Eye...bleach?

 So I made Riley a little shirt the other day. 

It's the Carpatina men's shirt pattern, not bad for $5. The collar needs to be adjusted, but not too bad for a test run. 

But, when I was trying to get his wig to look less like a butt, I noticed something.

Hey, bud, you feeling okay? Because your eyes look like maybe your liver isn't working too well. 

There's no real history I could find of Magic Attic dolls having their eyes yellow, but the main connection I had to people in this hobby for these specific dolls was shut down when Yahoo groups shut down.

I dropped it in the doll section of my pattern school discord, but most people who do dolls there are Monster High modders. They just kind of tolerate me because I'm general manager of the server.

Everyone knows the general story of these dolls (they were good, the company went through Some Shit, then they were bad, then the company shut down) and they wanted to know if any of my other dolls had yellowed eyes, and I just hadn't noticed.

Keisha, Chloe, my Alison, and Megan are all fine. I was expecting Megan's to go yellow since she's newer than the Alison that's now Riley was, but I was thinking that maybe with the wigged hair they got better eyes? 

As you can see, my Alison's eyes are just fine, which makes me want to say that it's probably NOT about being stored wrong, since I think I did everything wrong someone can do to preserve a doll. 

And, unfortunately, while I have no idea where she sits on the age range of these, it looks like Rose is also having some liver problems. I don't know what kind of problem these kids get up to when I'm not paying attention. At least they're not Elsie Dinsmore. 

I'm considering trying to retrobirte these, since I've done that before with keyboards, and dolls and keytars are both the same thing in the way of me owning too many of them for no decent reason. So we can try that, since it'll probably not be terrible if it doesn't work out. I already have 30vol crem peroxide so I just need a sunny day. I'll keep you posted.

This is, as we said in my group, literal eye bleach.

Apparently, Life of Faith (a "pro christian values" American Girl alternative) dolls have an even worse eye defect:

Sleep well, kiddos.

Reading more MAC and I have so many questions.

 

Okay, so in Alison Walks the Wire, we learn that going through the mirror can sometimes give the girls magical talent. Do they know that talent? I assume they don't get to keep it. In the epilogue of this book, Alison talks about having the confidence to act like she's walking the wire when she's giving a speech. Anyway, I think that's pretty cool, though if the experiences that they go through in the mirror are things that also happen in real life, and don't happen in parallel dimensions, then that has some weird implications.

How to identify that these books happened in the 90's is partly that an elderly woman trusts five 10-year-olds to know where the keys to her house are hidden.

How good of friends do you need to be with an old lady before it's not weird when she jsut reaches out and touches your hair? I've had strangers in starbucks touch my hair without asking and it's frankly just awful.

I can't tell who is who in this picture because they're not color-coded. I need Megan and Heather to wear pink and yellow or else I can't tell who is who.

I noticed in this thumbnail of Jane in a Land of Enchantment that it also looks a little weird because Jane's outfit is completely uncolored. There's no way they'd release that as an outfit and have it all be sepia tones. This adds evidence to my theory that these book covers were never completely finished. When you compare this thumbnail to other thumbnails from the books, you realize that it looks very different. I'd still love to uncover the original source for these book covers. How did they get on the internet? 

And inb4 "they have ISBN numbers," it's not uncommon to get an ISBN before the book is published. 

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So, here's my magic attic questions

1. When they go through the mirror, are those adventures happening in the same reality as the one the girls live in, or is it a split into a parallel universe. Megan meets a unicorn in one, so they either definitely can happen in a parallel universe, or unicorns are canon in the world that's also the world where Alison get reading tutoring. I don't know which one is more interesting.
2. The girls often get skills that allow them to perform things that normally take very long times to learn correctly.  This makes the adventures fun and helps the stories work, but how does it work? In Alison Walks the Wire, it's sort of spelled out that she doesn't get her wire walking powers until after she reads a book. 
3. How does time pass on one side of the mirror versus another. It seems like most adventures seem to take about two days of adventure time, but no one has ever asked why the girls were missing for multiple days in the attic. From this, we can assume that a trip through the mirror takes max a couple of hours, or just a normal amount of time for a child to get bored playing dress up. 

I'm sure I'll come up with more questions. I love these books, and picking at their plots doesn't mean that I don't like them. In fact, one of the ways that I show media that I love it is to overthink it. Looking at the small details like this shows an appreciation for the fine parts of the work. Thinking about the story allows you to find small things that the writers and production team put in. I hate when people tell me "You're putting too much thought into this," because, like, HELLO, have you ever met Shakespeare fans?  No one ever tells dramaturgs that they're thinking about the Bard too much. Why am I not allowed to think about my favorite books the way that professionals get to look at classic literature? Why do people assume that when I'm picking apart a book, it's because I hate it, or want to break it.

Let's take a video game like The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This is a video game with a story, and if you play the game all the way through, you get to see the whole story. But this is also a game with a world that the game takes place in, and you can explore that world. You get the main plot when you just play the game, but there's details that you experience, that aren't part of the main plot, but that are nonetheless worth experiencing. Telling someone that they can't think about the world the books are set in is like telling someone that they can't play any of the mini-games or do anything other than the main quest. And when you're someone who has played the whole game and learned every secret and done 100% playthroughs of the game, what do you do? Well, some people data-mine the game, which is going through the game's code and assets and looking for new things, or looking to understand how some things work. Some people write fan fiction. Some people draw fan art. Some people build things like randomizers, which mix all the items up and force them to complete the game in new ways. It's totally fine to take something you love, and try to expand on the world that it's in, and try to change it so that you have more to experience in a world that you love.

A line of play dolls was made for people to create new stories and experiences about. If you give a child a doll and they only re-enact the books word-for-word, that'd be strange. We want people with the dolls to dress them up and change their clothes and build them stories and play with their hair. Reading the books and trying to understand them and build the world they're in is part of loving the dolls, their stories, the characters, and their world. 

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Reading some books again

 I don't remember the last time that I read some Magic Attic Club books, but I know they were the first books I ever realized I could sit down and read entirely in one day. I think reading one in a single sitting made me think that they were probably "below your reading level" and that I shouldn't be reading them. As a kid, I tested in the top tier of reading comprehension (accelerated reader program) back in like 6th grade, and it proceeded to ruin my entire middle school and high school private reading. This was because books I was interested in, and books that were "complex" or "challenging" enough for me were not the same books. I think that any program that lets a weird little neuroatypical kid max out their system when they're 12 years old is probably pretty flawed. This system also had a really horrible setup where I was expected to read a lot of books where my ability to understand the words and the scenes was okay, but my emotional ability to process the scenes was not ready. 6th grade me was not ready for The Outsiders, even though it was "below my reading level" based on vocabulary. For those of you who haven't read The Outsiders in a while, a lot of that vocabulary is used for the main character to describe the changes that happen on his friend's face when his friend dies after being rescued from a fire, a fire that the narrator escaped, and the guilt that he feels for staying alive. FOR KIDS! Thank fuck that my parents were close to me and what I was reading, because my 6th grade teacher didn't do too much monitoring as long as the books were the correct level in the AR program. This is important because, when 12-year-old me was told, "Yeah, it's fine, you're ready for this book," and the book was The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin, my dad was able to sit down with me and talk about specific words starting with N, the history of these words, and how a book might use those words and that doesn't make it a bad book, and it doesn't mean the book should be changed, but it also is a word that you never ever ever all your white little ass to say. This was a program that said that Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was below my reading level. I think about that book a lot, so I'm glad that I read it, even when I didn't get any credit for reading it.

I think that the Accelerated Reader program also probably taught me to write in horrible run-on sentences. I'm sure that the program would have been good if the teachers were informed about it and didn't use it to just wipe their hands of teaching students adequate reading. It probably worked really well for the kids who tested below like 9.0 in 6th grade. But all it did was give me guilt that I was doing something wrong when I read books that I wanted to read.

Anyway, archive.org, a service we don't deserve, a service too good for this world, has eight of the books available to read. They're scans of library books, and one had an AR reading level of 4.2 on it, making it "below my reading level" by 8 levels. But them being online saves me, an adult, the trouble of buying a bunch of children's books and then figuring out where to keep them.

Sidebar, any time I talk about finding out where to keep something, I need you to read it with the desperation that Jonathan Coulton sings "you just get what you want and we'll find some place to keep it," in Alone At Home. As someone who now owns all the Magic Attic Club dolls plus one custom, I have a chronic place of "where does this go when it's put away?"

Anyway, I told myself that I wasn't going to sit down and read all of them at once. So, I showed some restraint, and only read three of them. 

Something that I didn't fully process, because I was a child when I was reading these before,

So here's a book report, since all books follow a nice formula:

Rose's Magic Touch

Real-world problem: Rose wants to be in the choir, but has stage fright. She doesn't know how to tell her friends that she is afraid of trying out, so she lies and says she doesn't want to join.

Elaborate costume: Pink sequined tuxedo with a top hat. Rose wears jeans at one point too. I don't know, story wise, where she gets the jeans.

Adventure: Rose is an assistant at a big televised magic show rehearsal. She and the adult assistant of the magician have lunch. Rose learns that magic is about knowing the secret that makes it work and putting on a good show. Assistant has to leave very suddenly to see her grandfather, and Rose has to be the assistant at the show. The magician thinks that she can't do the big final trick, but she jumps in to do it anyway, because actions are louder than words. The magician appreciates her and that when she said she could do it, he should have trusted her. Rose goes home and tells her friends that she is afraid to audition. 

My thoughts: I was thinking that a lot of this wasn't really dated, and then Karla pulls a stunt with an ashtray on a outdoor cafe table. That's a little bit dated. I'd also forgotten that trips through the mirror actually made a space in their worlds for the people. How does this work? In The Secret of the Attic, they go back in time to Ellie's actual childhood. Ellie's mother, however, knew who Keisha and Heather and Alison and Megan were. How does this work? From the point of view of Ellie's mom, was there always people in that role, and they were overwritten by the Attic Four when they went through the mirror? Or did the role not exist until they went through the mirror? What happened after they left? Did Ellie's mom ever go, "oh hey what happened to the four girls that went into the attic and vanished?"?

Moving on, I decided to go to Jewel of the Sea Cruise, because it was the last book that was actually written for the series.

The Jewel of the Sea Cruise:

Real world problem: It's Ellie's birthday, and the kiddos can't find a good way to surprise her. They craft an elaborate party and then remember that they only have like $90 between the five of them. I mean, this was 1999 dollars, which is like $160 when we account for inflation. Pretty nice for a group of five 12-year-olds. When I was 12 years old I was too busy being mentally scarred by the books that an infant computer system expected me to read and without adult oversight to keep the robots in check. I sure didn't have $100.
The outfits: There was only one outfit set for this, which was the party dresses. However, the story also describes a pajama set and a series of clothes that they'd wear when they go on a touristy Jamaica island excursion. This includes all of them getting their hair braided and with beads. Now, all of the MAC girls have quite long hair, and according to Dr Google, it takes like 4 hours to braid all of everyone's head, so I'm guessing that this is just a couple of braids? I'm just thinking about this from a merchandising point of view, items they could sell with this set. It's pretty normal for a MAC book to fully and firmly describe the costumes and outfits, since that's their jobs, but this book had the descriptions get in the way of the plot.
Uh. Plot. Okay. "Plot": The girls find themselves on a fancy cruise. They meet two other girls who are chronic pranksters. There's another girl who's an asshole. The girls go on a few disconnected adventures about OoH Boat Cool Let's Be on a Boat. They come back and the asshole girl is crying because her dad forgot her birthday every year since she was five years old. They throw her a birthday party and realize that what mattered to her was having someoen remember it. The girls go back home and realize that the perfect party to throw Ellie was to have them there and spend the time with her. 

This book took me about 20 minutes to read and it was a freaking slog. I was going to sit down and read one, and then go have a normal evening, but I had to sit and read another book because this one was so uneventful. If you took this book and took out all the descriptions of costumes, the plot gets really thin. There's not a strong sort of narrative going on. Back in Rose's Magic Touch, we have a constantly moving story. As soon as she goes through the mirror, the eventual closing of the story is established. We know from the first beat of the adventure that they're going to have the show on live TV, and she needs to be ready for it. As the book develops, she starts to feel more confident in her ability to do that, and then things change that force her to test herself and push herself out of her comfort zone. From the start, we're going to a point.

Meanwhile, on the Jewel of the Sea, uh,

*googles if you italicize boat names*, uh,

Meanwhile, on the Jewel of the Sea, the plot has no drive. They show up. A bunch of stuff happens. In the third act, they establish the conflict. Two pages later, they resolve the conflict. You wouldn't think that a book that's not even 100 pages of large text and pictures would be able to slog and drag, but it does. They don't come in with a goal in mind. That kind of could make sense in terms of the world of the play, but it doesn't make for a compelling tale. This was just a description of things people did. Remember when I said that these books were probably outlined, and then written at the same time as the collections were being built? That means that, at some point in the concept, they had built the collection they wanted to have, and had to put them into the story. This feels like no work was put into anything beyond describing the collection. 

Much like the Magic Attic (Club) doll line, the Magic Attic Club books really tapered off with a whimper. We never get the books promised to us of Alison in a medieval time with two fun outfits for one book. We don't get Heather at Fashion Week. We get Rose and Megan's stories from that last collection, but we don't get a last group story, introduction of the new character we'd been promised, or any of that. This book as a last group adventure was a real disappointment. If this was the first book in this series that I'd read as a child, I would have been so disappointed, and probably written off the whole series. I think the biggest insult that I can give to a book series is "this book would have made me never want to read the rest," so I don't say that lightly.

Okay, so, let's go back to where we started! I had to read a third book to just get the Jewel of the Sea Cruise, which, hang on. I think I'm still punctuating that wrong. The Jewel of the Sea Cruise. Italics within italics are underlined. Great. So, I wanted to see if the first books were as pandering to the doll line as Jewel was. 

The Secret of the Attic. 

Real world problem: Okay, since this book needs to establish the world, it does deviate a little bit from the formatting. There's a few things, like Heather being unsure how to tell her friends that she doesn't celebrate Christmas. But a lot of the real world scenes aren't as much problems as they are setup. A lady moves in across the street, but it's a family home, so she had lived there before, probably for many years. She knows Megan and Heather's parents. The kids find a key that's hers, and their parents encourage them to return it. The parents know what the key is, but don't tell the kids. This real world scene establishes what the attic is, who is in charge of it, what the rules are for using it, and why the whole scene seems to be okay with the family. It establishes rules like "time within the adventure doesn't map out to time in the world they left" and also establishes that the things they did in the adventure can directly impact the world they left. If they travel in time, things they did in the past can travel forward wiht them. 

OMG outfits you guys: We get starter outfits, snow outfits, and party outfits. As a side note, these party outfits in the illustrations are the most 90's party dresses I can imagine. I think I probably had a real life one that looked exactly like Keisha's. 

BTW this book also establishes that if they're wearing the wrong shoes for an adventure, the mirror will provide the proper ones. Shout out to the mirror not making Heather channel Models Doing Ballet for the whole adventure. Good job, Mirror. Oh, this is a book report. Hang on.

So here's the thing about this book: it makes sense on its own. It stands up on its own. It's got some engaging bits, and everything that happens either leads into another thing happening, or resolves something that previously happened. Nothing just happens. It's a story. 

I know that, in the beginning, doing things like donating these books to libraries was a marketing move. The books in the back have information about how to get catalogues that feature dolls of the girls. In order for that to work, they really needed books that sold the story. If people love the story, they'll love the dolls. 

That's part of what this series means to me. From the very beginning of owning the doll, I wanted to make stories for her. That's what a doll is, to a kid. It's a thing to make stories with, or for, or about. The costumes were always part of the story, made real. 

Anyway, there's some weird diversity message when Megan says that she's different because she's got red hair. I don't remember if Heather being Jewish ever comes back. 

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In doll world, I stopped by the craft store and got some Testors Dullcote and we're going to spray the shiny spots on Keisha that were left by someone using solvents on her. Hopefully, that works out okay.

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Update: I just realized that searching "Magic Attic" instead of "Magic Attic Club" on archive.org really opens the results up. There's like 28 of the 38 books up there. So, I know what I"m doing on my lunch break for the next month. 

Sleep well, kiddos. Remember that just because Great Aunt Pink says the fuck word that it doesn't mean you're allowed to.

EDIT: I can't believe that I forgot to mention this, but I'd totally never realized as a kid that all the art in the books is paintings! I love looking at the brush strokes and how they rendered everything. I love when I can see a canvas texture through it, or look at how they did washes of color. I think child me went "obviously that's an illustration" and left it at that. So many book illustrations now are done digitally, that I think in my head that was just how these were. I love digital art, and might be posting some on this blog, but it's so cool to me to be able to tell that it's a painting.

Okay so I did it

 One of the weird things about ebay is that you can bid on something, and then you're committed to it. So, if, say, between when you place a bid just kind of idly in the bathroom at work and when the auction ends, say, your car needs major repair, well, you still need to pay that even when you wish you wouldn't.

But here we are. Chloe Jane the Face Stealer.

So I now have every doll in the Magic Attic Club line, plus a custom one. We can stop now.

I know I said I didn't really want Chloe, but I actually owned Chloe very shortly, and my sister and I were kind of mean to her, and that's not fair, so here I have her.

Don't tell her, but right now I really wish I had the money I spent instead. Oh well, here's where we are. Dolls can't hear so she doesn't know I said that.

I think that her "I'm from a place where people surf!" idea and teenager looks didn't really appeal to us at the time, since we're from California and it doesn't have the same appeal. I believe one of her legs fell off and then my mom threw her away.

 

This Chloe's definitely been in storage for a while, because her head is determined to stay at a specific angle.

Also as a weird note, this Chloe was sold to me with nothing but her wrist tag, barrette, hair net, and undies. That's not weird. I know a lot of people split the starter outfit off the doll to sell separately. It's that her undies are leopard print. I had to take a lot of nonsense fashion classes for college (don't get me wrong, fashion isn't nonsense, but looking at what kind of chi clothing has while reading an awfully-illustrated self-published textbook my teacher's best friend wrote that I paid $89 for was nonsense) had this long bit about how leopard print is 100% sexual all the time. The class I took was BS and I know it, but it still seemed like a weird pattern to pattern a child's under clothing with.

I'm probably reading too much into that, and if any of you reading this are kids, I'm sorry that I said that. Just remember that no good person on the internet wants you to talk about your underpants online, and if someone asks you to, that's a stranger danger moment.

On a lighter note, I'm not officially unable to say "undies" without hearing "togs, togs, togs, UNDIES." I'm not even from New Zealand.

My Chloe to-do starts with getting her a shirt that isn't branded with another doll line's name. I'll figure out the rest from there. 

I know I don't normally like buying dolls in really good shape, but there's not a lot of options with Chloe.

New wig fun

 So, back when I ordered the big lot of 4 MAC dolls on ebay, one of them was a Marian-era Alison. I already have an Alison doll, who is mine from my childhood, so I didn't really want a second one. In addition, there are three different kinds of MAC hair, and the Marian-era have the worst. The majority of the MAC dolls had wigged kanekalon hair (kanekalon is a modified acrylic fiber that you find in a lot of human wigs), but for a time near the end of the brand's life, they had rooted saran hair. Saran is just not nice hair to play with, and when it's rooted then it either comes out all the time or is very difficult to style. When Charisma bought the doll line from Marian, the only real thing they did with this line was to swap from rooted saran to wigged saran. The diameter of a saran hair fiber is much smaller than a kanekalon wig fiber, which makes it much more prone to tangles and other problems. My Megan is a wigged saran Charisma doll, and Alison #2 was a rooted saran Marian doll. The other four are all wigged kanekalon, and nice and robust.

I was going to take a picture of kanekalon hair next to Megan's saran hair, but it's too much of a pain to detangle and rebraid the saran. Just trust me, it's worse. Anyway, I say "was" a rooted saran doll because it doesn't have rooted hair anymore. A while back, I cut all of it off and replaced it with a doll wig I got off ebay. This created Riley, my Magic Attic Club original character. 

Anyway, upon realizing that maybe I'm going to get back into this hobby, I just kept feeling like I wasn't getting everything I wanted out of that character. So, I was at work, hiding in the bathroom because a customer I hate walked into the door, and I had an idea. So I bought a wig.

For the curious, Magic Attic wears a 11-12 wig, and a 10 is too small. 

Add some darker eyebrows and a few freckles, and I still have a Magic Attic Club OC named Riley, but he's going to serve a different role in the story. Not sure what it is yet, but there's no official Magic Attic Club boys, so we'll figure something out.

I forgot that, right before I put these folks away, Toys Were Us happened, and I bought a TON of Journey Girls clothes for them. In my head, they were all still dressed in the best of the 90's and early 2000's. So, here's a picture collection.

Just six dolls...for now.

Something fun about each of them:

Heather: The part in Heather's hair actually has a skin top. It's not a changeable skin top, but if you look, there's a little line of fake skin to make it look like her hair isn't a wig. My sister had Heather at the same time that I got Alison, but I don't know what happened to her Heather and all her accessories (though I have a few of Heather's accessories with my doll stuff...my sister is just a year older than me and we had a pretty established "your side/my side" "mom, she's stealing my stuff!" situation going on, so this is a bigger crime than you'd think...oops)

Alison: This is a pre-Knickerbocker Alison. Knickerbocker released Rose when they bought the line, and I know that I had this Alison before Rose was released. I remember that my sister and I didn't like Rose's face. I was six years old in 1997 when Rose was released, but my Alison has the jean jacket meet outfit, so she's definitely the 1996 model. Among various things, this Alison went to the Magic Attic Club doll hospital at one point when her arm fell off. She's missing her left index finger and I have no idea where it is, but I believe it was lost back when we lived in the house that we moved out of in 2000. Safe to say, short of taking an arm off another doll, she's just going to miss her finger. She also is going to be wearing a hat almost 100% of the time, because she's got many bald spots, and parts where budding hairstylist me felt she needed some trimming. Emotionally, I can't re-wig her, because child-me put so much effort into destroying playing with her hair.

Megan: This Megan has the Marin face sculpt, which was the last change that happened to the doll line before it was ended. I'm really glad I have this sculpt, actually, because it means I have more variety in the faces. I may or may not have big plans for her hair to not be...like it is...She's got wigged Charisma-era saran hair, but crap is crap, folks.

Rose: My sister and I had a firm "they changed and so now it sucks," mentality about a lot of our interpretation of MAC things, so when they announced Rose, we decided we didn't like her. That's really a bummer, because looking at her now, I really like her. I'm also a little embarrassed to think about how we just mentally bullied the new girl out of our play pretend games just for being new. Even back in 1997, I felt her face sculpt was a bit too different from the other four girls, and she didn't fit in with the line as well. Having Marin-sculpt Megan does help a little bit with the "everyone has the same face" issue. If there's any kind of makeup or vinyl color difference between Rose and the 2003 "Rosa" rebranding, I might get Rosa as well, just to stop this from being quite as monotone of a group of kids. On the other hand, the idea that you can just change a doll's heritage just because their vinyl is the appropriate color. Anyway. What do I care, I'm going to buy Chloe Jane the Face Stealer, so.

Riley: Fun story, my sister (who had Heather) has a baby named Ridley, but this doll was Riley before Ridley was even thought of. This wig is an Edward by bbeauty designs and I'm definitely going to order from them again. After all, I've got big plans for Megan's hair. All characterization plots that I had for Riley before will remain. I just wanted a boy in the group. I'm sure that the MAC would have gotten a boy doll eventually, if they'd carried on. Or they'd have burst into flames instead of wimpering out. Who knows. I filled in Riley's eyebrows a little and gave him some freckles with watercolor pencils, but I have to be careful to not smudge that off since it's far from permanent.

Keisha: Oh, Keisha. I can't wait for my restringing kits to get here so that we can get her back on her feet. I'm going to grab some Testors Dullcote at the craft store and, while she's in pieces, I'll spray all her shiny spots with that. I can hit Riley's face while I'm at it. The shininess is definitely some kind of solvent being used to get tape or writing of some kind off her body. Her hair's definitely been cut but I'm having trouble finding a wig that matches this hair texture. Based on how the hair is, I'd guess this is an older doll, but I'm not really experienced in that. It's wigged and it's not saran, her body is the old no-bellybutton body, and her hair's textured and not braided. I'll see if I can maybe trim her hair a little so it doesn't look quite so "a child cut this all off".

That's all for now, going to go on tumblr and explain to people how sewing machines work again. Sleep well.

Got a new doll

Necro-ing this blog for a reason. I always knew that, when the time was right, there'd be a cheap Keisha doll on ebay and I'd also have the money. 

So, finally got this. This poor doll has been through some stuff.

The first notable thing is that her arms are falling off. I placed an order for a specific MAC restringing kit. I once tried to restring my Alison, and I could barely get her back together. This kit was $6, and hopefully it will make the process easier this time. I actually got two kits. If this isn't hard, I'll use the second kit on my Alison, and if it is hard, I have a backup in case I mess up.

When I was looking up articles on how to take care of AG Addy's hair, since I'm not familiar with this texture, I found some articles saying that it's more common to find Black dolls secondhand in really bad states, when compared to white dolls from the same target demographic. I don't have any information to say that happened here, but I hope it didn't.

Her torso and legs are shiny, which the ebay seller said, "shiny from ???" in the listing. It's definitely because there was some kind of writing or sticky something on her, and whoever removed it used a really strong solvent that started dissolving the vinyl. I don't really mind this. It'd be better if she didn't have it, but if she didn't have it, she probably would have been $50 more. 

As I've kind of rambled about previously, I'm not here to be a "everything must be new!" kind of collector. The adult American Girl collectors community is just kind of alarming, and I don't want to be that. I just want to have some dolls to tell stories with and make clothes for.

For those of you who don't know, I have a lolita fashion blog about doing it on a budget. Lolita fashion is a subfashion from Japan where many things are in the $300+ for a dress kind of setup. I'm not in the fashion to impress anyone with my wallet. I'm in the fashion to wear goofy dresses and have some fun. I don't remember why I brought up the blog even though I only brought up the blog three sentences ago. Okay. 

And her hair has definitely been cut. I was initially concerned that a ton of it has been pulled out, but I can only see her wig cap in a few spots, so I think this has scissors taken to it. It's only a few inches shorter than what it looks like stock hair was.

Also, my concerns that I wouldn't be able to take care of and style her hair were just completely unnecessary. I was able to brush it and pull it into a ponytail just like my other doll's hair. I didn't get a good before picture of her hair. My camera on my phone seems to think it's still 2008 and shoot some crazy blurry shit.

Anyway, if AG Addy's hair is anything like this, I think all the waspy adult collectors of American Girl dolls are full of crap when they say that her hair is so difficult and unmanageable and untameable and all that other crap. Which, you know, one of the things about dolls is that they represent people. If you're talking about alien dolls with slinkys for hair, that don't in any way represent people, saying that they're inferior to other dolls because of their hair is probably fine. But when adult women say that a certain doll is inferior to the other ones because the hair requires slightly different styling techniques or something, and that doll's hair represents people's hair in real life,   yikes. 

But y'all already know that. That's much more a reminder for myself than anyone else. I don't really need to say it, but I am, because no one reads this blog. It's more like a diary that I happen to leave open on my coffee table than it is a real blog. The only reader of this blog is going to be me in five years. If you found this blog, please leave a comment. I don't think anyone even uses blogger in 2023, but here I am.

So, anyhow, I got her into some pajamas. She'd been in the ballet tutu for who knows how long, so it's time to not be in the ballet tutu.

So, project registration, fixing Keisha:

1) restring so her arm's aren't coming off.
2) clothes
3) that's about it off the top of my head.

As a closing, I'd like to share with y'all the thing I wrote in my phone yesterday at work:

They think it will be a medieval thing going to the future, but it's extras on a movie set and someone stole an important prop.

They're two bands now and it's a competition.

Someone's a fashion designer
Candy striper
superhero or sidekick
pirates

Ellennellie wtfhername is goes through the mirror to get new clothes for her kids. she's basically a time lord. the parents trust her because one of them went on an adventure in the mirror when they were a kid.

The last thing that I want to say is that I think the "rare" books that only have cover art: 

Heather's Fashion World, The Mystery of the Pharaoh's Tomb, Jane in a Land of Enchantment, and A Tale of Two Alisons were probably all never actually written. Someone on the blogodome says that they have a confirmation from the author that Heather's Fashion World never existed, but I can't find that online. That said, it's really not uncommon in big collection stuff like this for things to be sort of created "out of order". Since the team writing the books and the team making the clothes are different teams, it's entirely likely that someone (or the main team) gets together and comes up with the concepts for the stories, and maybe some rough outlines. Then, the doll team would come up with the collection design. From there, the concepts of the books and the designs of the doll collections would be sent to several people, including whoever is in charge of the cover art. There's a lot of concept art involved in making things like this, and making the cover art would probably be part of the main design process. Interior illustrations can also be made off an outline, well before the actual book is written.
Meanwhile, the writing team is probably several different people, none of whom have any say in the doll design process. They write the story, and go back to it after the doll line is nailed down, and then they add the costume descriptions to the story.

The other reason why I think these books never existed is that the art for Pharaoh's Tomb isn't actually even completed. Alison, Rose, and Megan's clothes are just flat colors. Heather's Fashion World also is just a sort of placeholder texture without shading. It's very likely that the covers were started before the doll lines had been completely solidified. They knew Alison was in shorts and a tank, and Megan was in long sleeves (and obviously they're all color-coded, so you know what colors to use), but there's not a clear answer for what everyone's OG 2001 starter outfits were going to be, so there's no point in rendering the fine details.

In fact, this is probablysomewhat similar to how the books were. They knew what was going to happen, but didn't have any fine details down. 

inb4 "that doesn't look half finished to me", I'm pretty sure they weren't going to release Megan with a bio-luminescent cardigan.

I'd love to see where these images were originally posted, and how they made their way onto the internet. If anyone knows, please comment it. I see the titles and covers all over the place, but I never see the source. 

That's all for right now, everyone. 

EDIT: Okay, it's been about 5-6 hours since I wrote this, and I found something that changes everything:

This is a scan of the 1997 MAC catalogue, provided by Dollightful Dolls.

Text: Fun, Friends, Imagination, and Adventure...
The Magic Attic Club began several years ago as a mother watched her daughter and friends play with their dolls, creating wonderful stories for them. She recognized how this innocent play helped young girls develop and grow, releasing their imaginations to discover much about themselves and others. 

As the Magic Attic Club has grown, we have received many kind letters from young girls and their mothers, fathers, grandmothers, aunts, relatives and friends. The positive response from our customers reinforces our objective to encourage creative play with the dolls and strive for high quality in every product we develop.

I have had the pleasure of watching my own three nieces, Julia (7), Nell (7), and Jane (4), their frineds and many other children experience the Magic Attic Club. The dolls and costumes create hours of play with fun accessories and furniture, and the books take them on wonderful, imaginative adventures. The lessons in values and self-discovery are an added benefit inherent in the Magic Attic Club concept.

The Magic Attic Club is about fun, friendship, imagination, and adventure: five friends who find a trunk full of costumes and a magic mirror through which they go on incredible adventures. Every girl will delight in how their own imagination goes to work, or as we say at the Magic Attic Club: "The real magic is in you." Stay tuned--the magic has just begun!
Christine E Taylor
Division Director.

Did you all catch that? DID YOU ALL CATCH THAT? Okay, so--

*tears down wallpaper, revealing a brick wall covered in photographs with red string connecting the pictures into a convoluted web*

--JANE. Where do we know that name from? That's right, from Jane two paragraphs ago! Also from Jane, nine pararaphs ago! So, if Jane was Jane when she was four in 1997, that means that--

*tacks new piece of red string onto the board, seemingly at random*

--when Jane was new in 1999, Jane was six years old!

This leads me to believe that Jane was potentially a working name or a placeholder. We know from our existing images that Jane is an apparently white girl with hair lighter than Alisons. Is the Pharaoh's Tomb picture, we see her wearing white and pink. WHO ELSE--

*slaps new image onto the board, without pins or tape. It flutters to the ground before anyone can see what it is of*

--DO WE KNOW who is also pale blonde and wearing pink and white!?

*Slaps the board like a car salesman slapping the hood of a car. Several pieces of red string fall off*

That's right! We have hard evidence that Chloe was always intended to be Jane, and Jane was intended to be Chloe, because Jane was obviously a placeholder name, and it was chosen because the Division Director watched her niecea play with the dolls, and the youngest one was Jane, just like how Jane was going to be the newest, and therefor youngest in terms of time in the club, member of the Magic Attic Club. 

Chloe is Jane and Jane is Chloe. Remember that whole spaghetti thing I described about how big franchise things like this came out? It's entirely possible, and I'm going to say likely, that at some point either they changed Jane's name to Chloe to make her a neat coolkid to appeal to the cool kids, or they had never intended for Jane to be anything other than a placeholder name. 

I still don't have a source for the four book covers I posted up there, but since they're not necessarily finished-looking, we don't actually know if they were ever intended for public eyes. The actual typesetting of the titles might be a thing a fan did. 

Also, this section of a poster showing Chloe is proof that she can travel through time and space.

 

Anyway, let's make it clear that the last doll released in the series is now officially named Chloe Jane. As you can see from these high-res images, Chloe and Jane are 100% identical.

It's been five years but let's post here again.

 I felt like a couple of things were missing in my life. One was old fashioned blogger-style blogging, and one was Keisha in my MAC collection. 

So, well, it's been five years, but let's catch up.

I've said it a few times, but I don't have these dolls to collect, so I'm a little bit picky about what I do decide to take. And by that, I mean that I want to buy dolls in really bad shape. I don't want to take a nice doll that a collector would want, because I want to have them to tell stories with and make clothes for. It doesn't really matter to me if I have all of Megan's accessories from the 2002 magazine.

So, anyway, I found a Keisha with some chopped up, ripped-out hair, over on Ebay. She's in the mail and on the way to me. While I was doing other things, I also got some wigs. I don't know if they'll fit, because instead of ordering wigs at an appropriate place and time, I ordered them at work, in the bathroom.

It's been five years, so a quick note: I've gone up in the world of entry-level sewing-related jobs. I now work _sales_ and get _commission_ and _health insurance_ and _OVERTIME_.  Turns out the major differences between working part time for the big box fabric store (which we call Green Store over on my other blog) and working for a small business that sells exclusively sewing machines is kind of a lot.

But I still want to come up with characters, and stories, and another world. And I want to make clothes for that world. I spent a long time building a world with my friend a long time ago, and I have been building one for the past few years, and it's time to start another world. As much as a tiny band that accidentally makes it big is fun, and time traveling androids just want to go to high school in the 90's is fun, maybe I can do another one.

You've been in a daydream so long that the dream has eclipsed the day.

So, I got a couple of wigs. One was a Monique Denise in carrot. Many years ago, I decided that the Monique Denise was the proper wig if I was going to rewig my Alison doll. Now, I really want that Alison to keep her thin little remainder of her hair. As a kid, I pulled all that hair out with love. I pulled out all her hair because I was a kid who brushed it, and who left her doll on the floor, and who tangled up the hair, and who harshly brushed it back out impatiently. All of that is part of what she is, like how all her limbs are loose and she can't stand up. However, there's a nice girl on the team who has a fun face sculpt, but who has some really awful saran hair that I hate. So my Megan has a new wig in the works. 

The other wig is for Riley, who was once the wigged Saran version of Alison. This saran hair that was used late in the life of this brand was genuinely awful. I cut all this Alison's hair off, and put on a different wig, but it's not really suiting the doll, and the story needs something else. So, Riley the name is staying. The rest, not so much. 

I'm going to see how this Keisha looks when she gets here. Hopefully, that'll scratch my "gotta buy stuff" itch that I've got going on, but who knows. Maybe I'll make another bad decision.

 

For doll tax, here's Helena right now, lying on my bed. I don't remember where she was before, but she now has a bra and some pantyhose (handmade) and then a very cheap BJD outfit that I got off ebay for $9. Her wig's been dyed a little bit darker, and she has some great and slash or terribly jointed hands. Great because they're wonderful looking and I can do so much with them. Terrible because, no matter how carefully I put her into her cigar box that I store her, she comes out with a minimum of one dislocated finger joint.

Anyway, I'm glad I finally owned up to having her for years and never making her an outfit. I feel like I like her so much better when she's got some simple clothes covering up her knees and elbows. She looks a little lot like Rick Astley, but I can live with that.

There is a map in my room, on the wall of my room
And I've got big, big plans
But I can see them slipping through, almost feel them slipping through
The palms of my sweaty hands....
...You say "I hate you," and you mean it
and "I love you" sounds fake
It's taken me so long to figure that out
I used to love the taste. I would do anything for it
Now I'd do anything to get the taste out of my mouth
And you seem so confident, but I hear you crying in your sleeping bag
But you were broken bad yourself, and you were mad as hell
You felt if you had done anything, with anyone else
it would have worked out so well
But you are an artist, and your mind won't work the way you want it to.
One day you'll be washing yourself with hand soap in a public bathroom
and you'll be thinking
How did I get here?
Where the hell am I?

She sees these visions. She feels emotion. She says I cannot go. She sees my plane in the ocean. And "What about your friends? Don't you love them enough to stay?" I say, "If I don't leave now, then I will never get away. Let me be a blue raft on a blue see. I'll blend right in."

If you're someone who set up alerts on this blog, please comment. Hello. Nice to see y'all. Welcome to the current home of at 30- or 40- year-old's Magic Attic Club Alternative Universe, population me and several inanimate objects.