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. 

The MAC living room:

I'll do real intro posts for these girls sometime, but at the moment I've got some shots of them in their little room.
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I'm lucky enough to be getting my own crafting room (at the cost of extra rent$ but Current Me says, "whatever.") and the temptation to not make half of it into a dollhouse has been fought.

I've done a terrible job of 1) making them all everyday outfits, and 2) changing everyone out of their party outfits.
So Rose and Megan are still in their Christmas outfits, and Riley, Heather, and Alison are in their whatever clothes.
I'm sort of torn between loving and hating that I accidentally made a Magic Attic OC. I've been considering rebranding her as Jane, but my entire knowledge of Jane comes from one cover of a book that they apparently never actually put out copies of and written by an author who is un-googleable:

I also sort of felt that Chloe was supposed to be Jane, so I might merge the two if I ever get Chloe (she's at the bottom of my WTB list, though)

Anyway, that cover and that blurb from the catalogue can definitely influence how Riley's personality is going, but for now she's Riley.
When I was a kid and had just unwrapped Alison, I wanted to name her after my friend from preschool because they both looked sort of the same. She ended up going back to Alison, but that friend's last name was Riley, so we're going to stick that name on Riley and call it good.
(It's been so fucking long since I've written here that I don't remember if I ever explained it, but Riley was one of the 2002 model Alison's with rooted hair. That hair was a disaster so I shaved it and gave her a wig. I don't actually like this wig too much for her, so she has another in the mail to see how that works out. Right now she looks like Alison Minus Bangs and that's not what I'm going for. It also doesn't help that it's a 10-11 wig and she's an 11" head, which is apparently too big for a 10-11 wig. It's not glued down and sometimes it just moves places, so forgive that in the pictures.

So here's half the living room. Due to their legs splaying when they're sitting, these dolls aren't always the best for displaying while they're sitting, but I think it's cuter that way. Here Heather is trying to braid Rose's hair, but Alison keeps sticking her bare foot on the back of Rose's neck to see if she'll notice that it's not Heather's hand.
Not basing this off stuff I did as a kid or anything.
Megan's got her hand pretty close to Alison's foot and is probably ready to grab it if Ali starts trying to cause too much trouble. Megan's sort of the mediator of the group.

Outfit wise, Rose and Megan are still in their party dresses, but everyone else is back in more normal clothes.
The main problem about buying dolls without buying extra outfits is that everyone has to share Alison's collection of casual clothes and whatever outfits they were wearing when I got them (which wasn't much). Alison also pretty much always has to wear a hat due to her bald spots in the back.

And over in the corner, wearing Megan's jacket and some hand-knit tights is Helena. Due to her being 50cm/19+5/8", she can share the 18" furniture pretty well, and alternates between living with the xtra tall Monster High dolls and the MAC girls.

And in the other corner, we have Helena, Ann Estelle, and Riley with her guitar. Ann Estelle is a doll sculpted by Robert Tonner, who did all the Magic Attic dolls (except maybe my Megan's face? It's hard to find info about things that happened when I was in 6th grade and didn't care).
Now that I look at this image, the thing striking me the most is that I've been looking for that bottle of window cleaner all damn day.