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La Dee Da Doll

I’ve come to like the look of the La Dee Da dolls, and with a price cut currently going on at Target I thought I’d go ahead and purchase one of these cuties. They have big heads and oversized eyes similar to pullip and the fashion on this particular “city girl” doll is bright and cute reminding me of something Blythe or Pullip would wear. You can see from the photo above how she sizes up next to Blythe, Dal and Pullip.

So, the clothing that she comes with is a little blue next shrug, a pair of tube stockings, shoes, a hair flower, dress, earrings, and a little plastic pincushion wristlet. The dress’s ribbon is attached with velcro which means you can switch it out with the hair flower as it also has velcro on the bag. However unfortunately the hair flower is initially velcroed AND sewn into the head, so you will have to cut it loose to do anything with it. Also velcro is not kind to plastic doll hair. ^^; Anyhow the other versatile part of this outfit is the dress has a pull ribbon in the back so it can go from being a bell shape to being cinched into to a balloon shape.

As for the doll herself, she doesn’t have nearly as much articulation as Monster High or Pullip. She does however have knee joints and rotating hip joints. Her shoulder joint has more mobility than the classic barbie, but as you can see she does not have wrist or elbow joints.

I thought I would show a little comparison of the feet here, because I have great news! The feet of La Dee Da dolls are tiny and slender just like Dals, which means, yes, they can share shoes. Also they work fairly well on Blythe’s feet, but they will not fit on obitsu feet. On the flip side, La Dee Da dolls can also wear some of Dal’s and Blythe’s shoes as well.

For clothes sharing however you aren’t as lucky. La Dee Da bodies are slender like Monster High Girls, which means most of their clothing will not fit Dal as you can see in the above image. However clothes that would fit Dal will mostly work on La Dee Da, though they may be a bit more roomy. Monster High and La Dee Da can of course share clothing perfectly.

So next up I decided to take a closer look at the scalp of the doll to see how well it was rooted. Sadly I cannot say it is rooted very well. It is fairly easy to part the hair and see large gaps between plugs. The good news is this can be solved with some additional rooting which is easy to do. Also apparently the La Dee Da dolls who are styled with their hair up are worse off in the rooting department.

Well I think that’s about it for my review/comparison. I plan to customize this girl, so I will have a few more posts about those kind of things coming forthwith. 😉

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Barbie Sweet Roses Fridge – Refurbishment

One of my aunts is an antique dealer and knowing I was trying to put together a playscale dollhouse, she kept an eye out for old dollhouse furniture for me and found some of the Barbie Sweet Roses furniture from 1987. She actually found more than the fridge for me, there is also a kitchen set, a cabinet, sofa, chairs and a few other things, most of which are from the Sweet Roses collection. Anyway I decided to tackle the fridge first as I have been wanting a new fridge since I kinda mucked up the repaint of the hot pink barbie fridge I had.

This Sweet Roses fridge had been in an attic and it has yellowed with age and heat. I know that originally the fridge was white, and inside there is some light pink detailing. The great thing about this Barbie fridge is that it’s quite a bit deeper than the current barbie fridges on the market, which means it can hold more cute re-ment food! But more importantly this Barbie Fridge from the 80s is more to scale than the newer fridges, meaning when Pullip goes to open the top freezer, she will actually be looking into the freezer and not looking at the top of the fridge. This old fridge is also much better put together as well, for example the shelves inside are nice and level and don’t sag like the latest fridge does. XP

So the first stage of refurbishment was to scrub down the fridge which was a little dirty, and to get the old yellowed and torn decals off of it. It took some effort to get the decals off, because the glue was really holding them on there. With the newer fridges, just a 15-30 minute soak in hot and soapy water will pretty much remove the cecals easy, but this one required more elbow grease. In the end after a soak in warm soapy water wasn’t doing the trick, I broke out the isopropyl alcohol and rubbed it down, finally removing the decals.

After removing the decals I noticed that the plastic underneath wasn’t as yellowed as the rest of the plastic, which is unfortunate. You can see it just barely in the pic above. Now this leads to me to decide what to do next. I’ve heard that putting yellowed plastics in a bleach or hydrogen peroxide bath can help remove yellowing, but I’ve also heard that it can make the plastics more brittle. I have also considered a repaint, but after my last failure, I’m not too keen in wrecking yet another fridge. There is also the fact that the way this fridge it put together means I can’t separate parts nearly as easily for repainting either. Whatever I decide to do, I’ll probably continue to post the results here.

For now though I have placed it in my dollhouse kitchen and been messing around with furniture arrangement. My kitchen is really coming along now, especially since my mother found me the brown re-ment china cabinet when she was shopping in Pittsburgh. The dimensions of the Sweet Roses fridge works really well for my kitchen, it fits neatly in the space between the two windows, but I would need to make some sort of cabinet to go in the space between the red re-ment kitchen and the fridge. I would also eventually like to make some red wall cabinets to match and pull the room together more. Still a lot of work to do, but little by little I am getting there. 🙂

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Mature Body 20cm BJD, Doll Values and Other Musings.

Recently I’ve been kind of…er…”pre-shopping” for a new doll. I know I want one, and money-wise I’ve saved and I am close to being able to get a new BJD, or if I wanted, I could already get any Pullip, Dal, Taeyang or Blythe I wanted….well maybe not so much “any” Blythe. Anyhow I’ve been leaning towards just getting another BJD because Pullip and Dal offerings as of late haven’t interested me, plus I have to admit I am a little disenchanted with Pullip since I’ve been having so much body troubles with her. I ended up taking her off of her 25cm SBH because despite all of my efforts her neck was still flopping and since her new wig it became even worse. In the end, I am far more pleased with my Dal, and would probably buy another Dal again in the future, but as of right now, not another Pullip unless a to die for design came out.

Anyhow I digress on my Pullip misgivings…..So I’ve been looking at the possibility of getting a new BJD, and I know that I no longer want anything beyond MSD size. With all of the mature bodied MSDs out there, why would I possibly need a giant 60cm+ doll just to get a more mature body shape? Besides that, I prefer smaller dolls as they are just easier to handle and you have more miniature options available to you, especially since the advent of the American Girl Dolls, and now those larger size Dora dolls. Anyway I am interested now in the even smaller BJD, especially any size that would be a nice fit for my current Pullip house or I would even go so tiny as to get a doll that would work in my 1:12 scale dollhouse that my grandfather built for me. As I got to thinking about it even more, I thought to myself, “I wonder if there are any mature bodied 20cm dolls out there” so I searched and lo and behold there were!

20061211124945_mLimhwa makes a barbie size BJD called ToYou. For a while though they stopped making them, but recently a new ToYou was offered called Sara, and she is quite a beauty. However Limhwa dolls only have certain ordering periods and seem a little difficult to get in that regard, but I will still keep them in mind. I also came across Soom’s Mini Gem series, which again are mature bodied 20cm dolls. I absolutely love their doll called Aren, which you can see in the pic I posted. So I’ve started seriously considering a “barbie sized” BJD because they would work my my new dollhouse and would be easy to clothe. I need to figure out though how easy it is to find tiny wigs and eyes though before I jump into that, and I also have to wonder how difficult doing a face-up on a tiny doll would be….there are these type of factors to consider. Plus I love all those itty bitty tinies out there too. Heh, I know I probably mull over things way too much but when you don’t have a lot of disposable income you tend to really ponder large purchases more. In the end though I probably have a bit of dolly overload from looking at waaaaay too many dolls.

Anyway after looking around for BJDs I also decided to see what people were selling secondhand on DoA and eBay and such and I seem to be noticing a trend in doll values, and that is that they seem to devalue as soon as you buy them. I saw a few people for example selling brand new dollies that were still mostly boxed that they just couldn’t “bond with”. These dollies were being offered at a lower price than what you could buy new at the maker and were seriously comparable in newness. If you have an older dollie before double jointing became commonplace, there is no way you could get full value for your dollie again…or so it seems. You see, as of late I’ve been considering selling my DIM Danbi as I have fallen out of love with the larger dolls and he spends a good deal of time in his box. However I have been reluctant to sell him because he was my first BJD, that and the fact that it looks like perhaps at best I could sell him for $125 less than his purchase price.

Of course dolls like Unoa and such seem to retain their value well, but I find it really funny that Pullip dolls can double or triple in price in 5 years whereas a BJD will most likely devalue. Blythe is another dollie that seems to keep her value too, as dolls that are only a couple years old may already be double their original value or more depending on edition.

Well, I think I’ve probably rambled on enough about dolls, so I think I shall sign off for now….and keep on musing over the possibility of purchasing another doll.

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Dolly Find!

newdesk
I went and did a little thrift store shopping with my cousin when he was out here a couple weeks ago and I found this cute little vintage desk from the 70s! It works great in Edie’s room, and then I was able to move the armoire down into the nearly empty living room, yay. Besides the desk there was some other furniture that came packed together with it, which were a beige armoire and vanity set complete with seat, as well as a small table and chair. These toys were made for a type of doll that was produced back in the early 70s and turned out to be perfect Pullip and Dal sized items because they are a little more oversized than the Barbie furniture and thusly are a better fit due to the added height of the head size on Pullips and Dals.

Anyway I got the whole bag of toys for only $5.00 at my local DAV, so I am going to highly recommend thrift store shopping to search for doll clothes and furniture. The DAV and AmVets are better though than your run of the mill Goodwill because they have more toys and they are packed in plastic bags. Goodwill seems to only have a lot of larger toys. Also it is possible to find bags of dolls/doll clothes as well. I saw a pack of doll/doll clothes there that I was tempted to buy for $3.00, but the bag was heavy on the dolls and had less so much clothes. I think there is a certain amount of luck and timing to get a good find, but when you do it will totally make your day! It totally made my day to find that little desk, which subsequently I researched online and came to find that it is actually worth around $50-$60 these days! (O-O)!!

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Dolly Find – Eraser Miniatures

crazerasers

Ack! I realized that I have been neglecting this blog! Lately I’ve been trying to focus a little more on my comic work, so it’s making my other hobbies suffer. I am hoping though to be able to have a chance this weekend to play around with my dollhouse and the new miniatures I have gotten for it. Then maybe I can post some pics! I also have a DIY Pullip Bed post I need to make at some point as well…..Anyway on with the eraser miniatures though.

I found these “crazerasers” in the Easter section at Target the other day. They are around with all of the Easter Basket toys. Anyhow these are the perfect scale for Pullip & Dal, and they are cheap at only $1.19 a set. Besides the two sets seen here they also had a bathroom item set, some sports sets and another food set that I have forgotten about. Now as cute as these are there are a couple drawbacks, but I think the drawbacks can be forgiven for the cheap price. Drawback one is that the little separate pieces, like the sausages in the fry pan, actually have a little nub underneath them which plugs into a hole in the skillet. If you, like me, do not want the nub, you could just carefully carve it off with a Xacto blade since they are erasers. The other drawback is that they are going to need some trimming, as some pieces will have a little fringe at their seam edges from the molds. Again though that is easy to take care of with an Xacto blade.