Holly Hobbie fashion packs from 2006

 Old dead stock fascinates me, where'd it come from? How did it end up here? What even IS it in the first place? 

And for the past year or so i've been seeing these Holly Hobbie fashion packs on Ebay and Vinted etc selling for very very little. 

So I got curious, because I mean, I wasn't even aware Holly Hobbie HAD been rebooted at some point. 

But let's start from the beginning shall we? 

So, Holly Hobbie was an American Greetings character, one of the many cute little illustrations used on greeting cards in the 60s and onwards. (you probably know their other popular characters like Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears) Holly Hobbie (herself named after her creator) started appearing on cards in 1967 and by the 70s was extremely popular. A cute little girl in a bonnet and patchwork dress who loved cats and flowers, she was twee and she was adorable and very very marketable. 

So by the 70s American Greetings started looking at ways to merchandise their properties and in 1975 Knickerbocker toys started making Holly Hobbie rag dolls. 

They were very very successful. 

1975 Holly Hobbie doll. Picture from WorldCollectors.net

During the late 80s and 90s Tomy produced Holly dolls and Knickerbocker started making vinyl headed versions. 

curiously, outside of America she really doesn't seem to have gained that same cult status as her fellow American Greetings characters. I wonder if her very old Americana vibe is why she never quite ended up as iconic outside the US. Apparently she was very popular in the UK in the 70s, but for whatever reason she didn't hang around like her siblings did. 

Go figure.

And it's not like the UK didn't have a bunch of similar dolls. Pedigree's Sarah Kay were effectively the British equivalent (despite that artist being Australian I think) in that she was a greeting card character first and then became a doll and whole franchise. And like Holly Hobbie, she was very twee and wore a bonnet and old fashioned clothing. 

In fact, 

Here's Holly

 And here's Sarah.

 

So uh... yeah. 

 

Both  had ragdolls and later on vinyl headed soft bodied dolls. 

Both featured on hundreds of items of merch including tea sets, plates, cards, bedding, even little chintzy figurines and so on. 

But anyway, 

whatever the case, Holly Hobbie as a brand doesn't seem to have the same PULL here in the Uk which is probably why the rebooted 2006 line doesn't look to have made much, if any, splash here.

though apparently the animated show the dolls are from DID air on CBBC here, with an English accented dub lol. Why bother? Who the heck knows. 

Anyway, 

the 2006 reboot dolls were made by Mattel, who worked a lot with American Greetings over the years. 

The line featured 3 dolls. Holly, Carrie and Amy

The original Holly Hobbie dolls seem to have also featured 3 girls named Holly, Carrie and Amy. 

The "lore" is that these girls are the great granddaughters of the originals. 

It looks like Amy is the green one while Carrie is the one in red. 

But the reboot their colours are the opposite way around with Carrie in green and Amy in red. 

Just something curious I noticed. 

 

anyway, the dolls.

They are about 12 inches tall with massive feet and big heads with oddly proportioned faces and widely spaced eyes. They remind me a lot of Strawberry Shortcake actually, which makes sense. 

 

This one is Carrie. She's the cutest of the lot I think with her closed mouth smile and big brown eyes. She still has a strangely proportioned face with the high and wide spaced eyes and eyebrows disappearing into her hair line, but she doesn't freak me out the same way Holly does. 

Holly has this MASSIVE molded grin that I find extremely disconcerting.
 

Also worth noting, the dolls aren't wearing the same clothes as they are in their animated versions which is kinda weird. 

They aren't even sticking to a colour theme it seems with Holly AND Amy both wearing purple.

I couldn't find a stock image for Amy. She has a smaller closed mouth smile like Carrie and the larger eyes. 

All the dolls in this first lineup come with a gimmick of some sort. 

Amy's is tie dye colour change. Carrie's are stickers and Holly herself has beads.

this theme continues into their respective fashion packs. 

 Which is what I was actually supposed to be talking about

 

 But first I wanted to share what their vinyl headed older dolls looked like.

 The first ones are genuinely scary to me with teensy tiny eyes and next to no detail to their features. 

the smaller ones are a bit cuter but still very abbreviated in their faces. 

so the wide spaced strangely small for their head is just a thing with these dolls. Mattel was sticking to the aesthetic there at least. 

I got all three fashion packs for around £3 per pack which is silly money really. I didn't want to pay a lot though because I had no idea what these might fit having never seen the dolls in person before.

Like their regular dolls the fashion packs follow the same gimmick theme. One is tie dye colour change, one is beads and one is stickers.

They're nicely presented boxes with a little card bow on the top and a gingham sort of pattern on things. 

The box is however absolutely awful to open. 

blister packs like this usually are a pain but I can't say if it's the 18 year old glue or Mattel just really didn't want you getting into it, but damn these were hard to get into. 

Once you battle the cardboard and glue you get two plastic layers. One that holds the beads and another that holds the clothing, which is sewn to the plastic. 

I prefer when doll clothes are sewn to the box rather than plastic tabbed, it's far easier to snip the threads. However, I do wish they hadn't sewn it quite so excessively because it leaves several holes in the material.

The bead outfit features a top, skirt and a jacket, a fabric bag and a pair of plastic shoes. 

While the skirt and top aren't hemmed, they're made from some sort of soft fuzzy material that's laser cut to shape. I don't know what it is but the material seems to be pretty decent and fray resistant anyway. 

The skirt has a little sash of purple crepe-like fabric sewn to it and blue ribbons. 

The jacket is made of a slightly shiny material and has a lot of ribbons with little beads clipped to it. 

the bag is made of the same fuzzy material as the top and skirt. It would open if not for the beads, the ribbons lace through a little hole and keep it shut.

The clothes fit this vintage Estrella Suzi pretty well but of course the top is designed for a doll with a flat chest so it sticks out a bit oddly on a doll with a bust. 

I didn't bother with the extra beads but it looks like they actually clip on rather than slide on. So.. are they really beads? or clips? 

On Barbie the fit is even worse. It's too short and it sticks out oddly. 

The skirt is too wide in the hips but the jacket fits really nicely on the Barbie body. 

The Rainbow High body works a bit better. The skirt ends up knee length on the shorter body but fits pretty well. 

the top is a little big but it doesn't jut out like it did on the other dolls and the jacket, like on the Barbie, fits really nicely. 

I do feel like the skirt and top together is a bit much though. There's just a bit too much going on around the waist area. 

 It works better with the simpler skirt from the tie dye set. 

The tie dye set has fewer pieces than the bead set, featuring only two clothing items, one bag, one pair of shoes and some stamps. 

I assume the gimmick took the budget for an extra jacket piece. 

The skirt is made from some sort of nylon material that's waterproof but it doesn't change colour or anything. It's just a bit rustly and very basic but it's okay. 

the top is made from some sort of synthetic that has this colour change gimmick and it feels slightly sticky to touch, which isn't pleasant. Whatever it's coated in to make it do the colour thing leaves it feeling... odd. Like the skirt it's a stiff rustly fabric too, which is a pity because I quite like the shape of the garment and feel like if it had been made from a nice soft cotton it would have been amazing. 

but of course, Mattel HAD to do the gimmick shit.

This set comes with instructions on how to do the tie dye effect. 

It looks like the shoes were supposed to change colour too but over the years they've ended up stuck in their changed form.

So I got some ice water and had a go. 

The bag, which is mostly made of pleather with a single panel of this colour change material changed great, it ended up bright and clear with just a gentle rub over with one of the sponges. 

the top on the other hand barely changed at all and the stampers don't seem to do a lot. I tried stamping them to get the shapes but it just left a blob of water. I think the problem is that the top doesn't change fully, it only changes in random splotches to get the tie dye effect. If it changed fully from one colour to another the shaped stampers would probably work fine, but as it stands, there's just no point in the shaped stamps when the overall design is so patchy in the first place.

You can see here on the back, that was an attempt at a heart shaped stamp.

it just doesn't work. 

Disappointed by how lame the colour change was with the stampers I elected to instead dunk the whole garment into my cup of ice water. Now THAT worked. Look how much brighter it is!

though unfortunately it is now soaked. And I can't put it on a radiator to dry or anything because the it'll go back to the regular dull pink.

I'm... not totally sure Mattel thought this one through. "yes kids, saturate your doll's clothing! then make them wear it while it's wet!" 

Within a few minutes the colour was already fading anyway. 

this gimmick just doesn't work well for the purpose. I mean it's doll clothing, it shouldn't be getting soaked in the first place and it also should retain colour while being handled otherwise what's the point? 

I feel like a wash off ink marker tie dye would have made a lot more sense and created a garment that 1: didn't feel sticky and 2: remained colourful during play. 

but I guess that's messier than just water. 

still... 

this set is a bit of a fail to me. As much as I like the shape of this blouse, the material it's made from is quite unpleasant and the gimmick is so greatly undermining it. 

the bag however, the bag strangely enough actually retains the colour a lot better and for a lot longer. Several days on it's still showing the patterns despite being in a warm room. 

my middle son pointed out that I didn't actually have to soak the top, I could just put it in the freezer. That worked to change the colour too without it getting wet, but like with the ice water, the colour faded very rapidly in warm air and more so if you touched it. 

so yeah. Pointless gimmick.

 

While still wet (and thus transparent) I tried it on the Rainbow High body. The top is too short for a lot of dolls and while it's a little big on the rainbow high body, I don't think it's ridiculously oversized. I do like how the peplum sits on this body, that's about where it should be right? 

I will give Mattel some credit here in that this outfit, despite being questionable fabric, is very nicely sewn. 

I do like those little ruffles. 

The final outfit is Carrie's sticker gimmick outfit and let me tell you, stickers are not a gimmick. It's just a thing they come with.

basically, the outfit comes with some little silver flower and heart stickers that you can stick onto the clothes if you want but why would you?

and because stickers are CHEAP, more budget was clearly put into the outfit pieces themselves. 

The bag is large and while the front pockets are fake, the whole bag opens and fastens with elastic. It fits the sticker sheets inside nicely which is useful for storage. 

Like the bead outfit, this set comes with a top, a skirt and a jacket. 

And this jacket is quite something. 

It's made of a fairly stiff material that holds the shape of those puff sleeves beautifully. There's a big fabric flower on the lapel and two little decorative buttons and the whole thing is trimmed with a satiny pink ribbon. It fastens with a single metal popper. 

The skirt is made of thin fashion denim with frayed ends which have, rather nicely, been hemmed just above the fraying to prevent it going further. There's little panels with a patterned denim and little belt loops that actually work. It also has working pockets. 

I mean this is just lightyears better than the previous outfit, it's shocking to me that both are the same line and retailed for the same amount. 

Whether you like the aesthetic or not, there's no denying that these pieces are well made. 

It turns out that the more stretchy top fits the Barbie body pretty well and the curvy Barbie body fits the skirts really nicely along with the jackets. 

Changing my curvy girl into her usual jeans paired with the jacket and top is a look I really enjoy. I feel like the pink skirt with the jacket makes it a bit too much, this allows the jacket to be a standout piece on its own and it deserves to stand out on its own, it really is a fabulous piece. 

 even the shoes are more detailed with a proper tread pattern on the bottom. While the sandals from the bead outfit have hollow soles and the slip ons from the tie dye set has a standard pattern of straight lines across the bottom, these little mary janes have a realistic tread. 

All three shoes are marked TCFC which stands for "those characters from Cleveland", the merch spinoff of American Character.

Now these shoes are a very odd size, especially for a doll of this scale. They are of course far far too big for all my fashion dolls, so I took a look at some of my more unusually proportioned dolls. 

 

Cry Babies BFFS have the same sized feet as the Cave Club dolls, and they  have pretty massive feet so I tried them first. 

the Holly Hobbie shoes are a little too long. 

I feel like with socks they might be okay, but they are definitely too big. 

these little croc-like shoes work quite well being a little oversized though I think. It feels appropriate for crocs to be a bit ill fitting. 

So, who else do I have who might fit these shoes then? 

they're too small for Living Dead Dolls.... 

and too big for Makies. 

too small for glitter girls or little apple.. too big for Whats her face or any other mattel line I have.

yeah, I don't seem to have anything they actually DO fit. 

they are quite a bizarre size. Wide but short. 

Very very odd. 

In the end, of the outfit pieces I quite like the skirt from the bead set and I love the jacket. I haven't managed to figure out what to do with the top though, it sits strange on most dolls unfortunately. 

I also love the sticker set, i'll use all these bits.

The tie dye set is the more disappointing. Not only does it have fewer actual pieces, those pieces are made from an unpleasant material with a gimmick that's unfit for purpose. They're nice shapes, but the material really lets them down. 

I will use the bag though. It's a good sized bag for chunkier 1/6 dolls. 

I'm not sure what these originally retailed at but honestly? the tie dye one isn't worth it. 

the other two however are decent little packs that fit wider hipped dolls which is always useful. 

 

VIP Pet/Rainbow High hybrid girl stole the bead jacket to tie her outfit together. The beads sort of tie into her shoes i think.