It's the most wonderful time of the Playmobil Christmas Market

 

When Dad said "oh, we have to keep and use the Playmobil Christmas figures," he probably believed the box contained a Santa's house, a sleigh, and maybe a couple other things. 

He was so, so wrong. Last year's diorama required three shelves in the dining room. This year, I found the 1980s medieval houses and decided to go for the gusto with an entire Christmas fair, which takes four shelves.

Santa's house has more furniture this year, thanks to finds while I was sorting boxes of Playmobil to sell or donate. It's also gained a home office, for keeping those naughty-or-nice lists in order.

The ski and sledding slope is adjacent to an enchanted forest, so if you get up too much momentum downhill, you may end up as a guest of the fae.

New this year are Black characters. Playmobil's history on diversity is mixed, and a lot of my parents' collection dates from decades ago. So when I found Black adults and kids in the go-away bins, I swapped all of them into winter outfits for this diorama, and they will be permanent members.

Santa has sprung for rent on a garage and workshop. Mrs. Claus is relieved to have this part of the home business out of the home. (That's his sports sleigh parked in the garage, while the big family sleigh is upstairs by the house. Santa had a bit of a midlife crisis a few years back.)

The Santa Band plays swing version of holiday classics. The band leader is a Dean Martin impersonator during the rest of the year.

The second Tudor house is a vet's office with bookkeeping upstairs and examination room downstairs, convenient for treating reindeer.

Finding the porta-potty was a major motivator in increasing the size of the Christmas market.

I think the pizzeria furnishings were a set I gave Mom many years ago, and I'm particularly fond of it.

The toy store is because Mom collected huge amounts of Playmobil "toys for the children in the dollhouse," and even after culling it substantially, there are still more than enough.

Upstairs in the performance space at the pizzeria, an indie duo does their sound check. At least, we hope it's sound check, as there are no customers.

This all stays up until New Year's Day or Epiphany, whichever gives me the urge to take it down.

Kylie wants a new pair of shoes

 

Cinderelsa's having a baby, but I'm giving birth to success.

We went to Las Vegas over Thanksgiving because that's a thing people around here do. 

On our prior trip to Reno, I'd picked up a couple 1:12-ish table top slot machines that have the name of the city as part of the design. Here's the Reno one in Arvin Lebec's apartment.

Yes, Arvin makes "pull the handle, see if you get lucky" jokes to visitors.

This one was $5 at the car museum. I also have a silver one that says Virginia City, which set me back $10, but I was a little punchy at the time I bought that (plus everything is outrageously marked up in Virginia City, so hey). The Virginia City machine is in the game room of the Lil Bratz abode in the Playmobil Victorian Mansion.

So once we crossed the Nevada border, I was keeping an eye out for more tiny slot machines. I don't really need more, but it's a cute souvenir. Primm Mall and Casino, where we stopped to charge the car, no longer has a gift shop. Various kitschy shops on the Strip were charging $10 and up for a Las Vegas mini-slot machine, and Bonanza the World's Largest Gift Shop wanted $7.99. 

I was not vibing with this, as the more of these I have, the less novel the idea is, so at some point, they need to be $5 and under. There's a Walgreens across the street from Bonanza, so I said jokingly that we should check to see if it had a better price.

It had an entirely different machine.

Just the right shade of pink for Gambling Addiction Barbie.

This one is more blatantly plastic than its smaller compatriot. It similarly has a working handle. I picked through the stock to find out with a clearly printed Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sticker and slot results that line up correctly.

This one-armed bandit moonlights as a pencil sharpener.

This one is larger -- either a very large 1:12 or a small 1:6. It was also priced under $5. It came in Barbie Pink, so the 1:6 community can share in the gambling issues of the 1:12 and 1:18 dollhouse people. 

It's a Boy!

 It turns out I don't have a natural talent for flocking doll heads. However, my extra Kid Kore 7.5" doll has now had his gender affirmed as Ben, a boy doll who has socially transitioned and takes his place in the community as Kelsey's younger brother. I've pleased with the match between their hair colors, and I'm close to what I wanted in giving Ben a curly texture.

Kenzo, as the only adult male role model in the community, is ready to take Ben out to play catch.

Next year, I will probably remove and redo the flocking, but hey, let's give it a chance to flake off on its own. Building the crown of Ben's head with flocking so that the little plastic edge didn't make him look like the offspring of a Kappa was quite the project. (Monster High has lost an opportunity here.)

For the next 3 weeks, personal and business travel rule out much in the way of crafting, so this is a good point for calling Ben's transition done and tidying up.

Mama's got a new pair of knees

 Simply Fresh Kylie can now touch her face, practice yoga to deal with her stressful entrepreneurial career, and wear standard Barbie clothes.

The catalysts for re-bodying her, in defiance of my original intention of keeping her as her maker intended, were two. First, when I took her out of the enclosed storage where my dolls spend most of their time, I discovered that her hair has become lighter and redder. Oxidation is not what I'd expect in a doll that was unboxed less than six months ago and has been kept out of sunlight, but here we are.

Second, Target had its "25% off any toy" offer for Circle members expiring this weekend, and it also had one single African-American MTM doll on the $16.99 card. While $12.75 to rebody a discount-store doll isn't the bargain of all time, it's also not bad, and it beats waiting for an AA MTM doll to show up at thrift. (My local thrift stores are so, so bad compared to the bounty I enjoyed in Arizona a decade ago. Plus AA dolls with any remotely desirable feature are less likely to show up at thrift anyway.)

Time to boil some water! Getting MTM's head off was easy, despite the head spike. Maybe beheading Barbie's is like riding a bicycle: once you get the knack, you never truly lose it. Kylie was another thing entirely. The one thing this low-end doll committed to fully was that her head will not come off in energetic play. She needed four dunks in boiling water and so, so much squeezing to get her head off.

Once off, heads went on their new bodies with much greater ease.

It feels weird, but somehow... good.

Kylie's head is larger than MTM's head, but big doll heads have become so normative that I don't see it as any wilder than the Hasbro Disney Princess proportions were. MTM's smaller head makes her look like she got Amazonian proportions through some serious work at the gym.

I'm much happier with Kylie having motion, and this ups my enthusiasm for the 2024 rebodying of Manbun Ken.

Tribute to the Gray Mansard dollhouse

 

My mother used to buy dollhouse kits at antique stores and yard sales. When I was living in Arizona, I started a thing where I'd fly out for a 3- or 4-day visit just to build a dollhouse. This was the second one we did. It's built from an XL Machine "Petite Dreams Deluxe" kit, which is a mirror-image of the RGT Alison Jr. I believe it came with a lot of the trim already painted. Mom furnished it in a frontier style.

When Dad and I sold, gave away, and donated the very large quantity of dollhouses Mom had accumulated, I'd kept this one because it went with my bedroom, it offered a lot of space on a non-sprawling footprint, and I figured I'd have one 1:12 dollhouse to furnish with keepsake items I'd bought in Connecticut.

Then three things happened:

• Dad found me the kit for my grail house, the Walmer "Mulberry Lane."
• I kept trying and failing to furnish and decorate this house in my own style, and it always felt wrong.
• I started resenting this house and missing my IKEA wall shelf house.

When push comes to shove, I really only want one full 1:12 house. This will seem absurdly minimalist to dollhouse collectors, but it's what makes me most comfortable. So Arvin Lebec moved out and put his house on the market on FB Marketplace, partly furnished. He will eventually move into the Mulberry Lane, and I might at some future point also do a very small studio apartment.

Most of my feeling now is relief (with renewed enthusiasm for other projects), but there's also this weird sense of having drawn a final line under something I hadn't previously admitted was finished.

Can we get a hallelujah for baby Allison?

Girls, hit your hallelujah!

 My Kid Kore Allison -- blonde, with freckles -- arrived today, so I have to figure out how to make baby clothes.

Allison is not a Krissy clone. "How can that be?" you ask. "Kid Kore was a clone brand." Well, Allison precedes Krissy by four or five years. It's not just the head stamp date. There exists a verifiable playset, marked 1995 on the box, that includes Kelsey, a pair of Jodi, a lot of baby furniture, and baby Allison. (I'm not buying it because I don't buy NRFB.)

If Allison is a clone of anything, it's the babies included with some of the Mattel "baby sitter" and "Barbie as pediatrician" dolls of the mid-1990s. And here's the thing: while her head mold is similar, she's a better doll than her putative originals. Because Allison can move her arms and legs! The Mattel babies of her era can't.

Kenzo babysits Evi Love in her new Dollar Tree finery

 

They have matching outfits!

Dollar Tree got in new winter outfits for their Friends Forever Club dolls, with pants and tights. I grabbed three that seemed most flexible.

My original hope was that they might fit my 6.5" Creata "Today's Girl," who is obviously larger than Kelly but smaller than classic Stacie. However, one look at the pants next to Hilary's legs showed me that I don't have a good eye for doll sizing.

So it was time to try an outfit on Evi Love, who is a little too big for Kelly clothes. The pants are a titch long, but that looks cute on a toddler. Otherwise the top-and-pants (one piece) garment fits great. 

Sleeves on the overshirt are too narrow for Evi's hands. Since these will never see rough play, I took a seam ripper and removed the first couple stitches at the end of the arm. Next time I'm hand-sewing, I'll put a knot to stop the seam from coming undone any further.

Alas, the shoes were not only too small for Evi's solid little feet but also too small for Kelly! So I'm back to square one on finding shoes for Evi, since hot pink is not an all-purpose neutral.

Meanwhile, Kenzo is looking a little stiff. I'm torn between wanting to give him an articulated body transplant ASAP and wanting to postpone decisions about a friend for him (which would need to be in the same AliExpress order) into the new year. Fortunately, apathy and indecisiveness will probably work in favor of the second option.

Christmas is coming, send in the clones!

 Burlington recently replaced a Best Buy at one of the shopping centers around here, so I headed over to see if it's cleaner, neater, and politer than the other nearby one. They had done a real holiday inventory set-up!

It's holiday time, so we need Disney-esque princesses.

The edge gals are clearly Cinderella and Aurora. I kind of love the short versions of their typical outfits and may steal this idea for sewing projects. The gals in long dresses baffle me. The gal in aqua might be intended as Elsa? But who is a dark-haired princess in dark pink?

It's almost as difficult to figure out the characters in Chic's Fantasy Fairytale sets, which have something I'm thrilled to see (and rarely get to): all-Black princesses!

Top left is clearly intended as Tiana, and top right is Ariel. Bottom middle is Belle, and bottom left is plausible as Cinderella. That leaves top center as Elsa (though the period of the gown is wrong), and bottom right... purple.

Have I so badly lost track of Disney princesses that there's someone famous in purple?

Meanwhile, Sparkle Girlz are going upmarket, into the boxed $8 price range. This one exploits the "surprise" element, because part of that sparkle is exploiting the trend of the moment.

It's like if Madeline Hatter and Tinkerbell had a daughter.

Sparkle Girlz have also entered the standard clone fields of baby-sitting and dog-walking. Nobody in clone land wants to come up with a new body mold to do a real Skipper knock-off, so they reproduce Skipper's pastimes on their standard "teen fashion" doll.

Kudos to Zuru for committing to the Giant Heads, Giant Eyes schtick down to the level of babies and bulldogs, I guess. But has anyone at Zuru HQ ever seen a dog being walked?

Finally, no toy display is complete without a fairy. It looks like all of the design effort went into her wings. 

One of my goals at Burlington was to look at socks for bargains that might work as winter sweaters and body-con dresses for my dolls. This was kind of frustrating, as girls clothing this season has a remarkably limited color palette based around ballerina pink, white, and tomato red.

The entire women's and girls' sock aisles were like this! The color combo is pretty, but it's not one I especially want to do anything with. Perhaps I will reconsider and do pink-and-white ensembles for the Katie Kolony, but I'm not feeling the excitement on that one.

Then I found the pair of socks that's the exception to the universal color scheme!

This four-pack was priced at $4.99, so it's the same $1.25 a pair I'd pay at the dollar store. Figuring one sock per outfit, I have enough socks for all seven adults and teens to have new winter sweaters at 75 cents an outfit, plus my time and patience.

I'm calling that a success, as well as an incentive to learn how to use the serger.

Cinderelsa's body is here!

 

Cheap articulated body variety pack!

My AliExpress order arrived! All four bodies are here, undamaged.

The pinkish pregnant body is slated for Cinderelsa.

The baby bump comes off to reveal a flat stomach insert. I can hear rattling behind it but haven't yet figured out how to get the flat insert off to find a baby.

The quality is decent, not brilliant. The plastic is translucent, and the joints bend when they feel like it. This is still a huge improvement over Cinderelsa's original body! It's in line with what I expected in ordering $5 bodies from a toy distributor in Shantou. I wanted a Chinese body to give me the best chance of an acceptable color match with Cinderelsa's cheap clone head, which... well, it depends on the lighting.

Finally, I get to take a load off!

Her head is on! It has to be pushed down hard to stay on, but that's not a huge surprise in joining a cheap knock-off head with a cheap knock-off body.

In this light, her head looks noticeably pinker than the body. In other lights, it looks like a good match. Cinderelsa may take up high necklines. She is so very pink, and I ordered from a distributor whose positive reviews noticed that bodies ran pink, so there's no better I'm going to do.

Practicing pushing and breathing.

Cinderelsa can achieve a birthing position of sorts!

Kenzo is excited for fatherhood! Cinderelsa is awkwardly clothed in whatever fit, which was a pair of Broad Ken pants and a Curvy Barbie top. My long-term plan is to sew her a glamor wardrobe, but I'm supposed to be doing paid work today.

I'd hoped that these bodies would allow me to agonize in an ethical dilemma over whether or not to rebody Simply Fresh Kylie (merits of the authentic body as conceived by its designer versus allowing her to interact more freely with her peers through articulation). Alas, she is too sallow for both tones of brown, so original vision it is.

Arvin Lebec buys a Christmas tree

 

It may be just barely after Halloween, but Christmas gear is already taking over stores, and Arvin Lebec has snagged his tree.

This 6" tree was at Walmart. It's not really good for decorating, but dollhouse-scale trees rarely are. It makes its own statement.