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Friday, September 05, 2008

Hair Club for Dolls (Not just a member, but a victim!)

3 dollars at a Michael's craft store got me one of the silliest purchases I've ever had to bring up to a counter. Sadly, I was contemplating getting a Barbie to test whether my girls had bigger dimensions than Barbie. I opted not to, since Barbie nowadays dresses like a whore. I may be weird, but I have decency limits for my dolls. I chose this throwaway use of my money to accomplish one major task: make Lia's hair less stiff.

"Crochet instructions included". Some use that is, as I don't crochet...yet. I'll abstain from the prom dress instructions and opt to continue what I've been doing: reverse engineering clothing patterns from military garb. Who wears a prom dress to a gun fight anyways. You'd burn holes from all that brass, and you'd be hard pressed to carry an additional magazine on your person.

Now, onto the primary objective: less stiff hair. Right now, Lia utilizes strips of brown construction paper glued to a scalp to form hair. Great for that "I made this out of paper" look, but the stiffness tends to pop her scalp off when she's seated, due to the stiff length of hair acting as a lever arm. Therefore, I decided to go for a synthetic, non-paper hairdo. That and to satisfy my massive hair fetish. (Aaaauuuuuhhhhhh...hair...so luscious and shiny...must stroke...must rub face in it) After about three hours of gluing and about half an hour of cursing, here's the finished product.

I kind of miss the bangs. Might handle that issue in a futher revision. Now, about the construction process. I liberally and literally de-faced the victim doll, after the traditional decapitation. I certainly could have done it without decapitating the doll, but I must satisfy that other fetish I have of lopping off doll heads. (Or do I have a fascination of putting heads in a cup...) Rather than take the skilled and leisurely route of rooting the hair into the scalp, I went for the haphazard WWII medic route and started sawing off bits and cutting. I eventually obtained some bundles of hair that I glued to the blank scalp using a hot glue gun. Interestingly enough, the extreme heat of the glue gun nozzle blackened the hair. It's a cheap and dirty way of securing hair to a substrate, but I had few options. I suggest using small dabs of glue and working quickly. Anything more than a pinhead in drop size results in a mess. I highly suggest working from the bottom of the scalp and applying small quantities of hair at a time.

Right now, the hair is a bit too poofy. I'll figure out how to control it later. Kind of like mine in real life, but I never bothered to control that either. Except that I like this result better, and it doesn't deform when I sleep.

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