Dressing Barbies for Christmas

 When I talk about my on-line friends that I met via the doll community, I usually refer to them as "my Barbie People".  We trade stuff our dolls no longer need, ask for information (like what articulated body matches the noggin from an unarticulated body), and just generally support each other in our refusal to act our ages.

Remember the one who sent me Morrible when I couldn't find her in my neck of the woods?  (Of course, Morrible showed up in my stores after that!)  I was telling her how hard it is for me to get my dolls Christmas clothes.  One reason is a combination of my own frugality and family rules about buying stuff for yourself between a certain date and Christmas.  I wait for the after-holiday sales, but miss out on things because others beat me to em.  Another is that the nearest Target (for example) is forty or fifty miles away and I hate driving.  I'm also not a fan of ordering through the mail because  I like to check things out in person before buying and because porch pirates exist.  

I'm okay with "settling-for" what's easily available to me.  But my friend took pity on my poor dolls and sent a package for them.  The packaging said "Zubebe" so I'm assuming that's the maker.  These are very nice sweaters and my dolls are stylin' in them.

They're great.  The only problem I had dressing the dolls was the fingers snagging in the knitting, and that's easy to prevent if you're too impatient to just slow down a little. Just toss a bit of tape or fabric over the doll's hand!  They slip right over the noggin and fit nicely.

These are the holiday clothes my dolls already had. Midna's Santa shirt was an ornament, the only one of the three I managed to de-glue enough for anyone to wear. Most of the others are wearing T-shirts meant for a knock-off "Elf on the Shelf".  (Elf Mates?) Those work really well for most fashion dolls. Albus is wearing a home-and-badly-made Santa suit.

My big boy Hagrid can't wear any of that, but last year Santa brought him some "Snoop on the Stoop" wine bottle sweaters.  He's not pictured here because he's wearing the one that's not Christmassy - it just says DOGG SUPPLY 20.  Here you can see Severus and Sirius wearing Snoop Claus.  

Iris (rainbow braids), Yule Ball Ron (end of top row), and Tommy (Creatable World beside Iris) are wearing Walmart sweater ornaments.  I do not recommend these for dolls.  The appliques are barely glued on.  They aren't stretchy.  I had to snip the neck holes to get em over the doll's heads and then the knitting tried to unravel.

But here's the crew in their Zubebe sweaters.  These are as easy to put on as the Elf Mate(?) shirts.  They fit well on a variety of body molds.  The colors and designs are festive.  Absolutely no complaints. Except it's hard to see, in the pictures, the snowflake on the light blue!

Once again, thank you to my Barbie Person.  My dolls suffer so horribly living in the boonies with a penny-pincher who hates driving.  I hope gifting these sweaters gave you as much pleasure as getting them has given us. 

RIP: WCT Dollhouse

 Imagine you are a well-made dollhouse, intended for use with dolls like American Girl.  Imagine you've survived a decade of being moved around and even disassembled and reassembled.   Now imagine an overweight woman, with bad knees and ankles, using you to brace herself as she rises from a seat on the floor.  Yeah.  I have killed a dollhouse. 

Wicked Cool Toys makes an amazing dollhouse.  That it lasted this long is a testament in and of itself.  That I believed it would support my weight (again) speaks volumes.

As a result, my dolls have moved.  One shelf is (in my mind) the first floor and the other is the second. And maybe an attic.  Depends on where I feel like pretending the game room is.

The rooms are about the same width, not as deep,  but there are more of them.

Here we see the kitchen (invaded by a random checkout counter) and the dining room (table is being repaired).

Living room and pantry.  Most of the pantry was previously the grocery store.  

Two bedrooms.  

Whoever sleeps in the top bunk better not be claustrophobic.  Or maybe the dolls will take the top bunk down for sleep. It does pop off.  The daybed makes this room suitable for three.

The bed in the room with the crib is made for the more recent version of My First Barbie and therefore wide enough to serve as a double.  They'll use the trundle bed it if they have company, but usually this will be for a couple and their baby or babies. 

Another pair of bedrooms. 

The sewing room has another of the My First Barbie beds. This room will normally sleep just two.

The kids' room has bunk beds and lots of toys. 

Game room.  

I put it on the bottom shelf because I suspect it will get less use than the others.

The other bottom shelf has the folding house (formerly Sunburst Cafe), the basketball court wall (remnant of a Monster High playset), and a bin of school furnishings.

The round purple bin is outdoors stuff.  Picnic tables, garden seats, strollers...   

I spy the clothes bin behind it.

A close look will show you that the small bins are stored on top of the shelves.  These have labels like "beach" and "sports".   Thus, the dolls are now mostly tucked into a corner of the living room.  

Vehicles and the 70s dream house (which is serving as a garage/barn) are still in my bedroom.

Willa

 I remember Zombies from a few years ago.  It was on one of the Disney channels or services.  Nothing about it appealed to me, not even the dolls I saw in stores.  Therefore I know next to nothing about this franchise.  Less even than I knew about Nightmare Before Christmas on my last review.

MyFroggyStuff recently reviewed three new dolls from that line.  From Zombies 4: Dawn of the Vampires.  Two of the dolls are blondes with a bad case of Vapid Face.  But Willa... 

If Sally was little-goth-on-the-prairie, Willa is gothic mountaineer.

I guess she's a werewolf.  Her last name has "Lycan" in it and the box mentions she's the leader of the pack. There's a wolf on her belt buckle.

Girl's got some hair!  

Her bicep wrap and rope bracelet came off with the packaging.  Necklace and belt were not on her person.  I'm going to take a stab in the dark and assume the necklace is a moonstone amulet of great power. 

Several tattoos on her arms.  You can also get a gander at that beautiful shirt and the bracelets that stayed put.  The tattoos look like art from a certain Disney Princess who shares ethnicity with a certain other-franchise lycanthrope.  

She goes to the same hair stylist as Bellatrix.

MyFroggyStuff says that's makeup, but she's my doll and I say it's facial tattoos like Midna's.  

Pointy ears like Midna.  (Midna is a Fairytopia Sunburst, by the way, rebodied.) 

 

Willa with Tris, Four, and Midna.  Showing off their ink!  

Disney ily 4EVER

WARNING NEKKID DOLL BOOBIES

RUN FOR THE HILLS 

I haven't bought any of the Disney ily 4EVER dolls for a couple of reasons.  One, they are ridiculously expensive.  I don't even want to think about the price of the Disney Store versions.  The Jakks Pacific play line ones are more than a Barbie with more articulation.  Two, the only ily thing I've seen that really fired me up is this fashion pack.  Which I did buy.  Don't ask the price.

 They're based on the tradition of Disney Bounding, in which a guest at the amusement park dresses "inspired by" a favorite character as a way to circumvent rules against adults in actual costume.  None of them floated my boat until I spotted this gal. 

I didn't buy her but kept eyeballing her.  The high price was mitigated for me by the second outfit, but still more than I was willing to pay.  Today I found her in the Clearance aisle for less than 20!  You know she hopped right in my cart.

Some of the outfits don't strike me as practical for a day at the amusement park!

 I must confess I have never seen Nightmare Before Christmas.  What struck me about this doll was the whole Little-Goth-On-The-Prairie thing she has going on.  Unlike most of the dolls in this line, this gal bears a passing resemblance to her inspiration. I'm just going to go ahead and call her Sally.

Her earrings (which are removable) look like Jack Skellington.  Her hair tangles badly around that gray coming out of his noggin.  I might snip that - the gray, not the hair.

Here she is in her second outfit.

She has molded on panties and lots of articulation.  You know I gotta have them knees and elbows!

Her coffin shaped bag opens.  The necklace features the curvy hill I see in much of the Nightmare merchandising and the purse charm looks like Jack's ghost dog.  The clutch purse doesn't open and the handle has the ghost dog and a Jack head.  I could not manage a decent picture of it, but that's some cool detail.  The clutch makes me think of Yzma (Wrong movie, Kronk!).

Phoebe (a reissue Barbie and the Rockers doll) is similar in articulation.  Sally's head and feet are  larger, but that's okay.  A lot of my dolls have more realistically sized feet than Barbie.  And Sally's head ain't bigger than her torso like certain (freaky) doll lines I could name.  Jakks Pacific does dolls well.

Lil McDonald's POP

 

My Barbies got all kinds of goodies today!  One of the shift managers at our local Micky Dee's is a friend of mine and claimed this POP (point of purchase) display on sight.  "For Jeanie, for her dolls."

Of course, we had to wait until after these toys were featured and the POP came down.  

The scale is all over the place, but that's nothing a bit of imagination can't fix.

One problem with a POP is the white squares that hold the toys in place.  They always leave some of themselves behind.  But that is absolutely not a deal breaker here.

There's your problem.

We'll start with the Happy Meals.  There's even one tray that's just a huge order of fries.  The bigger ones and the Halloween bucket open. 

 The bucket has a sticker on top of a sticker sheet.  The boxes have real sticker sheets inside.  

The scale on these is excellent for the Barbies.  

These aren't bad either.  I think a true to-scale Happy Meal box would be somewhere in between the sizes we got from this POP.  I can certainly see why my friend thought of my dolls.

The bits pictured here are almost to scale with each other, except for the giant drive up menu!  Most of these are static (they don't do anything) but the truck rolls and...

The roof comes off the building!  The interior wall is cardboard, glued in place.

Jenny for scale.

Most of these have interactive features.

The order kiosk and POP have double sided paper inserts.  POP can be empty shelves and kiosk can be in waiting mode.  The register screen tilts.

The register is a good size for the dolls.  The kiosk and POP are too small to be toys, but work well on a doll-size counter.  

The dolls' dolls can have a seat in the booth.

Drink station, fries in the fryer, burgers on the grill.  

Fries are up and burgers are seasoned.

Ice is pouring and the platen on the grill is down.

A play cell phone with the McD's app on screen and its own case! Real phone for comparison.  

A bit large for the dolls.  Maybe I could use it as a wall-mounted order kiosk.  Or Gage might be holding a really big tablet. 

Either way, quite a score!  My dolls are happy!

Barbie Exhibit

We went to Cincinnati Museum Center at Union Terminal for the Barbie Exhibit.  

CMC seems to be developing a habit of having these things during June. 

Twice now they've lured me in with Pompeii.

It's like they know when my birthday is!

This is the first thing in the exhibit proper.

This is the main reason I so love Barbie.

This was slightly later, after the story of how Ruth Handler created Barbie.

Barbie has always been about the possibilities.

I'll fight anyone who says different.

Here's me in the original Barbie Dream House.

They had a lot of these fun photo ops!  

My minions got pictures in a Disco and with a surfboard.

Most of us got into Barbie's Corvette.

We even got into Barbie Boxes!

They give a good overview of how the dolls are made.

Most of the exhibit is in chronological order, showing dolls, accessories, and fashions.

It was fun and informative for our whole group, even those not into Barbie (weirdos).

Recommended for all Barbie Lovers and their weirdos.