agdollhouse

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The girls are ready to see Wicked!

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If you can't tell, dressing everyone up in a theme brings me the greatest joy. Please enjoy the girls of today in their summery boat inspired outfits! 🛥️⛱️

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Everyone's wearing their springtime best on the bookshelf. :)

I bought Kit and now I have all the historical girls that I grew up with seeing in the catalogs. (Kaya and Samantha are at my parents'. I need more display space!)

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he has found a lap

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The girls changed into back-to-school clothes! We're all ready for fall now! I don't have Felicity's "school" outfit so I substituted her riding outfit because I think it's a "cool-weather" outfit and it has the distinct honor of being the only outfit of Felicity's that my mom has complimented (I believe her words were "I like that one")

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a list of things I want to do, in no particular order:

- finish posting Pixie's before-and-afters

- update everyone's pictures with... better pictures? and add info about the newest girls.

- maybe a new layout ionno does anyone really care about tumblr layouts anymore??

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did y’all know Pixie looks cute in everything? now you do! bonus pictures of all the modern girls living in my apartment right now! (Kailey and Jane are living it up at my parents’ house)

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She’s not 100% finished but I thought y’all might enjoy seeing my project.  Her name is Annalise Elizabeth Lukaszewski but everyone calls her Pixie!  I came up with Pixie when I was 12 years old.  She loves running around outside, is obsessed with faeries, and has a wild imagination.  You can get to know her a little better when I type up her official bio.

Her wig is a Monique Brittany wig in black.  I haven’t brushed it because I haven’t decided if I want to mess with the curls.  I did her freckles with acrylic paint and a toothbrush, then toothpicked in some of the larger beauty marks.  Her lips and cheeks are a Lime Crime lip liner in Cake, which is maybe a bit expensive for doll restoration but I had it on hand and it’s a very nice pink nude.  I don’t know how well it will hold up long-term or if I’ll need to seal it somehow.  I lined her lips slightly and then blotted it with my fingers and blotted it across her cheeks (and the bridge of her nose) as well.

Her legs and arms still have stains and honestly if you give her a sniff she still smells slightly of smoke.  I’m waiting on a few products to be delivered so I can finish her up but I am loving how she’s turned out!

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Continuing my adventures in eye painting, it is with a heavy heart that I admit that I... failed.

After destroying one set of eyes, I ordered a second set of eyes from an eBay seller.  Those eyes went on an adventure.  They were guaranteed to arrive on December 8th, but inexplicably went back to Tennessee where they were shipped from.  At another point I saw an update that claimed they had made it to Miami.  I do not know why this happened but it is maybe one of the funniest things that’s ever happened to me.  I can’t even be mad about it, shipping was free and to be fair, the seller shipped it right after I paid for it.  I received them December 21st.

Once the eyes arrived I realized that these eyes are different from pre-Mattel eyes.

They have a small piece of plastic in the back that helps hold in the weight. Taking the weight out was ridiculously difficult and the piece of plastic did break.  I’ve read that this may affect how the eyes close when the whole thing is put back together but I never got that far so I can’t say for sure.

Removing the paint in these eyes was the most difficult thing I have ever done.  I don’t know if it’s because the paint is newer, or if Mattel uses a different formulation, or if it’s because in the older eyes the paint was already beginning to peel, but the paint would not come out.

I fussed.  I swore.  I dabbed gently with acetone, super glued a nail to the back and tried to pull out the paint, scraped with a craft knife (which made some nice cuts in the eyes) and finally tried heating a hot glue stick and pulling it out when cooled.  This also didn’t work.  I ripped the glue stick in half, melted eyelashes on one eye, my hand went numb (thanks carpal tunnel) and eventually I was left with an eye full of hot glue that I couldn’t get out.  

When I wasn’t working on the eyes, my cats, who are terrible, stole them from me repeatedly.  They knocked over the container the eyes were in, popping it open and spilling parts across the floor.  I am still finding eye parts under my dishwasher on the opposite side of the house.

Above is the cleanest I was able to get the eyes. I did try just painting over it with new paint and allowing it to dry, hoping that the two paints would stick together and I could then peel it off in one big piece.  This, amazingly, didn’t work.

At this point I gave up and decided I was just going to order eyes in the colors I wanted.  This meant ordering two new sets of eyes.  This is fine, I told myself angrily.  This is fine.

In summary, here are my tips for repainting doll eyes!

Use old eyes!  Eyes that are silvered are defective already, the paint is beginning to pull away and that makes it easier to remove.

Peel as much paint out as you can.  If you’re able to use tweezers and pull it off in one chunk, that’s ideal.  Otherwise, heating the tip of a stick of hot glue and sticking it to the paint, letting it cool briefly and peeling it out seems to help.  Others have had great success.  I let mine cool for an hour or more and that was when I ripped the stick in half trying to peel it out.

If you’re careful, confident, and you have a steady hand, using a toothpick dipped in acetone will help break down stubborn residue stuck in the crevices.

Test your paint colors in advance.  I did swatches on a sheet of white printer paper and it really helped see how the colors would dry down.  They do dry a lot darker than they look when wet, so keep that in mind.

Use at least two coats, making sure they dry fully in-between coats.

It’s unfortunate that I ruined my first set of PM eyes because I think otherwise they would have been ideal for this project.  On the other hand, I learned a lot and someday I will try again!

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I’m writing this quickly before I go to sleep - I know I haven’t said anything about my project but that’s because there’s been no news for a while. This is the busiest two weeks of the year for me at work and I have been absolutely exhausted every day. And the eyes that I ordered took much longer than expected to arrive (I’ll tell you about it in a full update) but they arrived Monday and I’ve been tinkering with them since.

My only note now is that the paint in these new eyes is very, very, very hard to get out!

Full update on my progress coming soon! Thanks for being patient. :)

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I’m really bad at tumblr and I can’t seem to remember how to reply to replies right now (help me xkit you’re my only hope) but I wanted to say thank you all for your lovely comments and reblogs.  I’m glad y’all liked my silly little post about painting doll eyes!

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I had meant to type this up last night, but between my melatonin and a kitten who insists on walking on my laptop and chewing on my phone, I decided it was better put off until the next day.

Yesterday was a day of experiments!  As I mentioned, thrift store Molly is my learning doll.  She came with silver eye in one eye, but lovely soft eyelashes.  I set about learning how to repaint her eyes.  Turns out removing paint from the silver eye was almost impossible.  It took me about two days and the only way I made any headway was with acetone.  I was able to get most of the paint off, but rubbed off part of the eyelids and the eye whites.  At the suggestion of a friend, I soaked the whole thing in acetone to give myself a completely blank slate.  If that rings alarm bells for you, good!  Acetone ate through the plastic, ruining the eye.

Disappointed but still determined to learn, I decided I could practice painting the eye anyway.  I mixed up my colors and painted half the eye one color, and half the other, just to see how they would look dried and inside the eye.  Here are some pictures with and without flash:

The blurriness isn’t just from my shaky hands (I’m sorry) but because the acetone ate the plastic on the outside, ruining the shiny finish.  However, I really liked how the shade of green turned out.  I wasn’t happy with the blue, so I started mixing some more colors.

The 1:1 marsh and English ivy green is what I painted in the first eye, but I started from scratch with the blues.  I liked each new blue shade more than the prior, but I kept fiddling, adding some teals and gray.  I like the very last shade (bottom right) so that’s what I used for the second eye.  I also added some gray and teal to the green eye and painted that in the other half of the second eye.

As for prepping the second eye, it wasn’t silvered, and removing the paint from it was much, much easier.  I don’t think I used any acetone at all, just scraped away top layers until I was able to grab all the inside and pull it out in one piece.  Unfortunately the glue for the eyelashes covered most of the paint as well, and I ended up pulling out all those lovely soft PM eyelashes. 

...Oops.  So much for preserving the eyelashes.

I didn’t remove the black iris, since I found out while painting the first eye that the paint I believed to be black was actually a dark gray and now I need to buy black paint.  The iris looks a little wonky but I’m not that upset about it.  It’s all practice, after all.

I really like how the colors turned out, and in person I think they look similar to the colors American Girl uses, which is neat.  I may try adding more gray to both, though.  Which colors do you like best?

I ordered a new pair of replacement eyes from eBay and I’m waiting for them to arrive.  In the meantime, I need to buy some RemoveZit, new stuffing, and some micromesh as the doll has a new scratch on her cheek that seems suspiciously similar to a cat chew mark.

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When I was a kid I had two outfits that were from American Girl.  It was around 2003-2004?

One was a long-sleeved (maybe 3/4 sleeve) knee length dress that had a zipper near the collar.  It was a heather material, a blue/lavender/gray color?

The other was a girl-sized version of the sporty school outfit.  I can find pictures of that on the wiki but I have no idea what the dress was called.  I don’t remember there being a doll version of it and I honestly don’t remember if it was an actual AG product or just a fever dream????  I have no pictures of me wearing either outfit but I vividly remember wearing them to school and feeling so cool.

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A while ago (a whiiiiiiile ago) I was thrifting with my mom and we ran across this lady for $19.  She’s a Molly around the same age as mine, late 90s/early 2000s.

My first plan was to clean up her wig and give it to Molly but this girl reeks of cigarettes and I’m not sure how easy that is to remove from a wig?  Also I put several holes in the wig removing it from her head, oops.  So the plan now!  Is to learn how to refurbish and customize a doll with her.  :)

We will learn:

Rewigging!

Restringing/tightening strings!

Eye swapping!

Eye painting (maybe????)!

Face painting!

Stain removal!

Getting out smoke smell!

I’m kind of excited, I’ve got big plans for her and I hope I get to show her off soon.

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I thought I’d take a moment and share one of mine and Molly’s favorite outfits.  This is a homemade version of Molly’s school outfit.  It was made by my grandmother, and it’s always been very special to me.  My grandmother made so many wonderful things for Molly, from dresses to nightgowns to bedsheets to a clothes bag.  I also had several matching outfits - I believe Molly and I had matching dresses for one of my dad’s changes of command.

Part of the reason Molly is so, so special to me is the connection to my grandmother, an incredible woman who was diagnosed with cancer when I was young and passed away when I was only fourteen.  While much of my memories of her are related to her illness in some way, the fondest memories I have are of watching her at her sewing machine, or of dressing Molly in something she had made just for me.

My grandmother was a remarkable person, who always had a cup of coffee ready for the milkman and would invite him in to sit down and chat, who loved her daughters, who treated my father, her son-in-law, like one of her own children, who always, always had time to make something beautiful for Molly, and whom I wish I had appreciated more while she was alive.

This school dress, and Molly’s pajamas, are to this day my favorite of Molly’s outfits.  Not just because of the design or the colors, but because they are a constant reminder of a grandmother who loved me so much.

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Addy

Full Name:  Aduke Walker

Received:  August 2013

Pets:  –

Squid received a copy of Meet Addy from a Scholastic catalog many years ago, and the story stuck with her - particularly when Addy is forced to eat tobacco worms - and purchased a mini Addy that Kitty adopted.  Squid’s favorite third grade teacher also had an Addy, and mentioned changing her outfits with the seasons.  Still, it took years for Addy to join the growing family.  Though she can be shy, Addy is not afraid to speak her mind to the other girls.  Sweet and even-tempered, she is one of the more logical girls in the group.  She and Kitty get along well, though Addy politely refrains from mentioning/acknowledging her miniature counterpart.

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Kirsten

Full Name:  Kirsten Larson

Received:  July 2013

Pets:  –

Polite, amiable, and possessed with “can-do” pioneer spirit, Kirsten was on Squid’s wishlist for many years, the obsession usually peaking whenever Squid would reread Little House on the Prairie.  Yet somehow it took approximately 13 years for Kirsten to join the group.  Kirsten loves to be outside and isn’t afraid to go on adventures of her own, occasionally dragging one of the other girls along on her expeditions.  She gets along well with Kaya - perhaps remembering her friend Singing Bird - and though she tries to keep it under wraps, she is a big fan of Addy’s.