Playing Dolly Doctor: Finger Dings Sally Skater

Happy Summer Solstice, ladies and germs!  Now meet Sally Skater...or rather, what's left of her.

As usual, I learned about these dolls from Tam, and because I love dolls with personality I fell in love with their smug little faces...and their cotton candy hair.  Y'all know how I love goofy hair.  Anyway, Finger Dings are from Remco, the same bunch that brought us Jan and Tumbling Tomboy, among others.  Under normal circumstances Finger Dings had cloth bodies with hollow legs that fit over one's fingers, turning the little dolls into a finger puppet of sorts.  But as y'all can see, Sally is missing her body.  Under normal circumstances she'd have looked like this.  Obviously Sally isn't worth much as a plaything without legs, so she'll be needing a new body.  Now...I had read that Finger Ding heads were hard to remove from the bodies without heat.  I saw one blogger utilize a hair dryer, but that fried some of her doll's hair, so I'm going with hot water no, brute force did the trick.  The shoulders are melting anyway, as is the neck.  Sally could still turn her head, but her shoulders were frozen stiff.

Good riddance to bad rubbish.  Now...I saw on Pinterest, on Flickr, and over at ggsdolls that Finger Dings take a small-sized Pure Neemo body, so that's what I got for Sally.  I went the natural-toned route and got all eleven pairs of hands, but since I wanted Sally to be more flat-chested I got the boy body.

I have one other doll with an Azone Pure Neemo body, that being my oldest Licca-chan.  Let's briefly take a look at Sally's new body and Licca's.

There's not a lot of difference at all, actually.  Sally's chest is obviously gonna be flat, and her ankles are sturdier than Licca's, and her new body is a little shorter overall than Licca's, but for the most part the shape and the coloring are the same.  I did notice a defect on the right ankle, though.

Bummer, looks like someone hacked off part of the joint (and part of the heel) with a dull knife!  The mobility of the joint is not impaired, but I can't say that this makes me happy.  The new body also does not come apart at the joints (except for the wrists).  I kinda like how Licca's body can come apart in multiple places, but the new body feels very sturdy, bum ankle and all.

Alrighty, the moment of truth:  how is Sally gonna look with this body?

Well, her neck's kinda long, but for the most part this is a pretty good match.  For the record, Barbie had a giraffe neck too for a spell during the eighties.  I think that if I were gonna do this again though, I'd get a pale body.  Sally's head is pretty fair compared to her new body.  Just a little, but enuff that it might bother a more OCD collector.

I already know that this size of Azone body can wear Licca-chan and Neo Blythe clothes, and I found another post on Flickr that says this body can wear Skipper clothes.  But get this:  the Skipper clothes shown were VINTAGE!!!  I don't have a vintage Skipper doll, but I do have her friend Fluff.

It's been YEARS since I talked about the dress that Fluff is wearing, but my opinions on it are still the same:  it needs something underneath it.  If Fluff can share Licca-chan's clothes then I'll be able to get her a blouse or a shirt to go underneath it.  But first things first:  here's how Sally looks in Fluff's dress.

Mmmm...meh.  Sally looks kinda like a twig in Fluff's oversized dress, and as I stated above it's pretty revealing without a blouse or somesuch like that underneath.  This would work in a pinch, though.

Now, for grins, here's Fluff in Licca-chan's dress.  

I had my doubts since Fluff's chest is wider than Licca's or Sally's, but Fluff actually looks pretty cute in this dress.  Her feet are too big for Licca's shoes, but that's easily remedied.

Okay...I've established that everyone can wear each other's clothes.  Now it's time to throw Sally in her forever dress.  It's another Licca-chan outfit, one with cute jelly-colored heels.

I love it and Sally does too.  Indeed, Sally has turned into a bit of a ham with her new body.  She can ham it up even more with hands; as with Licca, I went full monty on the extra hands.

They come in all the same shapes that Licca's hands came in, so now Licca has someone to play Rock, Paper, Scissors with.

If I were to try this again with a beat-up Finger Ding I'd get the paler body, and I'd pay more attention to the sex of the body!  Sally looks okay in her new dress, but I think she'd look better if she had a full chest like Licca-chan does.  Oh well, can't have everything!  As long as you're not bothered by Sally's longish neck then these Azone bodies are a good fit for the Finger Dings. 

Love,
RagingMoon1987

Flipping Cissy, part 2: new clothes

Part two of my Flipping Cissy series.  My beat-up Peaches has a new wig, and today I'll be talking clothes.  No, I unfortunately haven't gotten around to any of the hard stuff yet, restringing or repainting or any of that, but I promise that should come this summer.  For now, though, clothes.

This dress actually belongs to what could be considered the poor woman's Cissy:  a doll of similar size and jointing named Candy.  Candy was produced by Deluxe Reading (much later by Charisma) and thus could be considered a cousin of Penny Brite and a more distant relative to Suzy Cute and Dawn.  The Candy dolls that I'm aware of came with four full outfits (one for each season), and complete sets can cost a pretty penny, but loose dresses are fairly affordable and easy to find.  This dress is the spring dress (I assume) and it is done in kelly green fabric with white trim.  It is missing its purse and shoes, but it still has the cute little pillbox hat so dear to fashionable women of the early sixties.

Pillbox hats are making a bit of a comeback, in fact.  Princess Kate certainly isn't ashamed to be seen in one!  Fashionable dolls of the Camelot era often wore what fashionable ladies wore, and thus pillbox hats were not unheard of for dolls like Vogue Jill and her buddy Jan, Little Miss Revlon and her larger Revlon sisters, Barbie, Tressy, and the like.  Well...maybe Tressy could be considered post-Camelot since she was created after the Kennedy administration, but she still wore a pillbox hat on occasion.  Anyway, I have never owned such a hat for myself OR for a doll, so I'm glad to have this little chapeau aboard.  The hat has four little evenly spaced gathers, which at first threw me off a bit since I wasn't sure what was supposed to go in the back.

One side of the hat has a fabric plume, which I hoped would help me get this all sorted out.

Plumes like this usually point towards the back, but according to this old advertisement the plume was supposed to be worn in the front.  I'll try both ways and see which one I prefer, since I don't guess placement of the hat matters terribly.  The inside of this hat is not lined, which surprises me since the dress is partly lined.

Now, the dress.  The dress is in reasonably good shape, but there is one tiny little spot on the front of the bodice.

I wasn't able to get this off with my usual fix-all (spit), but a deeper, more thorough cleaning might do it some good.  For the time being I've got a tiny vintage stick pin, which I got off Etsy.  The vendor listed these as sold out the night after I bought this one, so I suspect I got the last one.  There were about thirty small pins in the pictures provided on Etsy, in the shapes of birds, insects, flowers, cats, turtles, giraffes, so I had no idea which one I'd end up with.  As y'all likely know by now I love cats, and I ended up getting...

...A CAT!!!  This little guy is a very little one indeed.

I still haven't established whether that quarter is phony or not, by the way.  Anywho, Mr. Cat is a very pale lilac (lilac?) with black spots and off-kilter facial features.  He's not particularly well-painted, but on something that small I'm not entirely surprised.  The insides of his ears are even painted!

Of course no cute little outfit is complete with a pair of shoes, which Peaches has been needing for awhile anyway.

Plain, versatile white plastic heels, the type that would probably also fit Candy or a larger Miss Revlon.  These snap closed in the middle of the strap and were a little tricky to get fastened.

To be a proper sixties-style outfit I should probably also grub up some gloves and some seamed stockings, but I don't dare do the latter until I get Peaches' broken knee fixed (the edges are sharp and would do a number on stockings of any sort).  So for now, here's what my girl looks like.

Unfortunately Peaches will never fit on that stand properly if I don't restring her.  See how her head is tilted back?  I CAN get a picture of this doll's still-attractive face, but I have to re-position the camera.

Notice that I chose to put the plume of her hat on the left.

Oh yeah, I also got Peaches a stand.  It's wood and fits her below the arms like so.

The armrest screws to the post like this, so the height can be adjusted.  It's a VERY nice stand.

During the course of this little chat it occurred to me that I've never once photographed Peaches with my Little Miss Revlon doll, Wendy.  The two are supposed to be besties despite their difference in size.

Peaches has come a long way since her first appearance in this blog, but she's still got a long way to go.  It's possible to see in this picture that she's still orange, which she should NOT be.  I've got my magic eraser ready to go, but I still need some other odds and ends before I try to take Peaches apart and clean her.

Final thought (prepare for a spate of griping).  I did some browsing on eBay, a dangerous thing to do when one is supposed to be saving up money, and I found a healthy quantity of Cissy dolls available for sale.  Get this, though:  even dolls in less-than-mint condition can go for two hundred fifty bucks, maybe more, and yet here is my poor little Peaches, knee broken and exposed to cigarettes, sitting in a junk shop with a twenty-dollar price tag.  I wouldn't have been able to afford a Cissy doll at all if not for all that damage that knocked down her price, but I still shake my head in disgust at the previous owner(s), because even when these dolls were new they weren't exactly cheap!  I can only imagine what that person's lungs must've looked like, and their teeth, and how their clothes must've smelled...ewww.  I'm not a huge fan of cigarettes as it is, but Peaches must've been around a supremely heavy smoker to get to the point she was when I found her.  Oh well, I'll fix her up and give her a chance at reclaiming her former glory.  Oh, and if y'all want to see a truly beautiful Cissy doll, check out this post.  This doll is a knockout in her vintage blue dress.

Cordially yours,

RagingMoon1987

Playing Dolly Doctor: Dulcie's Downy dunk

Meet Dulcie-chan, more commonly known as Sweets-chan, another of Licca's many friends.

Now meet Dulcie's hair...every kink and knot of it.

Dulcie was an Etsy rescue, a doll that I doubt anyone wanted because of that hair.  I have to admit it'll be Darlington Raceway-level tough to tame, but I have a secret weapon, one that's not-so-secret if you're an American Girl fan.

A bottle of Downy!  I knew already that Downy is a great friend of American Girl dolls and the people who love them, but apparently it can also be a friend of Takara dolls as well.  Kudos to Kitties 'n' Dollcrafts for that tidbit of info; her post can be found here.  Unfortunately I grabbed this without thinking of the dye; some fabric softener has blue or green dye in it.  But...too late to go back now!  I don't care if I dye Dulcie's hair a little or a lot, but I'll have to take pains to keep the Downy off her vinyl.

Alrighty, let's begin.  Fetch a cup, pour in the Downy, and leave Dulcie's hair to soak...oh, twenty-four hours is recommended for American Girls.  Given the mess that Dulcie's hair is in, it'll probably take at least that long.  And here is where I run into some problems.  Kitties 'n' Dollcrafts put some fabric softener into a bowl of hot water and dunked her dolls' hair in, while Beanbunny used straight Downy.  Since Dulcie's hair is so matted I think I'll go for straight Downy...after I've washed her hair, of course!  Make sure your doll's hair is clean!

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I can't say that Dulcie's hair feels any different now than it did, but after twenty-six hours in the Downy and two and a half hours with my trusty dog brush her hair looks a lot better.  It smells pretty darn nice too.

It's not perfect, oh no.  No, in order to get Dulcie's perfect curls back I'll have to do a boil wash with drinking straw curlers.  But this is way better than it was.  See?

I may try this on my Jenny dolls and on Licca, since Licca's hair is so gummy to the touch.  Hey, what have I got to lose?

Cheers,
RagingMoon1987

Flipping Cissy, part 1: new wig!

This will be a semi-regular series of posts chronicling my attempts to give my old Cissy doll a face-lift.  Some of y'all may remember her; I call her "Peaches."  This is what she looked like when I first got her.

There's a good reason why I call her "Peaches" instead of "Cissy."  Firstly, I think "Cissy" is an idiotic name, even if it does conjure up images of higher-end Madame Alexander dolls for some folks.  But admittedly "Peaches" is a bit of a silly name too, at least for a doll.  No, I call my little poppet "Peaches" because she's peach-colored...and she's peach-colored because at some point in the past she was around a heavy smoker or two or three.  When I first got this doll she was in rough shape with a broken knee and loose joints, clad in an ill-fitting pair of shoes and a dress that was stained and reeked of Eau du Cigarette.  Her wig was unkept and her face was bright orange.  I was able to wash Peaches' wig and dress, and Mama got her a new dress to wear while the old one was being washed.  As a result, Peaches ended up looking semi-presentable, like this.

Much better, but still not fabulous.  Notice that Peaches' hair is still mussed in that picture, and that she still has a faint orange cast, AND that she still has a broken knee (notice that her left leg is at a funny angle).  But at the time I decided to leave well enough alone and just let her hang around in my collection.

So that was last year.  Then about New Year's Eve I decided to give Peaches another hairwash.  Her wig still smelled bad and was frizzy, so I busted out the trusty Dawn, threw a towel over Peaches' eyes, stuck her head under the sink and...a piece of her wig broke off, cap and all.  So I said a lot of swear words and peeled the rest of the wig off, leaving poor Peaches bald.  When the wig peeled off it revealed a lot of groad and filth that I'd not been able to reach when I washed her face the first time.

Since Peaches needed a new wig, and since I didn't want a bald doll sitting all forlorn in my dolly room, I got her this.

This wig is from Natrume on Etsy and is a size 9-10.  It was originally intended for a Pullip or a larger ball-jointed doll, but it looks okay on Peaches too.  She looks a little like Denise now, in fact!

So I don't know when the next installation of this series will be, but y'all are along for the ride now!  I'll keep y'all posted on Miss Peaches' makeover.

Hugs,
RagingMoon1987

Playing Dolly Doctor: Sindy, Tammy, and Teresa

RagingMoon1987 here, and I've been junk shopping...again.  Ever since Johnny arrived I've had ball-jointed doll fever and I've played with him constantly, but today my attention shifts back to the play world.  There's an awesome flea market just outside Dexter, Missouri that I've never been to, and since today is nice Mama and I decided to go check it out.  The flea market has a lot of stuff, and one of the things I found, tucked away in a back corner, was a large wicker basket of Barbie dolls.  I dug through the contents to see if I could find any treasures, and needless to say I found some things.  My six new dolls are all fixer-uppers, being naked, deliciously dirty, and reeking of cigarettes.  This post focuses on the first three:  Marx Sindy, Ideal Tammy, and an All-American Teresa from Mattel.

I'm thrilled to have a Sindy in my collection.  The asking prices for the Tonner repros were a little on the outrageous side, so I never got one of those.  I was expecting to have to dig around on eBay or Etsy for a decent Sindy, but lo and behold God dropped one in my lap.

Anywho, these three are headed for THE PLASTIC BAG OF DOOM.  Teresa will also need a haircut to even out her unprofessional hair chop.

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Here's the end result.

This trio had a few surprises.  I wasn't expecting Sandy to have jointed ankles, and I wasn't expecting Tammy's hair to turn out as well as it did.  She was the holdup in posting this review  because her hair was a tangled mat.  I left her in THE PLASTIC BAG OF DOOM for a week before attempting to tame that mess.  As you can see, Tammy's hair looks great now.  I wish y'all could be here to smell her, because Tammy and her two cronies smell divine now.  No more eau de cigarette for these three!

I was also surprised and pleased to learn that Sindy and Tammy can wear Barbie clothes.  Teresa was no surprise since she IS a Barbie, but the other two are not so it was wonderful to discover that I had some things on hand instead of having to knit or buy new things.  If anyone can identify the ensemble that Sindy is wearing I'd appreciate it.  Tammy's garb came from a pack of separates that Mattel was once so good about making, and Teresa is clad in one of my favorite Fashion Avenue outfits, 52824 Tokyo Beat.  Oh, if only I'd known that Fashion Avenue wouldn't live forever!  I'd have tried harder to get more of those outfits,  because they were beautiful and of high quality. 

Keep your eyes peeled later this week for another installation of Playing Dolly Doctor, where I clean up the second half of my dolly haul.

Yours always,

RagingMoon1987 

Playing Dolly Doctor: Belle, Yasmin, and Barbie

Round three.  This group involves Disney Princess Belle, Bratz Kidz Yasmin, and what I think is a member of the Barbie Look gang.

It surprises me that my friend's daughter has a Bratz Kidz doll, since she was a very small child when they were available.  Oh well, her loss is my gain.  As with Merida and Yasmina, I've always wanted a Bratz Kidz doll.  I passed them up during my late teens because I was losing interest in the dolls I had by that time and I figured "Why bother?"  That's what I get for attempting to think (LOL).  Seeing the Barbie Look doll in the hands of a child chagrins me somewhat, as these dolls are meant to be for older kids and adult collectors.  On the other hand, those stiff limbs are made of some tough plastic so I guess no harm done.  I'm just glad the child didn't try to use this doll as a club!  As for Belle, well, there isn't much I can say about her.  I kept her because I liked her face, and because I like Disney Princesses.

Into THE PLASTIC BAG OF DOOM the trio went, and they spent a night in there.  Here's how they look now.

I want to try and replicate Yasmin's old hairstyle, because the original doll looked like this:

Or maybe she's this one!  Both dolls have frosted lips like my doll, so it's hard to tell.

Regardless of which doll my Yasmin is, I'm thrilled to have her.  The Bratz Kidz were adorable.  I think that modern-day parents take things too seriously, but I love how MGA Entertainment listened to their complaints and tried to make a creation that was less racy but still appealing.  The Kidz look the way I'd want my little girls to look, if I had little girls.

Digression over, cleaning these three up was relatively uneventful.  I've got two more dolls and a couple of heads to do (that's right, heads!), but since I've started a new job that may take awhile.  Just keep your eyes peeled.

Yours truly,
RagingMoon1987

Playing Dolly Doctor: Rapunzel, Merida, and Yasmina

Since I touched on these three in my last post, I thought I'd make them the next victims of THE PLASTIC BAG OF DOOM.  They are, from left, Magic Night Out Yasmina Clairvoya, Rapunzel from "Tangled," and Merida from "Brave."

Rapunzel and Merida both had some crud on their faces, so they've already been washed some in this picture.  Rapunzel was fortunate enough to have her dress buried in the pile of dolls, but Merida and Yas weren't.  Naked or no, I'm thrilled to have these three aboard.  I've wanted a Merida doll ever sense the movie "Brave" came out (never mind that I've never seen it), and I love Yasmina's hair color!  Since it's short, I didn't have to put up with tangles like I did with my first-wave Meygana.  Rapunzel, on the other hand, promised to be a living nightmare.  She's got almost a foot of hair, and eleven inches of it were tangled.  Merida has curly hair, so she may only need a night in THE PLASTIC BAG OF DOOM to get it to behave.  I've done that with two other curly-haired Barbie dolls, and both times their curls came out perfect.  Just don't brush.  Finger-comb while the hair is slippery with conditioner, but don't brush.

Here's how these fine ladies look now.

Yasmina has a few gimmicks that made me hesitant to put her in a damp plastic bag overnight, so I just washed her hair.  Rapunzel's rat's nest required a braid to keep it under control, and I may do something even more drastic if I can't get it looking the way I want it to.  As for Merida...well, my prediction turned out to be right.  Dipping her head in some conditioner brought those curls back to life, and now she looks like she should.  I'm only sorry that I don't have a proper dress to put her in; she may get something handmade for a change of pace.

Rapunzel, however, does have a proper dress.  Don't believe me?  Take a gander!

Yes, that is a small watermelon that she's sitting on.  I wanted to be creative.  Keep your eyes peeled for my third group!

Hugs and kisses,
RagingMoon1987