Well, I'm back, but totally different dolls

 

Don't we all feel like this sometimes?

The next stage of a dead blog: the announcement that one is BACK, with new ideas and content!

Things happened. I now live in California with my widowed father and dedicated a solid year to selling and donating my late mother's massive collection of dolls and dollhouses. To say it changed my feelings about collecting would be an understatement. I still enjoy my hobbies, but my criteria for actually owning a doll (or dollhouse) have become much narrower. This has not changed my joy in reading about dolls! I can happily read for hours about dolls I have no intention of ever buying.

My interests have now skewed much more toward 1980s and 1990s clone dolls. This gal up top is Kid Kore "Kelsey," a Barbie clone of the 1990s. She came in numerous hair colors, as well as a Black version (rare), a Native American version (based on coloring and costume, as Kelsey doesn't have distinct head molds other than the 2002 revamp), and a couple Romany dolls (notable for more Asiatic eyes). I've also seen some evidence of a Mulan doll.

Kelsey came home because she was the first decent doll I've found in a thrift store in years. I don't know what happened to the thrift scene out here on the left coast, but it's gone from being a bonanza to rarely yielding much more than a disheveled blonde doll with molded bodice, which I'm not going to buy. 

Yesterday, we drove up to Davis to return my university library books (no, nothing exciting going on with education -- I just use my alumni checkout privileges for stuff) and went looking for thrift and antique stores in Vacaville and Fairfield.

Vacaville turns out to have the best overall Savers I've seen outside Scottsdale, though it had nothing I wanted and was full of people who had no sense of personal space. I haven't had my elbows positioned that far out for self-defense since I left the NYC area. Fairfield's Opportunity House Thrift, however, had a bin of 1990s dolls for $1. They had two Kid Kore "Katie" dolls -- brunette curls and blonde curls -- both of which I already have and still need to restore, so I didn't buy more. And they had this Kelsey.

I'd said many times that if I were going to buy a Kelsey, it'd have to be a redhead. It seemed ungrateful to not just take her home.

Kelsey is now in the midst of her hair restoration. As is par for the course with 1990s hair, it took 45 minutes to comb out the tangles. Her hair has now been washed, soaked in diluted fabric softener, given a split-end soak in undiluted fabric softener, boil-washed, given a wait with hair masque on it, and rinsed again. I may end up trimming the worst of her ends, as her hair turns out to be about knee-length.

I have a Tumblr for dolls at https://www.tumblr.com/smallerplaces but anything interesting will show up here in some form or other. Since there's kind of a backlog of content, it may look for a while like I'm rapidly buying bajillions of dolls, but it's a matter of catching y'all up on what I already have.