Hogwart's Express Playset

 If you do not have a passing familiarity with the Harry Potter franchise, please seek out your favorite Potterhead to explain anything that might confuse you.  Also there will be spoilers if you are new to the Wizarding World.

Taking a break from my winter projects to open my other new toy.  When I bought Jeff, I noticed the price on the Hogwarts Express had gone up a good bit, so held off to research similar (cheaper) options.  Anything I found that met my criteria cost even more!

I was never happy with my DIYs for a diner... even had to turn Sunburst Diner into a cafe during my Barbie Soap Opera.  When I saw this, my first thought was DINER BOOTH!  That might seem strange to you, but I'm a strange woman... as you well know.  

But that's for Walmart's "My Life As" dolls, you say.  The scale is way off, you say. Look how small Snape and Bellatrix are next to it, you say.  I've had a lot of experience with using this scale for my Barbies.  It does work with a little ingenuity and imagination.  

Anyway.  Here my volunteers stand beside the freshly opened playset.  It really is coincidence that I grabbed a couple of Harry Potter characters.  They were the two dolls closest to my work table. 

The white cardboard under the window opens to be a backdrop.  I'll be keeping this, although usually folded down so my dolls can make use of that window. 

The big picture was enclosed in the backdrop.  It's meant to slide behind the table window. 

This other stuff was in a Hogwarts envelope.  There's a cardboard rug, instruction booklet, stickers, and the boxes for goodies from the trolley.

Also Harry's first letter, its envelope, and two train tickets.  These are large for my dolls, but could work as wall art.  We shall see. Snape's toes for scale.

Sticker in the frame and Hogwarts outside the window.  The opposite side of that window card is a night view, for if they take the midnight train to Hogwarts.  Hedwig says "get me outta this dang plastic".

 The big blue box and plastic hold even more goodies.  I popped the trolley together and put up curtains.  Snape and Bellatrix noticed the height of the tabletop, but I told them I have a plan for that problem.  More on it later. The table folds down against the wall.  Because reasons. 

The little balcony thing on the rear was easy to install.  That lantern has a working light which I will never use.  The batteries will be removed so they don't corrode. I also remove batteries from the headlight and interior lamp.  

 

Photo is sideways because I am lazy.

It was at this point that I said "Where's Scabbers? He's supposed to be in this set."  Found him in the trash, right where the little traitor belongs.  Which reminds me... if we've got Harry's first letter, why is Crookshanks there?  Chronologically confused much? 

Pocahontas is 18 inches tall. She's a lot skinner than the intended dolls, but will serve to demonstrate the size of the pets.  Crookshanks is supposed to be a big boy.  Not a lion cub! I'm debating if he'll work as a Barbie pet.  I've had some huge cats in my time.

Even as skinny as she is, Pocahontas still takes up more than half the seat.  Snape and Bellatrix share easily.  This is one of the benefits of using larger-scale items with Barbies.  This picture makes me giggle.  Like they're Pokey's kids and Bellatrix says "Feet on the floor, Mom!  Gawd!"

Like the children they resemble in that photo, the table-height problem can be resolved by sitting on a suitcase or stack of pillows.  Come story time, I'll probably make risers out of Lego and use camera tricks to hide them.

The table folds back and the benches become a bed.  No blanket, though, unless you rip the curtains down.  The gray bolt behind the seat back is one of the two that hold the smokestack on.  Smokestack is off here because I was removing the batteries.

My dolls are very happy with this playset.  What they can't use will have a home, probably with my favorite Potterhead.  I'm not fussed about keeping the set complete.  Not a collector.  These are toys.  Play with them!  Or maybe I can use the pets to ward off home invaders (Crookshanks and Hedwig are heavy!)  

Winter Projects: Part One

 This time of year is rough.  The long nights and short days, with holidays over.  What I need is a project!  

Goodwill delivered. A folding house and an ambulance to customize!  Other stuff, too, but I digress.

Not a house.  Barbie Cook and Grill Restaurant.  (Ad photo)

But the other really is an ambulance. (Ad photo)

Both playsets are missing a lot of pieces.  Basically, anything that isn't attached to the building or vehicle!  The flashing lights and siren sounds on the ambulance don't work, but we all know I wouldn't have used them anyway.

The ambulance "interior" is missing all the loose stuff, as mentioned, but also the top of the admissions counter.  At least I'm assuming that thing that folds down into the floor is - the ad photo shows it upright and having a sort of desktop.  Otherwise this looks to be in pretty good shape.

"Exterior" looks good.  

Both playsets will need gentle cleaning, because most of details are stickers or cardboard. 

Also because they are too big for my dishwasher.

Exterior of the Cook & Grill.  I knew this was a fairly new playset because of the electric car charger!  I'm not crazy about the folding corners being so small - they look more like shutters than walls and that hurts my brain.  Maybe I'll decide it's a patio enclosure.

Interior of Cook & Grill.  It is missing one of the cardboard backings (beside the pizza oven).

Drying off after a bath.  

To be continued.

Jeff

WARNING NEKKID PLASTIC DUDE 

 

Santa was so busy bringing me other cool stuff, he forgot my Wizard of Oz doll! 

So I bought him my own self.  Like a grownup.

Just like Madame Morrible, this doll does a great job of capturing the likeness of the actor.  Jeff Goldblum can now come to my house and play with himself!  I just love Jeff Goldblum.  Almost as much as I love Sam Neill. 

But I digress.  Here we have The Wizard.  He's really leaning into his emerald theme.  The chains on his paisley waistcoat are all one plastic piece.  There's an eye on his Adam's Apple. And flowers on the long coat.  I think poppies, as a nod to the original story.  

I was disappointed to see that most of his wardrobe was all one piece.  I expected to find the shirt and waistcoat were one, but thought the coat might be separate. Bummer.  I wonder if the real Jeff looks this good.  I know he did once.  I've seen The Fly.

I have it on good authority that this is the same body as the other Wicked dude doll.  Jeff (and presumably that other guy) is nicely articulated.  Jeff can sit totally upright, an improvement on Mattel's Harry Potter men. I understood why Hagrid has a lean, being a portly fellow, but not the others. 

A better look at his shoes and cane. 

Anyone who knows me knew this would happen.  I just had to turn him in Ian Malcolm. I forgot his shoes, but barefoot is the norm for my dolls anyway.  "There will eventually be dinosaurs on the dinosaur tour?  Oh, excuse me, Miss Raptor, I didn't see you there."

Windows

 I'm a bit of an architecture buff.  It bugs me to watch TV shows where the exterior and interior do not match up.  I always have a floorplan in mind for the places in my fiction.  

 Most dollhouses have an unseen area, where stairs and closets exist. They are usually set up so it can be assumed you are standing in that area as you play.  There are windows on at least one existing wall, even if they're just printed on.

My current bookshelf dollhouse has been bothering me.  There are no windows on any of the three existing walls. Do my dolls live in an underground bunker?! 

I picked up these decorations at the after-holiday sales, but only managed to find three.  The third one isn't pictured, but it had a pointier top and the word down the center was "MERRY".  I hoped to find more, to put doors on the back of each room and move the unseen area into my apartment wall.  No luck there.  So I figured out a way to give my dolls a window in each room.

First order of business was to take off the words and greenery. 

Then I marked in black the areas not needed and broke the "wood" apart.  This created nine windows that don't match each other and aren't symmetrical unto themselves.  If you followed my soap opera and remember Joe's job, you know building with reclaimed materials is nothing new to my dolls. 

The bookshelf house is continuing that tradition.

I glued calendar pictures to them so the dolls would have a nice view.

Here's the pantry and dining room with their new windows!  Each room got a window and they're far from perfect, but my inner pedant has quit fussing.  Honestly, I'd prefer to stick fake doors on the back wall and pretend the unseen rooms are inside my apartment wall, but this works.

Always a work in progress.

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 Family Dollar 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!