Mystery of the Pharoh's Tomb (or: I didn't make the rules).

 

This blog has zero readers so if anyone's here, they probably already know about this, but a quick summary anyway.

There are four book covers out there for Magic Attic Club books that were never released. According to someone who said they personally talked with Sheryl Sinikyn, the manuscripts were never written and the covers were made without the go-ahead from the authors. That conversation is not publicly available. 

I also don't know where the covers came from, how they ended up on the internet, where the descriptions of each book came from. I'm going to admit that I haven't done very much research. but my idle google has left me with questions.

Those books are A Tale of Two Alisons, Heather's Fashion World, Jane in a Land of Enchantment, and The Mystery of the Pharoh's Tomb.

When Ellie invites Jane, Alison's new math partner, to her open house and then up the attic, Heather, Alison, Rose, Megan, and Keisha don't know what to think. With the knowledge that Ellie sent Jane to the attic, the girls take a chance and invite her on their newest adventure through the mirror -- a search for a lost Pharaoh's tomb. When a golden amulet is stolen, the girls fear the curse of the tomb is upon them. Can Jane help figure out if the curse is real or just a hoax?

Obviously, Jane isn't a character that was ever released, but Pharoh's Tomb was going to be her introductory book. It's a group adventure. 

Considering that the last group adventure we got was Jewel of the Sea Cruise, which ranked somewhere between meaningless and just awful, I feel like it's time to start some wild guessing about the book we never got, as well as some sewing and designing.

Here we have an AI-upscale of the cover, which looks a little bit uncanny but is at least easier to view than a 400 pixel image. 

The first thing that caught me is that all 6 of the kids are wearing casual clothing. They're not in sort of traditional adventure gear.

The second thing that I noticed was that the image looks unfinished. I'm sure that, with books that tie into a fashion doll line, the images can't actually be finished until the outfits are finished. We've got rough colors blocking in Megan, Rose's skirt, and Alison's shirt. Jane(?)'s skirt looks like it started to get a print on it, but that was scrapped. I can't tell that for sure, because it might just be a shadow? I'm assuming that whoever was responsible for this illustration isn't about to find a blog in 2024 and give more insight. 

Moving on to some guessing:

I'm suspecting that this book was intended to be the new starter book, introducing new starter outfits. If they were going to be just a one-off adventure, Whispering Pines style, there's a lot of really creative ways that could have done. Putting the kids in everyday outfits makes me think that these would be new Starter outfits for the dolls.

Also, because of the formula of "dress up, mirror, adventure", we know that the kids had to be wearing something else and decided to change in the Attic. I refuse to believe that the attic mirror would let them go on an adventure in their everyday clothing. And since I appear to be one of maybe 6 people in 2024 who cares about the lore of a doll line that is older than many of my friends, I kind of get to decide that. Sorry, I didn't make the rules. Since they're all in relatively summery clothing, I'm assuming the book had to be originally set in winter. The only way I can imagine that these clothes were appealing enough to select for an adventure is if they are very unsuitable for the weather outside. "I don't care what the adventure is, as long as there's no snow," is a kind of reasonable line.

That's about the only insight I've got here, so it's time to move onto "things I decided I have to do if I'm making these clothes."

Part 1) Jane vs Chloe. Here's the problem: Jane actually got a pitched book, but Chloe actually exists as a doll. If you're making clothes for a doll, who do you include in the adventure?

Things we know about Jane:

• Alison's math partner
• Got invited to the attic by Ellie
• I'm seeing some people online say that she met Ellie at an open house? There's not a source for that but there's not a source for pretty much any of this. 

Because of the fact that the Magic Attic Club webpage gave Chloe a bio, there's a few things we know about Chloe: 

• Likes poetry
• Plays guitar and writes music
• Is from California
• Surfs, swims, and skateboards
• Has a twin brother, Connor, who shares a lot of her interests
• Interested in fashion and dressing up
• Teaches young girls to kayak and raft. Is a camp counselor and a lifeguard.

Okay so that last bullet point annoys me. Alison has the stories about going rafting and being a counselor, and Keisha gets the stories about being a lifeguard. IDK it kind of bugs me that Chloe gets to do the things in normal life that the other girls have mirror adventures to do. IDK why that feels weird to me, but it's sticking weirdly.

So quick summary for people who arean't aware, most large collaborative projects like this will have what's called a Bible or a Series Bible. This is one book or other resource that's agreed to have the correct information. Other writers, designers, and builders can then all be referencing the same source material. If two people are writing books for two different characters at the same time, they don't need to talk to each other, as long as everything that they reference is going off the same bible. Information like, "Alison likes blue, is being tutored for dyslexia, plays soccer, has three brothers," can be referenced by any author, designer, person writing a catalog blurb, and it's known to be correct.

The Magic Attic Club bible was written by Sheri Sinykin. However, by the time that Knickerbocker bought the company (and released Chloe), she was not happy with the company and said she wasn't being paid royalties on all the books she wrote. (Again, I don't have a primary source for this, but I don't have reason to believe it's particularly wrong).

What I think this sums up to is that whoever included Chloe into the series bible did it without Sheri Sinykin's input. And there's not really anything wrong with that. It's very common in big franchise projects like this for personnel to be changed and replaced. It's just that there's a lot of evidence that Chloe wasn't incorporated into the project in the same manner as the other kids.

Backstory time, when I was a kid, I has Alison, and my sister had Heather. I was later gifted Chloe (I believe because the paperwork said she was Alison's friend) and we never really liked her. Eventually, her leg fell off and we threw her away. So I both don't like her back story and feel like I can't do wrong by her because I owe fair treatment of her to my past self.

Anyway, I need to get back to the story. We've spent too long on side topics. Quick summary:

Things we know about Jane: She was actually in the books
Things we know about Chloe: Actiually like 3x as much as we know about Jane.

And here's the big thing: Chole has a brother, who is her age, and who is named Connor. And is probably blond. I have a boy doll who is her age and is blonde. So we have Connor now.

There's someone editing the Magic Attic Wiki who is insistent that Chloe is not Jane. However, since  Jane is blonde and Chloe is also blonde, there's at least a little bit of evidence that they had the doll partially finished, and then changed the accessorization to make her tough and cool and kool and tuff. Also the doll is high quality and the accessories and clothes she came with are a bit cheap, so I chose to believe that Chloe is a pivot to rebrand a partially-complete Jane. Since there is next to no information about either of them, anything that could be Jane OR Chloe is now acceptable headcanon. Sorry if some people disagree with that. I didn't make the rules. 

So let's check out where we're going here: 

 Crop of an AI upscale here, so please forgive the faces and hands. Let's look at what we've got here:

• Rose has teal t-shirt looking something and a long skirt. Probably below knee.
• Alison definitely has gray pants/shorts and then appears to have some kind of sleeveless or cap sleeve shirt with some kind of text of graphic on it.
• Megan has a cardigan? Some kind of long sleeve top, bottoms are not seen.
• Blonde girl holding the flashlight has a wrap skirt of some kind? there's a purple tie that could be connected to the skirt, to the skirt, or as a belt. Shirt is tucked in. 
• Keisha is in GREEN???
• Bucket Hat Kid is in some kind of plaid without a defined seam at the underbust or waist. She appears to not have sleeves, either. 

Let's get into some designs, then.

Keisha: Okay, so for starters. Every group of kids who want to travel through space, time, and dimensions needs to know the number one rule: All travelers must maintain color coordination, or else coordinate all costumes across the group, when on a group event. 

Didn't make the rules on that one.

Anyway, we have Keisha back in her proper color, purple. We can't see too much of the look on the book cover, just that it's got polka dots and a high neck. I figure a little bit of lace can keep it fun and quirky, as well as keeping a summery feel.

I'm assuming that the Pharaoh's Tomb they're going to go explore is in the desert, though you can't assume anything when it comes to the magic mirror. There's unicorns and talking flowers and snow queen worlds out there. 

 

Megan gets like a long cardigan and leggings. Maybe some Uggs. I don't get why she's got the long sleeves and everyone else has short sleeves, so she's getting a very light cardigan and a brown cami. Let's get those kids paying the female layering tax as a young age. 

The cardigan has a pocket for her glasses. 

 Rose's v-neck t-shirt has white on it in the reference images, but I think that looks more like it being unfinished rather than it being canonically white. I might slap some white trim/piping in the v-neck when I make this. We don't know. No one knows what I'm doing until I'm done, especially not me.

I'm going to go through the MAC lore (it's only, what, 7 years? 1994-2001 was the books) and see if there's anything that looks like that logo-ish section. I'd love to have a shirt with some secret Magic Attic Club reference on it.

If I'm lazy I can just use her shorts from the Alison on the Trail set.

Who's up for some creative liberties? This is the tucked in shirt with the wrap skirt and purple belt, the only costume you can see really clearly on the cover.

And we're putting it on Heather. 

There's a couple of justifiable reasons for that, like that it's pink and Heather's color is pink. There's also some non-justifiable reasons for that like that my older sister had Heather as a doll, and my older sister has never liked free size waists (babydoll cuts) or bucket hats, but loved and still loves a good tucked in shirt look. So Heather gets the look that my older sister would like, because in this case i DID get to make that rule, and so I made the decision.

Chloe does have one really huge problem. As previously mentioned, all travelers through time, space, or parallel realities must be assigned an identifying color and they must wear that color on all group events. I can't even begin to explain how much of that rule I didn't make. 

Chloe's starter outfit is pink. Heather is pink. The Magic Attic Club wiki says that Jane's color was intended to be orange, but I think that's just based off the picture on her book cover. I also think that book cover is of unfinished art.

However, the downside to being number 6 in the group is that a lot of the other colors have already been taken. I'm not about to make Chloe wear orange with her fair complexion, so she's getting red. That's it. 

We'll find her a nice red plaid with some lovely purple or fuchsia stripes in it. We'll ease her out of the pink and into the red nice and slowly, to avoid as much trauma as possible. But we simply cannot have two mirror travelers wearing the same color. 

I'd let it slide if I could, but this is yet another case where the rules are out of my hands.

But I think these would be fun new meet outfits or starter outfits that I could keep the dolls in when I have them in storage. I'll have some fun collecting new accessories for them as well.

As for the lore, I'm not really emotionally sure how comfortable I am with 10-11 year olds going into a literal tomb where dead bodies are to just have a fun look around. I think this is probably the kind of thing I'd imagine doing when I was a kid before learning about how therre's no more mummies because victorians are them all. Maybe we could have some fun where the kids solve the mystery by convincing all the tourists that the place is cursed and that the pharaoh should be left to its afterlife in peace. Maybe that's the only way I can come to terms with this concept.
My local fashion club is doing a graveyard meet and I had to opt out because I think graveyard meets are in absolutely awful taste.
Maybe they're in a tomb and think they're cursed and then at the end they find it's a movie set. I think I like that too. Like, what are all the kids doing on the set of Indiana Jones 6? 

We'll do the clothes first and then get into the rest.

So anyway, my new rule is that I'm not allowed to buy another doll unless I 1) have made this whole collection or 2) it's in really bad shape, under $35, and I think I can save it from going in the trash,

Eye bleach follow up

 I found an easier way.

Cw for some eye scream here. 

How to remove Magic Attic Club eyes and replace them. 

The Magic Attic Club dolls have fixed eyes. They eyes themselves are separate pieces of plastic, pushed into the vinyl from the front. 

Doll eyes are pretty easily available. From my experience here, Alison, Heather, Keisha, and original sculpt of Megan use 16mm eyes. Rose and Chloe use 18mm. I assume that the later sculpt of Megan uses 16mm eyes, but I haven't checked.

So, to change the eyes, we just have to get access to them. If your doll's hair is rooted, you're going to need to shave and wig them.

On 24-year-old dolls, I found that the wig can be pushed off with pretty much no effort. 

The vinyl was really hard to cut with a razor knife, so I had to heat and then stab. 

There is a little ridge on the backs if their heads, which I assume is where an original access hole was during construction. I found that it was easiest to go in the area around that, instead of trying to go in the seam or inside the little circle. 

I used a flathead screwdriver to follow my knife, to keep the space open and let me make better curves. 

Heat, knife, follow with the screwdriver, repeat. 

Inside you can see the elastic and the head cup, as well as the backs of the eye sockets. It's not a ton of room to work with, but it was plenty to get done what I needed. 

There's enough room to get in there with a knife and cut a hole in the back of the socket. It doesn't need to be pretty. It just needs to be big enough that the eye can push through it when. It's heated up. 

The eyes aren't glued in, so you can heat them up and push hard from the front, and it'll pop out. 

As you can see, Rose's eyes are quite a bit bigger than Alison's. You can see that both eyes are only yellow where they were exposed, and the rest of the sclera is still white. This means that I can just put Rose's eyes in rotated 90 degrees, and keep the original eyes while losing the liver failure aesthetic. 

Once the eyes are out of the way, you can clean out the rest of the eye hole. I found that the best way was to clear the vinyl on the back of eye socket all the way, but to leave it just a bit smaller than the back. This will hold the eye a bit on its own when you put it back in. It also helps make sure it stays in the right orientation. 

Once I stuck the eye back in (left), you can't even see the yellow area. 

I don't have pictures of the rest, but the answer is hot glue. Get the eyes aligned, hot glue to hold them in. Glue the dome back on. Glue the wig back on. 

I'm confident that hot glue won't hold the eyes in if someone is really determined to pop them out from the front, but I'm guessing that the number of people in 2024 who are interested in un-yellowing a doll's eyes but is too young to understand that you can't try to push the eyes out is probably a little low. 

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. 

 .

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.