In my defence, it IS the school holidays....

 At least that's my excuse and i'm sticking to it lol. 

in all honesty, the real reason i'm so sporadic in posting is purely down to energy levels. 

I've learned that because my energy is so low most of the time, buying dolls mint in box actually tends to result in them sitting in a pile never getting opened. Opening the doll is an extra hurdle for me, it takes time and it takes energy snipping all those stupid little plastic ties and tape and all that crap. And I just don't want to.

On top of that, I have no space to display new stuff anyway so there's this whole "well they're safer in their box" attitude too. 

I NEED to do a massive declutter but that ALSO takes energy I just don't have. 

it's like this vicious cycle. I buy stuff, then I have to make space for stuff, but I don't have energy to do that, so stuff sits in a box in the corner collecting dust and making me feel bad. 

Dum de dum. 

But what actually does help me a lot is buying secondhand dolls, because then I don't have to debox them. They arrive, I can have instant gratification and then they go in the pile. 

Problem is, they're addictive. You KNOW I love me a bargain bundle after all. 

But anyway, let me share at least SOME of the stuff i've obtained over the past few months of radio silence. 

Most of my stuff is still in boxes waiting for me to go on a mad deboxing spree but that's not likely to happen for a while. 

so in the meantime, here's the other stuff.

 

I've wanted Shadow High Karla for a while now, not for the doll, specifically for her outfit. I really like her outfit. But I wasn't sure about the doll, she always looked too washed out for my tastes. I found a tlc one with her hair cut but her complete outfit for pretty cheap so I snagged her expecting to rehome the doll herself but once I had her in hand I couldn't help but get the itch to tweak her facepaint and see if I could better connect with her. 

Her hair was cut to shoulder length so I neatened it up and put it into half pigtails which I thought looked cute. She got black lips and then black makeup to attempt to make her look a bit less washed out. I considered messing with her eyebrows but I think the slightly strange look she has going on kinda works for her gothy alternative vibe.

Her skin tone surprised me too. I thought she was light pink but she's actually a sort of pinky grey? I'd call it grey honestly but her pink hair tends to pick out the pink undertone making her look more pink toned. I suspect with a different hair colour she'd look more grey. It's a really strange colour and I rather appreciate that. 

Rainbow High needs more black clothes. Just sayin... 

Monster High g3 has some really nice dolls, but sadly the boys are NOT so great. I feel like someone at Mattel just really hates boy dolls because while the base sculpts are really nice, the factory paint, especially the way they're doing eyes, is just vile. And the less said about the really shit clothes the better I think. 

Heath's outfit and weird hexagonal eyes put me off buying him but I appreciated his brighter orangey yelly and the fire mohawk thing they had going on with him. I picked this one up for cheap secondhand and got to work trying to fix that awful eyes. I ended up completely repainting the iris too to be more like his g1 doll because I found they looked a bit too off otherwise. I also ended up repainting his lips because they really did look too much like lipstick to me.

As for his clothes, well, I hated his matchy hoodie/short combo but some of the concept art for him featured red shorts and shoes. I happened to have some red shorts from g1's create a monster packs and while they're slightly tight, they're good enough. His shoes are from a OMG boy and came to me badly stained with felt pens. I painted them red. 

I DO like his sculpt, he has a really cute face and I think the transparent flame is really cool. It GLOWS when light hits it just right, which is very very neat. (worth noting, it appears to be made of completely clear plastic and then airbrushed orange. So be very careful with acetone near it.) 

 

Clawd also suffered badly from Mattel's current "we don't know how to actually paint boy eyes" derp. He looked absolutely startled, like a deer in headlights empty stare. It was extremely uncomfortable. 

They also for some reason decided that despite his animated version having facial hair, his doll wouldn't. Why? 

The unstyled hair was bad too. it didn't sit well and just poofed out everywhere. It was nothing LIKE the afro it was meant to be. Poor guy needed a LOT of work to get him looking even halfway okay.

under all that shit there's a really nice sculpt, but yet again Mattel went "fuck the boy dolls" and sabotaged it. 

With Clawd I removed his dog nose (which was misprinted anyway), narrowed and reshaped his eyes, enlarged his irises, slightly reshaped his eyebrows and added more "shagginess" to them so they didn't look quite so perfectly sculpted, added his facial hair and tied his hair into a forward sort of ponytail which helped to get it UP and out of his face and gave it actual structure. 

I'm still not 100% sold on him, his eyes still look "off" to me but he's so much better than he was and short of completely repainting him (which I don't have the skill to do) it's very much a "it'll do" 

but yeah. I suspect we won't see more boys from g3 because Mattel genuinely seem to hate them. 

I don't understand why. But it's the only explanation I have for why they keep making their eyes SO UGLY.

When the Mowalola Bratz dolls came out I appreciated that they were so unique and bizarre. But they were expensive so I ended up only getting Jade. I've regretted that ever since but neither remained in stock in the UK long and don't appear to have ever restocked after their initial sellout run. So when I found these heads being sold on Aliexpress for about £10 I knew I wanted one. 

the question then was however, what body? Did I buy one of the repro campfire Felicia's from Amazon? Or did I have something else that would be the right skintone? 

I'd already tried a Bratz head onto an LOL OMG body and found I really liked the proportions so I went digging through my OMGs and found Agent Soul who I predicted was likely a very similar skintone. 

As it turned out, the match is near exact. Felicia's head is a little more ashy but it's as good as most body to head matches in dolls ever are without them being hybrids. I also vastly prefer this body shape to the bizarre body deluxe Bratz are currently using. I really hate those overlong disproportionate arms. They look awful. I'm also not too fond of the original Bratz torso because it's got such a drastically cinched waist that clothing doesn't quite drape right on it. The 2010 body shape looked much much nicer in the same clothing. But the OMG body has the distinct advantage of having really damn nice hips and legs. <_< Ahem. I do like me some shapely hips and legs. 

Felicia's hair is ridiculously long and this is because her doll would have been wearing insanely high platforms. I don't have any crazy platforms that fit the OMG body but I just haven't worked up the courage to trim her hair shorter. Usually i'm not a big fan of overlong hair on dolls but for the Mowalola dolls, they're so ridiculously over the top them having rapunzel hair sort of makes sense in my mind. I dunno. 

I wouldn't call this doll "pretty", but I absolutely adore her for her strangeness. The fluro yellow hair, the buck teeth, the spikey makeup. She's glorious. We will never get another doll like this, she and Mowalola Jade are truly unique and extremely distinctive. They are, as far as i'm concerned, the best collab doll Bratz has done. The others, while several are really nice, are very much just "a pretty regular looking bratz doll wearing designer clothes" while the Mowalola dolls have completely unique screenings to go with those funky clothes.

Another Bargain bundle. This group came to me nude except Victoria, who for some reason was fully dressed in a mishmash of her factory look and some OMG bits. 

Her hair has been restyled and trimmed too I think. 

She's SO cute. I adore her. 

Glitch is a doll I loved the base doll of but hated the clothing. Those stupid pant shoes offend me deeply. They really piss me off with their absolute impracticality and how dumb they look. Yes, I have strong feelings about pant shoes okay? 

Natasha was another doll a bit like Karla where I wasn't sure I liked her because she looked so washed out. But over time I have warmed a bit to her stark whiteness. But I wanted more contrast with mine, so I painted over her grey lips with a nice deep black. It was a tiny little change but I think it really elevates her. 

Again, I WISH there were more black Rainbow High pieces readily available. Natasha will look AMAZING in black. 

 Mermaze was another doll line I was inclined to just pass on but I got curious and she was really cheap. Mostly I wanted to steal her clothes for other dolls because they were really nicely made and very detailed. 

The inset eyes though.... what happened MGA? MGA has a track record of doing really gorgeous inset eyes on dolls, stretching way back to Moxie Teenz. So the starey fish eyes of the Mermaze dolls is a rare misstep on that front and feels a lot like the budget ran out right at the final stretch. 

There's a lot to like about Mermaze. Their hairstyles are amazingly complex, their makeup is really detailed, their face sculpts are lovely and they have really beautifully sculpted bodies and hands. 

But they also suffer a lot from cost cuts. Their hair fiber is BAD. I  ended up with three of them in this bundle and each have issues in their own way. 

Kishiko here has hair that feels like WOOL. I honestly don't know what the hell it is, but it feels like brushed out yarn. It's strangely soft but also frizzy and cotton-wool like. I don't understand it. 

Riviera, the rocker chick, has frizzy hair that sheds like crazy and comes out in huge chunks. 

And Harmonique, arguably the one with the best hair, suffers badly from frizz too. The light pink the majority of her hair is is quite soft, but the darker pink that frames her face feels crunchy and frazzled and unpleasant. 

so hmmmm. 

NONE of them have inset eyes that don't look seriously off and creepy. 

And I really don't understand their tails. Why are their tails not organic looking? They have like, stitches and seams and stuff indicating that their tails aren't part of their actual bodies, so why can't they be removed? 

A LOT of people have expressed a major desire for legs for their Memaze dolls. 

I tried a few bodies with mine but most didn't work great. The dolls have quite long heads which messed with proportions in strange ways. 

In the end, Kishiko got a Barbie Made to Move body that came in another bundle. I pulled the hands off and replaced them with the Mermaze hands which I felt were far more attractive but also a little more proportionate anyway. 

Barbie's hands and feet bug the shit out of me for how small they are. 

The proportions are... okay. And I do like that she can now pose and wear a large assortment of clothing. Right now she's rocking a Disney ILY outfit that was on clearance and matches her hair colours pretty nice. 

The final most extreme thing I did with Kishiko was her eyes. There was no learning to love those eyes for me. So I took a page from a couple of other collector's books and painted over them. First I sanded the heck out of the surface so the paint had something to adhere to, then I went over it all with paint. 

I gave her a side glance because I prefer side glancing dolls and felt it made her look a little more alive and her eyes are actually a slightly metallic copper colour which is fun. 

Now, I couldn't completely remove the seam of the eye where the iris is inserted into the sclera base so there's a line you can make out under the paint if you look closely. The iris also bulges a little for some reason, which I also couldn't sand down with the eyes still in the doll. 

Were I to do it again, I might be inclined to remove the eyes completely, make new smooth spheres out of epoxy and stick those in instead. 

But that's a project for future me, who has energy and motivation. 

As it stands, i'm not totally jazzed about Mermaze and certainly would never have paid full price for them, but I did get some cool outfit pieces from this bundle and some nice jewellery pieces if nothing else. 

I'd love to figure out a way to give the actual Mermaze torso legs but it's strange and flat just below the naval so you'd have to cut it at the waist and graft a whole lower body on which I just don't want to tackle. That sort of hybridizing is way beyond my skill set. 

 I do however have some OMG Fierce dolls here who's body proportions are pretty close to the Mermaze ones, so they might make a decent substitute. 

Again, that's a project for future me, who has energy and motivation. 

Here's another image of Kishiko before I rebodied her and took her stupid hair horn thing out. 

You can see how "crunchy" the paint on her eyes looks. That's because the surface was rough and smoothing it down was impossible with such teensy little eyes and sandpaper. 

I really do think a better option is the smooth epoxy spheres instead of trying to paint over the existing eyes. 

Whip those suckers outta there!

 What'd I do with the Barbie hands? Welll... it turns out those actually fit the sockets of old 70s Ballerina Sindy doll arms... <_< I had a Sindy who'd long lost her hands (common with the original Ballerinas, before they gave them hinged wrists) and was too stingy to buy reproduction ones off Etsy (they're really nicely made and i've bought them before but i'm CHEAP okay?) 

Sadly I don't think I snapped a picture of her with her new Barbie hands before I put her away safe. 

DOH.

They aren't nearly as nice as Sindy hands, Barbie hands are so.... expressionless and generic. But they're hands, which is better than no hands. 

Quite some time ago I got a bundle of vintage dolls that included a few Sindy clones in fairly sorry states. 

this particular girl has a gorgeous head of hair but her lips were chipped and needed repainting and she has a scuff across her cheek which is annoyingly visible in some angles and lights.

 

 

But what's especially interesting to me about this girl is that she's a bit of a frankendoll. Her head is quite clearly a Sindy inspired face, but unlike Sindy dolls of the era, her head and neck aren't one piece. But also unlike other dolls of the era, her head is also... not a socket. It's a real bodge job really, where the bulge of her neck piece connects to the neck of the torso and creates a very ugly and very obvious disconnected seam. Hence the turtleneck. 

Also someone glued some panties to her. Lol. 

Big plastic tube for a neck piece. This looks like a shit version of what Barbies and similar dolls of the era used. They had either a flat disk or a cone shaped piece but this one starts as a cone then just... deteriorates into a tube blob. 

I'm assuming they took a cast of another doll and just didn't bother refining this piece or trimming the excess. 

Here she is without the glued on panties. 

 

Her torso and arms appear to be Barbie, or barbie-like but her arms are elastic strung rather than actually socketed into the torso... what?

and then her legs are chunky Sindy-like hollow plastic legs. 

so... what? 

Also curious is that unlike a lot of VERY cheap clones, her plastic isn't actually that bad. It's a little squishy but alongside other dolls of the era, especially dolls like Sindy herself, it's not too bad. Her torso and arms are okay, her legs have very obvious seams and are hollow but  She doesn't feel like she'll immediately cave in if you breathe on her, unlike SOME clones. 

I finally got around to digging her out and fixing her paint chips and getting her some nice clothes and I think she's adorable. 

She fits 60s Sindy stuff fairly well though of course, has a smaller waist than Sindy does. She'd probably fit Barbie tops beautifully but the legs are probably too chunky for Barbie pants. 

She fits Sindy shoes perfectly too, like a lot of Sindy clones she has indents in the top of her foot where her original sandal straps would have sat and like a lot of clones, she has holes forming in her heels from wear and tear on the hollow plastic. 

I had two dolls with this body, but different heads. Both had the elasticated arms and strange hybrid parts. I don't seem to have photos sadly. the other one didn't have such a pretty face as far as I recall. 

 

 

Speaking of clones, these two fake Blythes came from Aliexpress. I've mentioned before I think that i'm no big fan of Blythe herself. Her big shiny head and no eyebrows and that teensy little licca chan body just really put me off. 

But there's a bunch of customised ones that I think are exceptionally cute. 

I tried my hand at carving a couple of fake face plates a while back and it was fun but also kinda scary. 

 

Now interestingly, one of the many fake Blythe-like doll makers in China have started to make face plates that look a LOT like the work of these artists who carve their Blythes. 

 

There's a bunch of different faces now. Open mouths with teeth, pouty lips, half parted lips and all that fun stuff. 

These two have the "pouty" face which has a more defined filtrum and nice big downcast lips vs an actual Blythe. They also have matte faces made of some sort of very hard very smooth plastic and what I think are knockoff Azone bodies with interchangeable hand pieces. And EYEBROWS! what a difference eyebrows make huh? 

I ended up with two because I couldn't decide which wig I preferred. <_< ahem.

 

they're quite well made, i'll give them that. They're hefty and well painted and their hair is really soft. 

They cannot look up and down, but I don't think Blythe can either. The Azone clone body has a lot of joints but the knees are quite weak and prone to twisting awkwardly and the elbows can't really bend much. The position both girl's bent arms are in is the limit of that elbow. I don't know if the real Azone body is maybe better engineered?

 

These girls cost about £15 from Aliexpress which was a bargain honestly. They came nude but with extra hands which is fun. I gave one girl the "ballet" hands and the other has one of her regular hands and a clenched one. 

I like the variation. 

Though I do wish more of the hands were in neutral poses, the vast majority are pulling gestures like peace signs which is a bit too specific for me. 

 

I don't know what to call these girls, because they are NOT Blythe dolls. They're clones, but they're also not QUITE clones either because their heads are unique to them (probably modified FROM a legit Blythe head though right?) and their bodies are Azone copies, not Blythe. 

so... um? 

 

It might be blasphemy to admit I like them better than legit Blythes though. I think their faces are substantially sweeter and less off putting. 

 

But yeah, more clones for the clone army. Hahahah. I find clone dolls fascinating, especially when they diverge from the original doll a little bit and aren't just a cheaper carbon copy.

MORE bargain Rainbow High dolls. 

These girls were actually two separate purchases. Ayesha came with a bundle of clothing while the other three came together. 

Ayesha did have her original outfit (without shoes or accessories) but it wasn't to my taste. Her hair isn't great either, it's a bit frazzled in parts. I curled it using paper straws which gave it a soft bounce which I think helps disguise some of the more ratty fibre but also just looks prettier to me. I love curls. 

She's wearing mostly LOL stuff and some Monster High g3 shoes because I didn't have any Rainbow High ones in the right colour. 

We ALSO need more black SHOES for RH. 

Aeyesha, incidentally, matches Felicia's skintone really well. I LOVE that MGA are using this gorgeous deep brown for more and more dolls. 

Roxy has been on my wishlist for ages, but there was no way I was paying full price for her and even on clearance, I still hesitated. I never liked her outfit because again, not my taste. I just don't like glam gowns. But I always thought she had a gorgeous face. 

Wierdly, she has jointed ankles but they aren't properly jointed. They twist but they can't point. So they're a lot like the LOL OMG Fierce doll ankles. I wonder why they did that when her feet appear to be exactly the same as the other Rainbow High dolls anyway? I mean what does it add? 

She and Aeyesha both have sculpted rings on their hands which are really pretty. 

I put Roxy into Willow's outfit because the purple looks lovely on her. Her hair is shot with purples and pinks along with tinsel which makes it feel kinda crunchy which i'm not too jazzed about but eh. She's still stunning. 

Harper came with most of her stuff and she's also been on my wishlist for a while. 

this one seems to have had a hair cut because all the Harpers i've seen have ankle length hair. But this length matches her artwork better so maybe that's why it was cut by her previous owner? I tried to reinstate the beachy waves but it didn't work too great. 

Her shoes are a pain in the arse to get on and lace up. 

Finally the Colour and Create girl. She was another wishlist doll for me. We only got this ONE colour and create wave 1 doll here in the UK and I don't understand WHY. It's super weird. 

but I love her face, she has smaller eyes which I think gives her a really sweet appearance and I dig the stark white hair. 

She actually came with her tee and it was covered in the marker pens. I wasn't sure it would wash out but it came out immediately when I swished it in hot water. So that's really good to know.

I mentioned I had a few OMG Fierce dolls laying around. I grabbed this Swags and two others for really cheap. She had most of her original outfit but i'm not a huge fan of it. It's really well made, but it's just a bit weird. So I redressed her in bits from the other two. 

I already own Diva and Bee, so the extra ones are in my body donor stash now. 

I love Swag's hair. It's so fun. 

And that's about all the dolls laying around my desk right now. Least, the ones that are presentable. There's several who need reroots and other work but again, energy.... 

A random post today, but you know, it's better than nothing isn't it? 

Take care everyone. Now I sleep.