The Rococo AirBnB

Last year, when Target had these wooden trees in the impulse bins at the front of the store, I bought a single quarter tree, as I felt I could not justify the expense and space of buying four to make a whole tree. The tree has haunted me since, as it's too small for more than a little seating in 1:24 but too big for 1:48.

This afternoon I pulled out the 1:24-ish furniture bin to see if I wanted to do a coffeehouse or something, and I found my little porcelain furniture sets. These have been around since I was a tot, and Mom had sent them to me back around 2019, to make them my problem. So they've been across country and back, with no resolution.

They fit!

So I put up some scrapbook-paper wallpaper and found a few accessories to dress the place up. The poodle has been in my stash since I was a kid, though I don't recall why. The gal living there was being a dollhouse doll in one of Mom's dollhouses, and I'd kept her because she seemed like a good fit for smaller furniture.

This is one of those projects that doesn't accomplish anything of lasting artistic value but is soothing to do on a rainy afternoon.

Answering Questions in Imitation of Teatime Tangents

 I'm too lazy to take photos of the doll shoes I bought on Saturday, so I'm going to emulate Teatime Tangents and Toys' use of interview questions from The Dolly Insider's backlog of Friday questions. It's cooler than anything else in my head right now! (I removed questions where my answer is a repeat of "not my branch of collecting.")

#1: Which doll do you wish you ordered when it was released?

It would have been a purchase rather than an order, but I wish I'd known about the Simply Fresh dolls (collab between The Fresh Dolls and Family Dollar) when they were new, so I could have gotten one of the dolls with curly hair at Family Dollar prices. Fond as I am of Kylie, she's yet another putatively Black doll with straight hair. I could buy a Fresh Doll or a Naturalista with curls, but they wouldn't be discount-store projects.

2. Were any of your dolls given to you as a gift? 

Of the current batch, no. In the 2010s, my mother flooded me with doll gifts, which was awesome and generous but tended to end me up with dolls I wasn't that thrilled by.

4. Have you ever traveled with dolls? 

Yes, but mostly by accident. I do have an old blog post with Liv Sophie and Skelita Calaveras touring Old Town Scottsdale and riding the trolley in the off-season, back in the good old days when there was a trolley circling Old Town and the Arts District. Here it is: https://smallerplaces.blogspot.com/2014/12/skelita-is-proud-of-her-new-hat.html

5. Straight or wavy? Which hair do you prefer on a doll?

Wavy because my focus is 1980s-1990s off-brand playline dolls, and wavy hair was de rigueur. I've also developed a passion for boil-curling doll hair.

6. Do you own any custom dolls?

Cinderelsa is my custom project doll. Ben is my Kid Kore Katie conversion into a boy. Delilah the Dollar Store Beauty recently got a new wig (still needs to be glued on). My customization is pretty mild! 

7. Which doll has been in your collection the longest?

Manbun Ken has been in my personal collection the longest. Fashionista Teresa passed through my hands earlier, but she was in Mom's collection for about a decade. (I really culled over the course of multiple cross-country moves.)

8. Do you make dioramas for your dolls?

Long-term, I'm intending to construct a new house for a segment of the dolls, more elaborate than what I used to have for Liv Katie and Haley. At the moment, I just have a few pieces of furniture.

11. How do you display your dolls?

Due to 18 months of dealing with my late mother's overwhelming visual clutter in the family home (I did good -- we have three usable rooms that weren't usable before, plus much of the house is more efficient), I have very little tolerance for open display. Both my fashion dolls and my smaller dollhouses are in a line of cupboards with opaque doors. I take them out in batches to set up little scenes on my dresser, and then they get put away for house-cleaning.

13. Bangs or no bangs?

No bangs. Getting bangs properly cleaned and conditioned on vintage dolls is a pain. So I don't love bangs, but I have a lot of dolls with bangs.

14. Have you ever sold a doll you regretted selling?

Thinking both sales and donations, there's nothing that digs up major regret that'd justify an effort to rebuy. Gertrud, my Macmillan doll via AliExpress, gets an occasional thought of regret, but the fact that she never got her own blog post tells you I didn't quite bond with her.

16. What are some of your favorite doll themes?

I'm about to go on a sewing binge for frilly little-girl dresses for my 7.5" Katie Krew. Because I no longer do fantasy-type dolls, they're not really themed. If I once get started sewing, though, I have plans for the adult women's Met Gala dresses.

18. What's something you wish you knew before starting to collect dolls?

There will always be more dolls. It is not vital to grab an example of every doll that's tangentially interesting. 

21. Have you ever been to a doll event?

Not as an adult, though I've been to dollhouse shows, particularly Good Sam, and to some form of action figure show in Glendale, AZ, back in the day. I feel like I'm at such a low-end niche in the market that I'm not going to see products that interest me, nor find sympathetic pals.

22. What doll did you recently add to your collection that you've always wanted?

"Always" is pretty short-term around here. Cinderelsa is closest to a long-term want, because she represents a project doll where I did more than a basic thrift-store body swap.

23. Which dolls do you collect the most?

Kid Kore dolls of the 1990s dominate my collection, largely in the form of 7.5" Katies. This was an accident. Admittedly, I started with a couple Katies this summer, but the reason they multiplied so fast was that one would be thrown in with lots of something else I was looking for. 

25. Does your collection have more girl dolls or boy dolls?

I have only three boy dolls, and one of them, I turned into a boy myself (the actual boy in that line is rare). Eventually Manbun Ken is going to get a friend at the same time I order him an articulated body.

27. If a doll comes in multiple versions, do you buy them all?

The official answer is "no," but anyone who looks at the Katie Krew is going to laugh at me. Katies are the exception, and still I have no plans to find a titian one, nor to replace the brunette I turned into Ben. The idea is to start with the variant I like best, so no more need to come home.

28. Do you rename your dolls? If so, how do you choose a name?

Sometimes. "Katie" is the 7.5" dolls' species, so they all have their own names, based mostly on vibes. Just to be inconsistent, "Kelsey" is not a species, so there's Kelsey (the first, earlier one) and her cousin Kenzie (the inset-eye one). Cinderelsa needs a real name of her own, and Babysitters' Club Kristy really badly wants to be Brenda, so she may get a name change.

30. What do you like most about collecting dolls?

Sewing clothes for them, which is why I need to actually pull out the sewing machine and do it! After Christmas, I should finally have time and space. Researching is up there, too -- I have massive Pinterest boards on clone lines that I don't intend to buy for myself but love looking at.

2023 in review 5: 11.5" and 12" fashion dolls

 

The population feels like it grew fast, but it's still only 7 dolls.

Simply Fresh Kylie, now on her MTM body, is what touched off this wave of doll collecting. I still like the idea of the Fresh Dolls/Family Dollar collab, but I keep making changes to the actual doll. Kylie's face is very much in line with the mainline Fresh Dolls faces, though.

Delilah, now Kylie's mother because her new short wig makes her look older, was indulgence in a Dollar Tree Beauty to celebrate the new jointed knees.

Only the original head remains of Cinderelsa, because her concept ($2 at a thrift store) was compelling yet terrible. She is improved by a wig and a cheap articulated body. Cinderelsa is married to Kenzo, the Manbun Ken in the back row. He's my grail Ken and the only survival of Ken culls.

Teresa is the longest-owned doll in this group, as I found her in a thrift store and improved her back around 2014. She's Kenzo's half-sister by a common Latina mother, while Kylie is Kenzo's half-sister by a common father. Teresa's father was Latino. Kylie's mother is Delilah (Black) and her father was Hawaiian. 

The back row gals, the two Kid Kore Kelseys, are where the fresh excitement is, but first, let's look at bodies, arranged from least to most articulated.

The 1990s girls really stand out from the post-2000 body molds. Kenzie's 1997 mold also varies significantly from Kelsey's 1991 mold, with a larger waist and lower bosom. (Yes, the second Kelsey is now Kenzie. This gives me Kelsey, Kenzie, Kenzo, Kylie, and Kelly, which is ridiculous! But no other name I try sticks, and I've called the original Kelsey "Kelsey" for so long that I can't make it a species name and give her a fresh name.)

From the back, we get to see different eras' views of doll buttocks. Kylie's MTM body is ridiculously modest, while Teresa has junk in the trunk.

The dolls who most need comparison are Kelsey and Kenzie, since they're iterations of the "same" doll: Kid Kore Kelsey, the big-sister equivalent to Barbie.

Kelsey definitely is the older and more sophisticated of the two!

The original appeal of Kenzie -- the reason I was eventually going to get one -- is the inset eyes. I took a look at FashionDollz to see what changed in Barbie head molds in 1996-7, and the answer is... nothing. The new CEO head mold for Barbie is marked 1998. The change isn't Bratz-driven, either, as those aren't released until 2001. Kid Kore just launched a new head mold with inset eyes, using it largely on cheerleader dolls, because... they felt like it?

Combined with her eBay lot-mate, Babysitters Club Kristy, and my Creata "Today's Girls" Hillary, Kenzie makes a reasonable "sisters" set! 

She's quite a different look from her more sophisticated cousin, Kelsey, though. I envision Kelsey as being in her early 20s, while Kenzie seems at most college freshman age.

2023 in Review, part 4: Teen Babysitters

 

My teens got an unexpected addition late in the year with the arrival of Remco Babysitters Club "Kristy." She was in an eBay lot with unhelpful photos and limited description, but between the two dolls in it, at least one was definitely on my wish list as something, and the price with free shipping was great.

Doing a body comparison with the two 10-inch girls reveals a lot of similarity. Lacy (Totsy) has bendier legs due to their internal wire, while Kristy (Remco) has regular click legs that don't click very well any more. Lacy has a more developed chest. Kristy's arms are set more "outward." These bodies are so similar, though, that I now wonder if Lacey is not a Skipper clone (since she's neither anime-eyed nor tall), but a Babysitters Club clone. The timing on mold stamps is plausible.

A quick Googling for Babysitters Club dolls isn't showing me a short-haired blonde, but cloning is sometimes more of the concept than of the specifics. Lacey would have been compatible with them and able to wear most clothing.

The addition of Kristy does raise the question of how much height equals age. Babysitters Club gals were canonically in junior high, so 14 at the absolute oldest. I've been treating Lacey as about 16, and thus old enough to date canonically 16-year-old Teen Skipper.

From the faces, Kristy is significantly younger than Lacey, Honestly, Lacey's proportions look to me like she's the younger sister of a 14-inch adult, not a 12-inch adult. However, 14-inch is a size that doesn't interest me, so Kristy just hit her growth spurt, while Lacey is naturally petite.

Kristy is too young to be a rival in Lacey and Skipper's romance.

Kristy makes a reasonable sister for Creata "Today's Girls" Hillary, though Hillary's head is larger than Kristy's, and her expression looks more mature.

The parentage of Kid Kore Baby Allison remains unknown, though she now is very well-supplied with sitters! Acquiring Baby Allison was one of those weird unexplained urges that hits a doll collector occasionally. If I were Mom, I'd soon have two of each Kid Kore baby, plus representatives from multiple other brands. However, I bought my favorite baby first, so there's no need for more. The only other baby that tempts me is the Totsy Native American baby, as that one also has hip and shoulder joints.

 

Over the long haul, if I keep Kristy, that skintone mismatch between head and body, plus the worsening condition of her legs, makes it likely I'd find a better articulated body for her. I'm not sure how well she fits into the community, but every time I question buying her, I notice she has amazing hair (much better quality than the usual 1990s fiber) and a sweet, if someone vacant, face.

2023 in Review 3: 6.25" and 7.5" dolls (the Katie Krew)

 

The Katie Krew did not start out to be a krew.

When I first started thinking about getting back into dolls, I happened on a discussion of Creata's "clones" from the 1980s. Like a lot of fashion doll lines of the late 20th century, it's unclear how much the dolls were actual clones and how much they were simply fashion dolls doing their own thing. The rock 'n' roll Creata line, for instance, was probably a clone for Hasbro's Jem & the Holograms. But the Creata Flower Fairies? Much less clear.

Really unclear on its clone origins is the 6-1/4" doll at front left, with dark curled hair, wearing her karate practice outfit over a red striped top. That's Creata's "Today's Girls" Hillary. "Today's Girls" debuted several years before Stacie was a twinkle in Mattel's eye, but long after Todd and Tutti. There's really no Mattel niche that these dolls match! They were definitely also used as little sisters for the Flower Fairies, but mine was sold as a little equestrian (foreshadowing Kid Kore's horse riders).

My first Kid Kore Katie happened because I was researching Native American clone dolls (there were a lot in the 1990s). I bookmarked on eBay a cute and cheap brown-skinned doll with dark braids -- the doll now sitting in the front row wearing checked shorts and a blue and pink jersey, waiting for her hair to be rebraided. That's a Dancing Brook, the "little sister" of the Heartland families. She is now officially called Brooke.

Then it was a no-brainer to get a Rosa Lee, the Romani Katie. She's the curly haired brown girl behind Hillary, wearing a flowered dress.

The golden-blonde Katie, now named Isabelle, came as a lot with my Black(ish) 2002 Jodi, along with the brunette Katie that was shorn and flocked in titian to become Ben. Isabelle is at middle right, wearing an aqua gingham cowgirl outfit with gold trim. Ben is perched above her in khakis and a red and aqua sweater. (Katie originally had a brown-haired dude pal (Todd clone) named Kyle, who was also dressed in western wear as Pistol Pete. Kyle is hard to find, and it was more fun to make my own younger brother for my redheaded Kelsey.

Bette Mae, the brown gal with lots of straight black hair, wearing the pink striped shirt at middle left, is my second Dancing Brook. She's named for one of the leaders of the Seminoles in Florida, as I decided to have the two Dancing Brooks come from different tribes. She arrived with a large lot of vintage Katie clothes, which is why everyone here except Hillary has shoes!

Katies are absolutely, positively a direct competitor with Mattel's Stacie. They appear in a sister pack in 1992. However, Katie has a slightly younger sister, Carla, who was being sold as "Girls Club" before Stacie launched. Carla had a Katie head mold on what sure looks in photos like a Creata 6.25" body like Hillary.

The Katie Krew proved so compelling that I got rid of my 1990s Stacie and Whitney dolls, who'd once been major thrift finds (but Stacie had worn the same outfit for 10 years, so my enthusiasm wasn't as high as I thought). I'm still a little on the fence about Bette Mae, but every time I put her next to Brooke, I notice subtle differences in their face-up and decide she's uniquely adorable.

Sunflower Cottage is ready for Christmas

 

The Sunflower Cottage is my Christmas house, for no better reason than that I impulsively furnished it from my stockpile last December and it then stayed on my desk through the holiday season.

So this year... it's baaaaack!

This is one of my favorite projects ever, because while it's simple and took basically an evening, it achieves very much what I want it to do.

The inhabitant is the Tweakie Toy nurse. If you haven't seen Tweakie Toys before, they were a short-lived competitor to Fisher Price Little People. J. Chein made them for exactly one year in 1969, and my set was my favorite toy as a very small child. While the people originally came with little blocks lithographed as contemporary rooms, I never had the rooms, and my people lived in what's now the Modern Abode. I started rebuying them around 2019 and now have (I think) all of the variations, certainly enough to inhabit all of my half-scale houses.

What I loved about Tweakie Toys is that, unlike most dollhouse people who are fixated on being nuclear families, they are defined by their jobs. You can work out a multi-generational neighborhood however you like. The one downside is that they're all white. Had the line succeeded into the 1970s, this probably would have changed, but alas! Back then, it was unusual to include characters of color in an initial launch. Someday, I shall try plastic dye on some of my duplicates and get a little diversity in here.

The bathroom may be where I started, as getting the flooring and walls i wanted was a project that involved finding a "generate your sample floor tile pattern" site. The furniture is vintage Marx.

The bedroom absorbs my 2021 obsession with Marx beige furniture sets. The resident loves sunflowers, so all the major art pieces have them. She also has a Navajo rug, a souvenir of her jobs in Arizona, that matches her shades from the Dollar Tree sticker aisle. The blob on the highboy is a maneki nekko for luck.

The kitchen has (printed) authentic Armstrong vinyl flooring in the company's most popular style. The sunflower painting in the distance is off a calendar of New England photographs. When I remember where I put the double-sticky tape, I need to attach the kitchen floor better.

The actual inspiration for this house may have been the blue living room set, which is Arco and used to be an appalling shade of yellow before i hit it with the spray paint.

If you squint at the right wall, you can see the nurse has her guitar handy for party sing-alongs. Later in December, she'll be throwing a party for her community of fellow Tweakies!

2023 in review 2: 4" mini dolls

 

This is a category where I culled and refined a lot. Mom had about 100 Kelly and Chelsea dolls in their costumes, and I'd had a bad habit of buying Sparkle Girlz Minis to reward myself for enduring grocery shopping at Walmart in Phoenix. (When I went to Kroger, instead I bought My Little Pony Minis. Since a girl has to eat, these things accumulated. I don't know where the ponies went, probably donated years ago.)

Our leftmost girl, Neveah, is a 2002 Kid Kore Jodi or Jodi-adjacent. She's the doll who touched off renewed interest in this size category, as she has a different face-up than the two traditionally used for Jodi dolls. I've been referring to her as Black, but I'm not sure that was her intent, and for 2024 she may be reclassified as a different ethnicity where straight hair is more usual.

The little blond boy, Lucky, is a Lucky Industries clone of Kelly's friend Tommy, in his original outfit. His rooting photographs badly but looks fine in person, and he has such a cute expression!

Evi Love was a standout pick because she's a Black mini with actual curls! Technically, her hair texture isn't authentic, but she's doing a better job of being a Black doll at this size than most others. 

Kelly is my favorite of Mom's Kelly dolls and provides the body comparison for this size range.

Kelly has a vast wardrobe, while Neveah and Evi do better in the fashions for Dollar Tree's little science girls. Poor Evi still needs shoes that aren't hot pink! If Simba sold an Evi Love fashion pack with neutral shoes, I'd be on it.

Notably missing here are Scarlet/Ruby (I keep changing what I call her) and Jania, the two reps of different generations of Sparkle Girlz Minis.

Ruby -- or Scarlet, it's a bad sign when I keep changing the doll's name -- was a sentimental save as one of the few dolls I bought in Connecticut, and one of the last generation of Funville dolls. Jania is a new Zuru Glitzeez, representing how the dolls changed after Zuru bought Funville.

On the one hand, I was really excited about doing a comparison of the two, and I did that thing.

On the other hand, they both look cheap and puffy-headed when compared to my fab four. Jania is very similar to Neveah and obviously inferior, both in quality and in interest: there aren't a lot of 2002 Jodi dolls running loose, and there are tons of Glitzeez. Ruby just... looks so stolid and unengaged. I was always having to do a little extra work to fit her into scenes with the fab four. So these two are going into the donation bin.

Important rule coming out of this: Don't buy just to document a clone line's existence. A $3.75 purchase obviously isn't a big deal, but I feel kind of stupid about it. The upshot is that I will not buy anything from MGA's Dream Ella line, no matter how steeply discounted as it's closed out, as my role in life is not, repeat not, to document every short-lived knock-off-ish line of dolls.

2023 in Review 1: the great decluttering of Mom's collections

 These are the survivors from decluttering my late mother's extensive doll collection (we are talking over 1000 dolls spread across four rooms!) and my much smaller collection. Obviously, I've bought more dolls this year (at a pace I don't intend to sustain), but that's for another day.

This 2023 recap is a monument to having sold, donated, or given away on FBM so, so many dolls and dollhouses!

Some of my favorite moments:

• In selling the dollhouses and some of the Playmobil, I consistently met delightful buyers who were so excited to get a bargain. One of my happiest afternoons was sitting with two buyers and a box of furniture and accessories that I was letting them have free or cheap, listening to them be delighted over items I'd ceased to care about. This whole process has surely done something to boost dollhouse love among a younger generation. I met a number of lovely people as repeat buyers or freebie takers, too. And the son of one of Dad's friends is now the Playmobil Tycoon of his kindergarten.
• Photographing vintage playsets was fun, and those buyers were nice enough.
• Kelly collectors are adorable, and Kelly lots were the most fun to sell.
• One My Twinn buyer told me about how she chose that doll because it reminded her of a childhood friend. There was also a buyer of over 100 vintage dollhouse dolls who was charming and saved me so much listing and shipping time.

All this stuff is out in the world, giving more joy than it could possibly have given to me alone, even if I'd liked more of it.

The survivors are:

• Fashionista Teresa, who I'd found at a thrift store and given to Mom for a birthday.
• Manbun Ken, my grail doll from the TRU going-out-of-business sale.
• Articulated Kelly, who was a long-time grail doll from Mom's collection and makes a good body comparison doll. I'd originally intended to trade her in for a different doll from the same line, but she grew on me.
• Scarlet the Sparkle Girlz Mini, who I bought in Connecticut. 
• Vinyl dog and white tiger from Mom's collection, because they're cute.
• Felted dog from Target because I was totally taken with those when I bought it.

What I learned was that I'm happiest with a leaner, more focused collection, where I have space and time to make clothes and furniture for them.

A later recap will discuss the dolls I've bought this year, which was definitely a pace I won't be keeping up in future years!

The Katies have shoes!

The huge lot of Katie clothes I bought on eBay -- with enough shoes for the entire Katie Krew! -- was accompanied by a Katie that I couldn't fully ID from the listing photos. She's the one on the right, with my original Dancing Brook on the left. As you can see, she's not the rare (and possibly hypothetical) Black Katie that I'd hoped from seeing long, textured hair. She's a second Dancing Brook with much, much more hair!

A full-day soak in fabric softener and a boil wash improved her hair texture remarkably, so I'm probably going to keep her even though she's technically a duplicate. Vintage fashion dolls with brown complexions are hard enough to find, so I feel she can represent other ethnicities if I don't want to pick two Native American tribes for the girls.

The Pocahontas-driven boom in Native American 1:6 dolls in the 1990s is a great boon in providing brown dolls, if one doesn't want to keep them in their original (inaccurate, often pink-and-teal) costumes. While none of the Native American dolls of this era would pass current benchmarks for cultural sensitivity, the clone brands did a better job than Mattel at offering a range of dolls of different ages, in family groupings, wearing varied costumes. 

One of the common (highly legit) complaints about Native American representation at doll size is that Native American culture is treated as "historic," with everyone depicted in some attempt at historical costume. This is why my Dancing Brook is dressed in modern clothes, just like her same-size friends. She'll eventually get a dance costume that's as accurate as my sewing and research skills can make it, and all the Katies will also have dance costumes representing their backgrounds. This means I need to decide what Isabelle's backstory is, as well as naming the new arrival. Brooke is [choose a tribe], Rosa Lee is Romany, and Ben is obviously Irish as Kelsey's younger brother.

Anyway, the Katie Klothing haul was sufficient to give the entire Krew fresh outfits and shoes. Ben was especially delighted to get sneakers!

Rubber ducky, joy of joys

The rubber duckies were originally justified as pool floats for dollhouses, and as you see, I am supplied with multiple scales!

After resisting 20+ years of rubber ducky novelties -- they used to be all over the Castro -- I succumbed to a rubber ducky machine at the Musee Mechanique in San Francisco last year. Fortunately, I'm incompetent at claw machines and it's rare for duckies to show up in other vending formats, so there is a natural lid on how many duckies I can acquire. I refuse to buy duckies off the shelf, as there'd be no end then.

If the Tampa airport gift shops had sold a flamingo ducky, I might have broken that rule. Phoebe the Flamingo was impressive in person! The gift shops did have small plastic flamingos, but they were made of that thin, light, brittle-feeling plastic that you get on the $4 AliExpress articulated doll bodies. A Phoebe ducky would have had some level of playful irony.

The trip was extremely productive as a business trip, but the first time I've done nothing for non-biz fun in Tampa. When I staggered out of the airport on Sunday morning after my all-night flight (the least stressful way to get there, but least stressful doesn't mean unstressful), I felt like I'd been hit in the face with a massive hot sponge. My glasses fogged instantly. My clothing felt saturated. In past years, the weather's always been gorgeous, but this year, nope. I walked across the street from my hotel for brunch, reflected that Tampa bus service on Sunday sucks, and decided the Ybor Chickens wouldn't miss me.

On Tuesday after work, I got an absolutely brutal sinus headache -- but hey, I'm fortunate I didn't get it when I needed to be lively for meetings! -- and then I shipped out early Wednesday. Tampa's airport gift shops sells genuine "I Can Be..." Barbies rather than knockoffs, which removed any temptation there.