fashion doll. Kids DO still play with dolls, but are those dolls fashion dolls? Or are we talking anything vuagely humanoid that they can create stories with? (Hey, when I was a kid we played out elaborate soap operas with littlest pet shop animals or paper dolls lol.) 

I feel like this line could have been a lot better than it was, if only the company had a decent mentor or someone to just... help them iron out the rough bits. 

But that they managed a successful kickstarter and got their product into stores at all is damn impressive. And supposedly there's a new tv show in the works based on this property as well, so good on them. They created something and they got it out there, and that is, in itself, commendable. 

I also wanted to see if I could get ol McDonald's eyes to not look quite as wierd so I added some darker colour around the eyes themselves. 

it looks a lot better irl than in photos. But it gives her eyes more depth and makes them look well... finished. 

And as I was writing this, wouldn't you know it, I got a stock alert for Howliday Draculaura.

they MIGHT get stock in March.

yes... MARCH. 

Until then, I may be relying on American buddies to help me out with dolls. Because damn the UK releases are SLOW and SHIT.

it's pissing me off. 

and it's not helping my poor wallet or my storage space for me to keep grump buying random bundles lol. 

Still, I got some fun stuff outta this lot. 

Hope you enjoyed my rambling.