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Progress on Custom Rainbow Dash

I realize I haven’t posted anything about how my custom Rainbow Dash was coming along, so here is a little progress shot. At this point she has been re-rooted with all of the beautiful pony hair from dollyhair.com and I’ve customized her face a little just to give her a more determined look. 😉 At this point she is waiting now for me to have some time to run to the fabric/craft supply so I can purchase some water resistant glue to seal her hair inside her head. After that happens I will then be able to reattach her head and begin styling her new hair so she looks more like herself.

Maybe I’ll get lucky and have some time this weekend to go on a supply run because I think it’s high time I got Dash back together again!

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Getting my grail doll – Unoa Lusis!! :D

As I eluded to in my earlier post, I ordered my grail doll, a Unoa Lusis off of the Mandarake site. She’s been paid for and now I’m just waiting for a shipping notification. She’s going to be a little bit of a fixer-upper since her face-up is pretty bad looking and she’s had some unnatural pink body blushing, but never the less I am very excited!! The pic to the left is what Mandarake had on their site, and yes, she will totes come with an extra faceplate and small bust part for a price of only 45000 yen!! She will however have some yellowing, but from what I understand after reading about other people’s secondhand dolly purchases with Mandarake is that the dolls always appear better in person and yellowing is minimal (it’s just their photos that are poor). I really don’t care much if the doll has mellowed, afterall I’m pretty sure that my AE Yara has yellowed, but she still has a natural looking creamy beige skintone that’s even, and I think no less of her for it.

I don’t know if it seems strange, but for some reason I’m doubly excited to get a secondhand doll. I think it’s because when you get a brand new doll fresh from the factory there is this “newness factor” that comes into play and it makes me super reluctant to do anything to the doll. I swear for the first month I had Sona I didn’t even want to take off her wig!! XD With a secondhand doll I feel much more comfortable with the idea of taking her apart, cleaning and sanding and blushing and etc…. Right now my big excitement aside from getting the doll sculpt I’ve always admired but never thought I could afford or acquire, is that I plan to customize the doody out of her and make her as beautiful as possible! By customize though I mean blushing and face-up, not actually modifications, because I think Unoas are the most perfect dolls out there and need no modding. One of the great things about a Unoa is that their sculpt is so beautiful that even a terrible face-up can’t hide the beauty of the inherent sculpt. Often with other dolls I find that the face-up can so drastically change the look of the doll as to make me reconsider a sculpt. With Unoas that doesn’t happen…of course maybe it’s that I have probably looked through every Unoa on flickr and studied them with great care. I’m sure there are other people who feel as passionate about their own favorite sculpt though.

Well, enough of this random crooning over Unoas, it’s time to ferry my mother about town since she has been cooped up since her knee surgery. You can expect more postings about my new Lusis when she finally arrives!! Yay! So exicted! XD~

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Website “Window Shopping” XD – Mandarake

So I guess I’m “re-discovering” Mandarake after hearing someone gush about a new dolly purchase they made through them. Considering I’m always late to the party it seems, I’m sure everyone knows about this place, but if you don’t then keep reading, heck keep reading even if you do know cause it’s fun! 😀

I had already known about Mandarake and in fact I had ordered used manga from them back in the day when I was a more avid collector of manga. Apparently however back then I never bothered with any other sections of their site, and in truth I was not much interested in dolls back then either. Now that I am revisiting I am discovering they have this huge inventory of pre-owned toys and dolls, that I have been happily browsing for about an hour. In my idle browsing I have discovered that they sell a great deal of second hand Pullips, Dals and Blythes among other things. The Pullips and such though I found surprising because for example I saw a hard to find old Namu doll still in his box going for about $80ish, and an old Pullip Street going for a little less. Now I know that many collectors have paid quite a lot more for those dollies before, and even presuming you tack on EMS shipping, I think you’ll still pay less than you would finding those dolls on the secondhand market here in the US. With this said I think it’s possible to get a good dolly deal if you know what you’re looking for and keep track of the going market.

Aside from finding the occasional bargain, Mandarake also appears to have lots of vintage doll goods. There’s plenty of old school Liccas and Jennies to go around as well as a bunch of older dolls I don’t even recognize. Of course Mandarake knows when they have a good vintage item, so there will be no bargains there….then again I don’t know the going rate for a lot of those types of dolls, so I could be wrong. There’s also a ton of other little toys and knick knacks piled onto those pages, for example I just came across an old 50s bunka style doll, and a cute little egg shaped dollhouse chair, all for reasonable prices and I know it’s nothing I can never find around here. So basically if you have time to kill and some spare moo-lah in your wallet you might go have a browse to see what you can see. 😉

Fufufu….to be honest I’m scouting for something in particular, but I’m gonna keep quiet about it so I don’t jinx anything. 😉 Here is the link: http://ekizo.mandarake.co.jp/shop/en/ enjoy! <3

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Sleepy eyed tinies

I am such a fan of the sleepy/dreamy eyed tinies, and this new Rustle of Spring Modigli is no exception! Aside from mooning over MSDs, I’ve also been researching and considering getting a 20-30cm tiny that I could use with “The Big House”. XD The sleepy eyed Modigli has I think just the right amount of openess in her eyes if that makes sense. Her eyes are closed enough to have a sweetly dreamy look, but also open enough to let the eyes shine. Modigili’s lips also have nice volume and pout to boot. 😀 The only thing I find fault with in the iMda 3.0 is the body. The body starts out well enough at the top as it doesn’t have the chunkiness of most tinies of this size, and then the fact that she has some semblance of hips is nice, but she definitely has thunder thighs! I guess I shouldn’t be too critical since I have a Dollmore Kid, all of whom have thunder thighs, but in iMda 3.0 it starts looking like it’s a beginner Puns….well this is just my opinion. ^^; So with all this said I still find that my favorite 20-30cm tiny body is Pipos with it’s twig legs and the option for a large bust. However their new body which takes away the lower torso joint leaves a little bit to be desired. 🙁


Speaking of Pipos, their Dreaming Mari was really the first tiny I ever became interested in. This is mainly because of her incredibly cranky look and slightly more mature face. My only concern with Dreaming Mari is that her eyes almost seem too closed so I worry that it might be difficult to get good photos, and she probably shouldn’t have lashes. As I said before though I think the Pipos body is aesthetically superior, though I can still appreciate the Littlefee Body which also has twiggy legs. My only problem with Littlefees are that their faces are a little too babyish for my taste and you also see so gosh darn much of them. I swear there are probably enough Antes out there to start an army big enough to invade a small country. XD Anyhow I think I’m rambling at this point so I will go ahead and cut this posting here. I still have more MSDs I’d like to blabber on about, but that will be for another post. 😉