I don’t know about you, but when I come across a doll head without a body, or a doll body without a head, I feel an uncontrollable urge to connect some doll heads to those doll bodies! No doll body should have to go around headless, and no doll head should have to go around bodiless!
How do you feel about putting vintage doll heads on brand new doll bodies? What are your thoughts on re-styling a doll’s hair?
In the comments, please leave your tips, tricks, and methods!
Inevitably, when I find a dismembered doll at a yard sale or second hand store, her hair is in dreadful condition. I look online for some guidance, some of which has been helpful and some of which has led me down the wrong path altogether.
I’m told A Thousand Splendid Dolls has a very helpful channel for doll repair, and I’ve used her expertise from time to time. But whoever suggested that I create paper-straw rollers to make my Christie doll’s hair look naturally curly was full of horse hooey.
I mean, look at this mess!
They talk about “AI slop” on the internet these days, but let’s be honest…. Some of the “advice” real human people give you for doll repair and clean-up online is pure garbage too.
If people have an epic fail, like the Christie hair re-do that you see above, we probably shouldn’t be bragging about it online. It just gives people more misinformation to have to weed through, you know?
I’m not saying we have to have rules, when it comes to doll repair, but a little thoughtfulness goes a long way.
One of the reasons I’ve cut back on the number of blog articles I’ve been posting is because my father died in April. My head hasn’t been in the game for a while now, and my doll clothes patterns and projects have veered off into left field a little bit. I suppose it’s part of the healing process.
You might remember the blog post a couple of months ago that featured the image above. I typed up that blog post just as I was going to visit my dad for the last time. I took a long road trip after he died, and visited various places I’ve lived, trying to connect the dots of my life in retrospect.
So rather than keeping up with five blog posts a week, I’ve been limiting myself to two or three authentic, well-made pieces of information that I am sort of pulling out of old flash drives. These are projects I’ve put on the back burner for whatever reason, or like today, I’m just writing about a project that never surfaced at all because, well… the final product wasn’t wroth bragging about.
It seems like, since I cut back to two or three blog posts a week, I haven’t been hearing from my followers as much. But this community means a lot to me. So I really do hope you leave a comment.
I started today’s blog post with the following statement: “No doll body should have to go around headless, and no doll head should have to go around bodiless!”
Since my dad died, I feel like a doll body without a functioning head. Some days, like Christie, I walk around with my hair all out of whack, wondering why I can’t seem to pull myself together enough to design some doll clothes.
I’ve had fellow doll collectors cite rules from some imaginary “rule book” that says you should never connect a vintage doll head to a new body. But I’ve never been one to follow the rules, when it comes to my dolls. And right now, I’m just trying to get from one day to the next, hoping my hair is sort of in place and my head is on straight.
But I can feel a change coming on.
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