Thursday 28 May 2015

Dolly Rehab: Caroline - the introduction

For some reason this appeared as a complete post before it was actually meant to be posted. I withdrew the post and turned it into a draft, but it appears as though it was up for a while. Sorry!

Anyway, I recently acquired a Caroline from Ebay. She came with her full meet outfit and accessories, though she was in played-with condition, with tangled hair, traces of lipstick on her lips, some random stains on her vinyl, and drawings on her torso. (This is why you don't give AGs to 5-year-olds - no wonder the kid's parents were selling the doll after they drew all over her!) She was obviously salvageable, but this project did take some work. I started off by getting rid of the lipstick and the stains on the vinyl, just using a wet paper towel to get rid of everything. This took about twenty minutes or so. I got a bottle of braid spray afterwards and got to work on her extremely tangly, but salvageable, hair. I put quite a bit on, brushed it in, let it sit for a few hours and then brushed it again. It's much shinier than it was when she got to me, and her hair is no longer tangled, though the hair is still more wavy than curly if you don't finger-style it.

The next step is to remove those obnoxious drawings on her torso. She's just wearing clothes that cover the marks for now, but I'd eventually like to get them off. The problem is that that step may require unstuffing and having her dry out for a few days, which will be kind of annoying. If I can find a way to get rid of them that doesn't require going through that, I'll try it. If I have to though, it'll be fine; it's not the first time I've unstuffed dolls to repair them. I had a Felicity here about a year ago whose joints were loose and I had to tighten the strings.

This is what she currently looks like:


Unfortunately I didn't take any photos of what she looked like before starting the Dolly Rehab process.  

Tuesday 26 May 2015

For Science!

On 23rd May our Big Person took Addy and me to the Museum of Science in Boston. We went along with Shepard, Kana and their Big Person, of Jinjia Mixed Goods.



One of my favourite exhibits was Mathematica, which is a massive collection of displays about maths. The most interesting ones were the ones about topology - that’s about spatial relations and things. I don’t know very much about it yet, but if I go to university I’d like to read mathematics and perhaps learn more about it. As you can see here Shepard and Kana’s Big Person is holding me in front of the exhibit so I can pose properly. Can you see the Möbius strip behind me?







We tried putting together a gripping claw in the engineering section but there were far too many people (bit overloading, really) there so our Big People decided that it might be a good idea to go elsewhere.



We saw a lightning show as well, where we watched somebody use Van de Graaf generators to create lightning right inside the room. The biggest one was given to the museum by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 50s, I believe, and it’s massive. Sorry there’s no photo of the actual lightning - it was too loud for us to try and get a picture and have our ears covered at the same time.



Here I am in front of a dinosaur skeleton.



It’s a Triceratops skeleton. This time my Big Person had to hold me - sorry about him getting in the photo!

 

I’m sitting in an aeroplane engine. It’s probably a good thing it’s outside the ’plane - and not switched on!





Addy, Kana, Shepard and I wanted to go inside a space capsule but there were too many people waiting. We decided to take a photo in front of the other one instead.











Addy and I did a bit of climbing and investigating near the geological exhibits. Addy says this was her favourite bit - looking at how the world has changed and become what it is now. I’ll put that down to her interest in history.

 

Aren’t chambered nautiluses very pretty?

Our trip was fun and I learnt loads of fascinating things about maths and science. Perhaps I’ll bring Alice with me next time. ~Emily