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.
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