MAC: Megan's Hair

Megan has a lot of hair and some of it needs some serious work.

Her bangs have the stair-step effect going on. This happens when you cut all of the bangs to one length, and then curled. Because the inside of a circle is smaller than the outside of a circle*, the inside/bottom of the bangs ends up longer than front bit. Because dolls have either wefts of hair or rows of rooted hair, their hair gets stair-steppier than ours would, but this happens to humans too.

You can see it sticking out right here. Handily, it's pretty easy to fix.
The first step is to make a terrifying gag shield for the doll's faceup.
You can see in this picture how it looks like she has another set of bangs under her bangs?

You tie back some of the bangs. Straight lines are easy when your hair's on tracks.

Then you tie back another layer until you're down to the bottom layer. In this picture, I'd already started cutting.

And then you just keep cutting! Doll heads are smaller than people heads, so it's hard to get the ends feathered out as quickly, so just keep going. Her bangs are pretty freakin' short here. Remember, if they're not shorter than you want them to be, they're too long.
Take off your faceup shield every once in a while to figure out where her bangs are realitve to her eyebrows

Put the next layer down. Square it off so it's notably longer than your first layer. Get to feathering that fucker like there's no tomorrow.

This is a bad picture. You'll see better ones later. Whatever. It's late and I'm full of anger and dont' care anymore.

____
*the same distance traced along the circumference of a circle with a large diameter and a circle with a small diameter will cover a smaller percentage of the large circle than it does the small circle, however you want to say it. I had a teacher come in to work to buy fabric and she laughed at how I draw the number 8 and now I'm self conscious about not knowing what I knew in 4th grade

18": Five's a Party!!

So many dolls!!

So, this is what my Ebay Disease got me. One one or two or three, but four new Magic Attic dolls. Old (kanekalon hair) Heather and Rose, and new (wigged Saran hair) Alison and Megan. Megan has the new face sculpt, which I'd suspected from the two pictures the ebayer posted, and I'm very excited about that!

For those of you who don't have the history of the Magic Attic Club memorized, here's a quic, review, as it relates to these dolls:

• Back in the late '90's, the Magic Attic Club was one of American Girl's main rivals. Their dolls are full vinyl, and much slimmer than the soft-body American Girl. 
• The Magic Attic girls--Alison, Heather, Keisha, Megan, and Rose (Chloe doesn't count, sorry Chloe) were modern-day girls who could transport themselves to adventures by putting on outfits their elderly neighbor had, and looking in the mirror in her attic. The adventures range from modern day (Keisha's cheerleading adventure, Alison's hiking, Heather's dressage adventure...), to historical (usually relating to their real-world selves: Heather's persecution as a Jewish girl in Spain under the rule of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, Rose living as a Cheyenne on the prairie), to fantasy (Keisha saving a city on a snowy planet by finding a crystal of power). Each story had an outfit and a series of accessories, and a story book.
• Once American Girl's "American Girl of Today" line started, they ended up being more fierce competition to MAC. Before, American Girl only had historical dolls, but now they were competing in the modern day too. 
• Once Knickerbocker, who owned Magic Attic, started hurting for money, cuts in quality had to be made. They stopped making stories and started just making outfits for the dolls. 
• Another big cut, and one that matters with the dolls that I own, is they made a change to the hair. They went from wigged kanekalon (wigged meaning they have a tiny wig glued to their head, kanekalon being the best fiber for dolls that get their hair played with and what a lot of human wigs are made of) to rooted Saran (rooted meaning tiny holes are drilled in the head and the hair is put in, think Monster High, and Saran being a thinner fiber that sticks to itself--same fiber as Monster High's, who aren't expected to have their hair played with for hours on end and for several years) to wigged Saran after they got noticed for the rooted Saran being crap.
  That's a seriously effed up sentence there but I"m tired and not going to fix it. One of my followers is a teacher. Sorry, Amanda!
• The Magic Attic Club got handed around from company to company. One of those companies thought they could save it and released a new doll (Chloe), gave Megan a new face, gave everyone new starter outfits, and a couple more things. At some point, they were given belly buttons.
• It didn't work.
• Around 2003, there were no more catalogues to sell, and in 2007 their doll hospital closed. When the doll hospital closes, your doll line is officially dead. 

So, it's getting late and now I want to be alone, so let me finish this up quickly and add to it later.

Heather and Rose are the old dolls, with Kanekalon hair. It took me about 11 minutes to brush out both of theirs hair. Kanekalon is great for restyling.

Side note: I somehow still have the original brush that I got with Alison. It's my favorite brush for doll hair. It's got rigid teeth aligned in parallel rows, with the vertical rows spaced out closer than the horizontal rows. It gives me roughly what a wide tooth comb and a narrower comb, depending on how I hold it.

Megan has a lot of hair.

Saran is a bitch and I braided it right after I combed it out.

The city I'm in has marginalized its Black community so much that I couldn't find braid spray even though I went to three stores, but children's detangler spray worked wonders. That stuff's basically propylene glycol in a spray bottle. Saran loves to stick to itself, and so this volume of hair wants to become a giant knot so badly.

Alison #2 also has a comical level of hair:

Remember, my Alison has really thin hair, and originally came with a lot more than you see here. Not as much as Ali#2, though!

Heather and Rose both have the higher quality hair. It looks way better under flash than the Saran. Heather had some weird ends. Some of the ends were three inches longer than the rest of the hair. I trimmed it off.

Here's a picture of Rose next to my Alison, just showing how thin my Alison's hair is. I don't mind, though. It means she was loved. Is loved.

So, speed summary of plans for everyone, and then I'm going to pass out.

• Heather: even out the ends a little more
• Rose: She's just fine how she is
• Megan: Add some layers into her hair to thin out the horzontal width, cut another layer into her bangs to fix the stair step problem she has right now. I'm going to rewig her eventually because I effing hate saran hair. There's a reason why Monster High dolls come with oodles of product in their hair.
• Other Alison: Ebay. If no one buys her, rewig and make a new character to play with my group

Meanwhile Helena is feeling left out. I keep reposing Gooliope and Maddie, but I haven't done more work on painting Gooliope just yet. I'll get back to it when it calls to me.

It's kind of freeing to accept that I'm not in this to "preserve the value" of them or anything. They're dolls for play. I'm going to play with them. Obviously, as an adult, I'm not going to mess them up like I did with Alison, but I am going to do what I want to to make them the characters I see in my head.

I have tomorrow off from work and you can bet your booty I'm going to play barber with Megan. I'm going to do it after I take a lot of photos, of course. Got to document everything and make a real product registration page for each of them.

G'night

18" Dolls: Had to Make It

I couldn't find a doll wardrobe that was big enough to hold my clothes, or even close to big enough, so I made one.

I'm not going to go into the details of how at the moment. It's a sterilite and a dowel and children's coat hangers cut down. I melted the clothes bar hole with a socket wrench and vice grips.

It's just that after reading AG blog after AG blog of adult ladies pissing themselves over the terror that people who can't afford every part of a set might still like their dolls, I wanted to fucking DIY some shit.

I'm in a piss mood right now and I'm just going to go to bed.

Remember, kiddoos, money does not measure your merit. Some people you don't like will have more toys than you and never need to save up for them, and some people you don't like will have to exercise great self control and budgeting skills to just be able to buy a single Monster High doll, and you do not deserve your shit any more or less than either of them. "deserving an AG" or whatever is a thing that exists independently of owning an AG. Not wanting a company to sacrifice quality for the sake of sales is one thing. Not wanting a company to sell at toys r us because it means more people will be able to buy a doll WHOSE QUALITY DID NOT CHANGE is shitty.

So don't sniff down on people who can't afford the doll wardrobe but still want to keep their doll clothes nice. Don't sniff on DIY.

If you've got your head so far up your ass that you think a poor person owning an American Girl doll decreases your ability to enjoy your doll, try shoving it in a little deeper to make room for all your classist bullshit rules that I'm about to tell you to shove up there too.
Fuck, I need to get back into Monster High, where people make more sense.

Things on my mind

Monster High dolls cost a lot less than American Girls, and they mostly don't represent actual human races. BJDs like Helena are often modeled by their owners to be fantasy races. I didn't realize how much this made a difference until I started reading American Girl blogs. When you're in a fandom based around expensive representations of humans, you run into racist and classist shit, often without realizing it, I think.

I'm not going to say anything definite, juust stuff on my mind that's a response to things I've been reading. I'm a white chick from a six figure family. I don't have much of a right to talk about this. I'm not trying to get pats on the head and "good white girl, caring about racism, have a cookie," points. This has just genuinely been bugging me.
The good news is there doesn't seem to be as much of this int he Magic Attic Club fandom, largely because the Magic Attic fandom doesn't exist.
But

Oh man American Girl.

• Changing the packaging to look more like a Barbie or Monster High box makes it less 'special'? Why? Because it makes it feel less expensive? Because it makes it feel cheaper? Because it makes it feel less personal? One of those is a good reason. Why don't you want it to feel cheaper, even if you know the quality of the actual product hasn't changed? Is it because you equate exclusivity to specialness? Is it because you can afford something that's denied to people of lower incomes? There's a difference between saving up for something and being proud that you did and being able to buy a doll on impulse. There's a difference between being able to live a life where you can save up for three dolls a year versus an income where you can buy one doll every three years. If the quality's the same, why does it bother you when it "feels cheap." Does it make you feel poor?
  (Obviously the answer to that can be no, as long as you think long and hard from an objective viewpoint before you buy that)
  ((I also realize that it's fucking hilarious that it comes from ME the same day that I impulse bought $180 of shit. I know I'm in the group I'm bitching about and I think that's part of why it bugs me))
• If it wouldn't bother you if American Girl only released one Black doll every two years (like they are doing) but you'd feel left out if they only released Black and Asian and Indian and Native and all other races, but only released one white* doll every two years, you had better not be an idiot that tells me that "you don't see race."
  If you can understand that two identical students being treated drastically differently by their teacher would end up having different grades in the class**, and if you can understand that even if you "don't see race" and even if you think that Black people are equal to white people, if you can also remember that the KKK has thousands of members nationwide who found their group based on the idea that Black people should die, you can wrap your head around the idea that Black people are treated differently by some members of society, and that them being treated differently by some people means your "I treat everyone the same because they are the same" argument is completely ignoring a big problem.
  The thing that got me on that rambly train of thought is that I realized I know what my hair looks like when I just woke up after sleeping on damp hair, but I don't know what textured hair looks like first thing in the morning, or what someone with textured hair has to do to get rid of bed head.
• Homeless doll isn't normal? Addy's hair isn't normal? Ivy's eyes aren't normal? What does normal mean? Does it mean different from white people? Different from your life? So why should the dolls be exactly like you? Think about that one. 

 And when I say "you" in all of these. I definitely mean "me", but that makes me uncomfortable enough to stop thinking about this, and I KNOW it should be uncomfortable, but I can't learn anything when I'm oiverwhelmed and I shut down. Taking that kind of responsibility to introspect these hard questions is a little too much for me right now, which is really pretty gross when I think about it. This is just so stuck in my head and I had to get it down, so I can read it tomorrow and replace all those "you's" with "me's"

I'm such a shitty understander of shit.

_____
*enough white people have told me "I'm not white, I'm Celtic/Norse/British/etc," that I've realized white isn't a culture, it's a descriptor, so it doesn't get a capital W. Without using those words, a lot of white people have explained to me that it's the way it should be. Also, I'm white, and I don't like the capital W.
**RACISM IS NOT AS SIMPLE OR AS TRIVIAL AS MY METAPHOR. A lot of people, myself included, have trouble grasping a difficult concept, especially because a lot of us were raised in a world where those kind of issues were just not discussed. The way that I try to figure out my emotions is to compare a very difficult concept to a smaller one that I've dealt with personally, and then see if my understanding of that situation can make a big and scary concept like racism into something I can understand my place in. I've found that this technique helps other people who've spent their life being told to ignore a problem and then find out that it's still there even though they pretended it wasn't.
There is no metaphor that can accurately explain the magnitude that is racism. What I"m presenting is scaled back and sanitized of its serious emotional context and it's not fair to people who experience racism every day for it to be explained that way without clarifying that it's a huge problem. It's not all that fair to do it even when I clarify. But this is the only way I've found to get white people who grew up with racism-free blinders to even consider that the idea is real. I know that, for me, thinking about the idea is what got me to actually look at what people of color feel about the issue, and led me to the confused mess that I am today.

Alison Saves the Wedding, pt2

[Part 1 is here]

So, Alison's got her shiny, clean dress, so now she's only missing three pieces.

Two and a half if you count the fact that she has one of her shoes. One shoe is still zero pairs of shoes, though, so I'm not counting that.

It's really a pity that I lost the other shoe, because Alison's wedding shoes are probably the prettiest MAC shoes I own.  They're a sturdy vinyl. They don't have any seams except the back one, so I think they'll (cross fingers) be pretty easy to replicate.

And now, for her petticoat/slip.

Spoiler alert, it looks like this.


Since I recently got a pretty devastating bout of Ebay Disease that's trashed my bank account until my next paycheck (and I got paid on Friday, bad news), all the doll clothes I make for a while are going to come off the Wall of Fabric.

As you can see on the left, the wall of fabric is en restaro right now, due to the water-gushing-from-my-ceiling incident. At the bottom shelf of the case on the left is my box of fabric flowers, so I'll have to unbury that eventually. Thankfully, Clone Zero, my Wheeler and Wilson D-9/W9 treadle sewing machine from 1901 was uninjured, even though most of the water fell on him.

Basically everything I own has a name. It's a bit childish. I'm also a 25-year-old woman who plays with dolls and has a blog where she shares stories about their made-up lives.

Where were we? Right. Weddings.

 So, up there on the wall of fabric was a double-layer of nylon crystal organza. It had been sewn together at the top. I'm sure I bought it for petticoats or something. It's not a Layer Cake Dress leftover because the texture's wrong. I have a lot of fabric on the Wall that I don't know where it came from.
Apparently I had started something with this and then just put it on the wall, because I'd already sewn it up.

So, time to pull out Sergestiel and find my cones of thread.

Couple of narrow hems (not rolled hems, narrow hems. Rolled hems don't like working on organza like this, trust me) on the bottom. I hemmed the two layers at different heights, so you could see both layers through the clear fabric.

Then comes the lining, which is a bleached muslin. Eye Dee Kay why I had bleached muslin, because I only buy natural muslin for draping. No real reason, just that it's the same price and I like the way pencil marks show on it better. Okay, one real reason, I like the way pencil marks show up on it better. That's all I need.

It turns out I don't know where most of my stuff on the Wall came from.

After this, it's just gathering the three layers into each other.
Remember the rule, kiddos: Bell shape, gather at the waist, A-shape and you gather at the hem.
You can't see it, but the lining inside has a blue bias tape bound hem. I want to pretend that it's a design call, but I actually just cut it too short (meaning it technically has a bias tape banded hem, but who's keeping score?)
It's elasticized in the back with some really wide 1" elastic because it's what I had and I'm not allowed to buy anything because of aforementioned Ebay Disease.

And here's a work in progress shot on our dear model, though not a very good one because you can't see the poof that the petti provides at all. It honestly doesn't provide a lot of poof, but GDI it says she has one in the catalogues, so she's going to get one.

The ribbon I used for the picture is stiff and way too wide, but it's what I could pull out of the wall of fabric without toppling the whole mess. She'll get a real flower crown pretty soon, but not this paychek unless someone outbid me and saves my sorry butt.

Not sharing on what I bought. That's secret for now.

Also, I have found an absolutely fantastic doll blog, American Girl Outsider. She's well-known in the American Girl community, but I haven't been part of the American Girl community, so I didn't know of her. Anyway, if you'd like to read something more interesting than the backlog of my blog, take a look.

Alison Saves The Wedding, part 1

At some point I owned this set:

(Image thanks to dollightful dolls' scans of the MAC catalogues)

 

Okay, I never owned the table, chair, cake, or place settings (it was $64 in 1997 dollars, and my parents weren't interested in figuring out where my 18" doll furniture would go when it's put away), but I had that dress (with full slip, shoes, and flower crown) and the veil and bouquet.

These days, I have the dress, and one shoe. To be fair, it was one of the first sets that I got for Alison. All of the Magic Attic girls had a full length princess dress, and I think my sister got Heather's at the same time. They made for some fun stories.

After a while, as I grew up, I started storing my Alison things in a cardboard box without a lid. This worked out really well, for the most part.

The only problem was that, between the years of 2004 and 2014, I had an adorable cat named Maggie. Having Maggie was not a problem itself, but Maggie was very special. Maggie spent two years refusing to walk on the floor, and instead jumping between pieces of furniture. We had to start putting her food on the bathroom counter, or else she wouldn't eat. She would express her desire to go into a room by reaching directly for the door knob, like she understood its purpose and just wasn't tall enough to touch it. She spent a good chunk of time sitting in the shower, staring at the wall. My dad swears he saw her teleport several inches one time. And, if the shower door was closed for some reason, she peed on piles of fabric.
Maggie had a stroke and had to be put to sleep just after Christmas of 2014. She was a good cat, and I frequently remind Smudge (the new cat) that she's not as good as Maggie, not yet.

However, this all resulted in me wanting to dress Alison up in her nice dress and finding this on it:

Thanks, Maggie. Glad to know you're still with us in some form.

I definitely had concerns about trying to clean a 10-year-old, irreplaceable dress, especially this one. One of the very annoying things about dresses with overlays is that the overlay can shrink more than the dress, and become too short. The little hearts are flocked onto the overlay, and I was concerned that they could rub off. There's a silk flower that's glued on, and I don't know what kind of glue it is, or how it could react to water, or how it reacted to time. Finally, the under dress is taffeta of unknown fiber, but might be acetate or not be colorfast. If it's not colorfast, it could bleed blue into the ribbon, or the ribbon could bleed pink onto the dress.

But the pee's got to come out, one way or another.

Enter Oxi-Clean. Not only was it Billy May's favorite cleaner, but it's also the cleaner for the job. For those of you who don't know how Oxi-Clean works, here's a quick summary:

• Oxi-Clean is a powder that, when mixed with water, creates a chemical reaction that makes a gentle peroxide.
• Peroxide binds to organic things, like dirt and sweat and urine. Peroxide does not bind to synthetic things, like dye or glue. 
• This is very good for cleaning Alison's bridesmaid dress, because it means the only dye or glue damage will be caused by the water. 
• The fact that Oxi-Clean will keep producing peroxide for six hours means the peroxide won't be used up in the first few minutes of soaking, like it would if you just put H2O2 on the stain. The fact that it only produces it for six hours means there is NO benefit to soaking it overnight.
• Since the peroxide binds with water in addition to binding with organic soils, when you wash the Oxi-Clean out, it takes the dirt and piss away with it. 

That's pretty simplified, but I wanted to explain it somewhat. Science is cool, folks.

 So, the process was simple: Oxi-Clean soak for as long as necessary to remove the visible urine. Wash in cold water with cold water detergent (like Woolite, but I use the Amway brand because my mom's hella into Amway and gifts it to me a lot). Rinse it out as well as possible.

I didn't take pictures, but that's the process.

Since the dress is so small, I got to do my favorite test to make sure all the soap's out. I filled my baby-sized wash tub up with cold water, and put the rinsed-out dress in it for a minute or so. If a lot of soap comes out, I need to rinse it again. If a tiny bit of soap comes out, I need to swirl the water around to get it out, and then be confident that diluting it in 1 gal of water only leaves a negligible amount in. This method isn't really possible with a garment that's human-sized due to the water necessary, but when it's just a gallon it works out nicely.
It's important to get all the soap out. Soap binds to dirt, which is why we use it. If there's soap left in the dress, it'll bind dirt to the dress.

(Lazy final picture taken from my bed, because I didn't want to move)

I dried it flat on a towel until it was just damp, and then put it on a hanger and carefully pulled the overlay down so it'd dry without shrinking and leaving the under dress exposed. I let it dry hanging. The taffeta really didn't want to hold onto water, and that made it dry really quickly.

The overlay didn't shrink, and the fabric flower's still attached just fine. The Oxi-Clean didn't soak long enough to get the flocking in the overlay back to white, but I would rather have it gray than hurt the overall dress.
The satin ribbon on the sash has faded quite a bit, but that's mostly from time, and not from being soaked. It's almost white in some places.
Something about the process has made the hole in the overlay in the back much less visible. I'd guess the process of pulling straight has made it close. Either way, it'll let me close it up without patching it, which I thought I'd have to do before it closed up. It's good news.

Anyhoozie, the dress is pretty much fixed up. I've decided I'm going to make the missing pieces, and maybe do that for all of her outfits. I'm not going on Ebay for a while, since I recently fell victim to Double Ebay Disease and that looks like it's going to cost me $250. Because of this, and because I'm both crafty and getting 20% off everything I buy at the craft superstore, I'm going to be making as much of it as I can. It doesn't really matter to me as much if it's original or not. I just want the whole set to make up for losing it as a kid.

Again, I really don't feel bad about losing all the pieces. The stories my sister and I told about the dolls adventures and all the crazy costume changing shit they did, and the fact that we had fun playing with them makes me happy.

So, to do list: slip/petticoat for the dress, flower crown, new shoes, maybe the veil and bouquet. Maybe.

It's 12:17am. Good night, everyone.