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.  

1 comment:

  1. With so much braid spray did the hair get sticky? If so, does rinsing it afterwards help? (I'm slowly working on my granddaughters' secondhand dolls.)

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