More Wiggings

I've gone through several 18 inchers over the last year but realized I had to cut back on them, so I settled on having Sunny and Meriel, and two Our Generation girls from Battat. The first was Winter Rose.

Sunny and Winter Rose

Our Generation girls are noted for their bad hair. So first I tried cutting it.

Merry with her curls and Winty with her bob.

It was actually pretty cute. Then I got Haila, a blonde Our Generation girl. Apparently I didn't take any pictures of her with her original hair. Basically, she looked like Winty only with blonde hair. After I rewigged Merry, I got the urge to rewig more dolls. So I took the two wigs I got from the Doll Parts place and tried them on Winty and Haila. A new type of Dolly Fever was born -- Dolly Wigging Fever!

These clothes are all tagged Battat but they seem a bit tight.

I had to cut off their hair close to the scalp, because they had rooted hair, not wigs.

As an added bonus, Auntie Berman repainted their lips a more pleasing color.

Now I took a good look at my 14 inch hard plastic girls. We had been picking up wigged porcelain dolls when we could and had quite a collection.

Sally before

Sally after

Noelle before

Noelle after

Penny before

Penny after

I am keeping my eye out for another wig for Penny. I like this one except it had a circlet of roses glued on it and when I tried to get them off (heating the glue with a blow dryer), a lot of the glue just melted and got caught in her hair. But I like the style.

And now for my two masterpieces. We found Caroline at the Salvation Army Warehouse, dumped in with a bunch of miscellaneous stuff. Even though she's not my usual type, being vinyl and from the 60s, I had to rescue her.

Caroline before

(She has a bad case of Green Ear, but we try to ignore it.)

She was dressed as a bride

Well it seems Caroline was really meant to be a blonde!

Bouncy blonde curls!

Later, we found Juliet, I think at Goodwill Bargain Bin. She was dressed as a bride too.

The rejected bride

She has jointed knees

She is also made of vinyl, and from the markings on the back of her neck, I found out she is a Valentine Doll and is a ballerina. She has a tiny touch of Green Ear, but nothing like Caroline has. Her transformation was amazing.

This is the True Me!

And then there was Baby Barry, now named Gwennie. I wasn't real crazy about her but now I like her a lot.

"Help! My hair's coming off!"

"I like my brown hair."

And that is all the wiggings I have done so far.

The Joys of Re-Wigging

The first doll I re-wigged was Peggy, my first hard plastic doll. I bought her at a yard sale for $2. Her hair was pretty bad.

Peggy, formerly known as Marley

I don't remember why I removed her hair (possibly it fell off), but she was bald for quite a while.

I made her this nice satin underwear

I had her restrung at the Doll & Teddy Bear show and the lady who did it told me she couldn't put her head back on until I got the crack in her forehead fixed.

That's Peggy on the left, holding the jack o'lantern.

So for a while she was headless, until I persuaded Husband-Like Person to fix her. I don't remember exactly what he used. Some kind of filler . . . Then I put her head back on and meanwhile, I got a wig for her on eBay.

Yes, I know the wig is too far back.

Auntie Berman once worked for a school psychologist who had a receding hairline. One day a little girl asked him "Why do you wear your hair so far back on your head?"

For some reason I never glued the hair on, until recently. I discovered The Joys of Re-Wigging! I think it came about because we found an American Girl at Goodwill Bargain Bin.

Ratty, ratty hair!

Back view

Someone had apparently tried to use a curling iron on this poor girl. We had to get her, to save her from the landfill. I began googling info about re-wigging. I found out how to remove her wig (I was greatly heartened by someone who said she had never met a wig that didn't respond to brute force). The offensive hair was soon removed. We named the dolly Meriel, Merry for short.

She remained cheerful throughout the ordeal.

Meanwhile, Lorraine had had a terrible tragedy in which her arm suddenly fell off while I was dressing her. The plastic had actually broken. I was horrified. Lorraine was horrified. When I searched for a solution, I found out about doll screws, which are curlicue shaped. (By the way, if you search for "doll screws" on google, be sure your Safe Search is on. Otherwise you will get some very unpleasant results.) I ordered them and some doll-stringing elastic from a doll parts store. They were very cheap but I had to get $25 worth of stuff to order from them, so I decided to order two wigs, one red and one blonde, because I was thinking of giving Sunny a new wig, since her hair was kind of choppy. A few days later the doll store person called and said they were out of red and that particular blonde, so I went ahead and got auburn and a different blonde. When they arrived, I didn't like the auburn (it looked brown to me) or the blonde.

Just okay.

I had a half-wig that I liked (it was half a wig cap with lots of hair).

Maybe the curls are a bit much.

I left that on her, because now I had my little green-eyed girl with red hair, but I didn't glue it on (and here I should mention that Auntie Berman does all the gluing, because she is the Glue Queen). I was hoping to find something better.

And I did. It occurred to me that all those porcelain dolls we find at the Bargain Bin and Salvation Army Warehouse are wearing wigs! The dolls are usually broken, but their hair is perfectly good. Of course once I thought of it, we couldn't find any porcelain dolls--at first. But then we did!

Perfect hair!

So Merry is now decently wigged and very happy.

I will have to continue this later, because I have lots more wigs to talk about and no time to do it now.

(And we did get Lorraine's arm fixed, but she wouldn't let me photograph her and doesn't want to talk about it.)

When you haven't blogged for a while, it's best just to plunge back in

So I'm going to start with Maria, who is a Sasha doll.

Lulu and Maria

A year ago I found a Sasha doll at work. I didn't know who she was but I knew she was Somebody.

A White Dress Sasha

I brought in Auntie Berman, who immediately recognized her but couldn't remember her name. We called Biggie Sis and she informed us it was Sasha. So we got her. She was wearing her original white dress (that caused her to be called a White Dress Sasha). I realized after a couple of days that she was rather odd. I think it was her tan, which didn't really go with her red hair. Biggie Sis belongs to a Sasha group and she suggested we sell the doll. After much finagling (the burden of which fell mainly to Auntie Berman), we sold her for $160! Not bad for a $2.00 investment.

I never gave Sashas another thought until a few weeks ago when we were at Salvation Army Warehouse. We hadn't found much of anything and I wandered over to the big bin of stuffed animals they keep in back (but no more bears, I told myself). I almost didn't look in the back of the bin, because there were golf bags and clubs piled around it but since Auntie Berman wasn't ready, I shoved my way back and dug around and saw a brown arm sticking up. To my amazement, it was a Sasha doll! She was rather floppy, desperately needing restringing. She was naked except for her ID tag on her left wrist (it's supposed to be on her right but it's tied on and I don't want to try to change it). It says Sasha on one side and Made In England Serie on the other.

Posing in front of the snapdragons

Our next stop was my Savers store, where we bought a small bag of doll clothes and put the pink flowered dress in the first picture on her. I really liked her a lot better than the first Sasha doll, I think because her skin tone was a better match for her hair. Lizzie told me she thinks they have an alien look about them, and I totally agree! Although I had visions of dollar signs when I first found her, by the time we got home I had bonded with her and knew I couldn't give her up.

I decided she is Mexican, because many of my coworkers are and I named her Maria because one of my favorite coworkers is Maria and also I had just finished re-reading Three Without Fear by Robert DuSoe, which is a great children's book, if you can find it, which you probably can't because it's out of print.

I found more clothes for her as well as some Battat shoes that fit.

Eskimo dress

I also restrung her, although that was kind of scary. Someone had tried to repair her using a giant rubber band. Fortunately I had good doll-stringing elastic. It was a success and look at her now!

Maria Ballerina

Then I had to make her a new dress.

New dress

Last week I found a Mrs. Santa type doll (what was left of her) with a styrofoam head at Goodwill Bargain Bin. She was wearing a nice red dress so I relieved her of it and gave it to Maria.

A perfect Christmas dress

That's all for now. I will be back with more exciting finds, like the Tonner fashion doll I just found!