Doll Restoration

Well, I know it's been a couple of days, but I'll blame it on the biblical exegesis paper I have to write and turn in by Sunday night (yeah, it's about as fun as it sounds). Thanks to said paper, I haven't had much time for crafting or anything else in the last few days, but I just couldn't help but share my find at a local second hand store. I had actually gone to see if I could find a belt to wear for work. I didn't find a belt, but I thought I would check the dolls while I was there just to see if they had anything that would help with my dress project and I was in luck! They didn't have one, they didn't have two, but they had THREE Disney Princess dolls!!!! Belle, Snow White (so hard to find even in the big box stores), and Ariel. They were definitely in need of some TLC, but for the price, I couldn't walk away from them. I was especially thrilled to find that Belle was the Christmas Belle (too bad she didn't have her dress with her) from 1999. The best I can determine is Snow White is the Gem Princess doll from 2006. These were both made by Mattel and licsenced by Disney. Ariel did not have a (c) date on her, but she is completely made by Disney, so she is within the last few years.

Here is a picture of the three of them shortly after I got home. Snow White and Belle were in much better condition than Ariel. Neither of them needed much more than a wash and a combing, but Ariel's hair was a mess!!!! And that's an understatement. In this first picture, the little portion of her of her hair in the hair tie is what I got combed out in about 30 minutes before I decided I wanted to do progression pictures to share her restoration on my blog.

And here is Ariel by herself, showing her hair. It was, as I said, a complete mess. I could barely get my fingers to seperate it into parts to even begin tackling it. 

Here she is a couple of hours (yes, I just said a couple of hours) later. I'm about a third of the way through her hair at this point. By this point in time, I have broken one tine on my comb and gone through about half of an 8 oz bottle of water just to get that small portion even managable.

Here's a frontal view with the combed portion in the hair tie on the right and the uncombed portion on the left. I had to find clothes to put on her because one of my cats has a doll fetish apparently. As in, if they are naked, he hisses at them (I'm not joking).

The next two pictures are close ups of the combed and uncombed portions respectfully. You can see that the bottoms of the combed portion is still very frizzy. The ends were kinked and combing them wasn't doing anything to straighten them. At this point, I had been working on her for nearly 8 hours and had to give combing a rest. I resorted to the internet to try to find ways to help restore her hair. My findings? Conditioner/Fabric Softener and Hot Water. That pretty much covers it. Some amazing transformations came from it though.

Before giving up on the dolls completely for the night, I did do a combing on Belle and Snow White. Much easier than Ariel, and come to find, Belle's hair was pretty tangled itself. Belle's hair took about 30 minutes maybe to comb out completely. Snow White's short bob took about 15 minutes. Below you can see both front and back shots of both dolls.

And here are the dolls all together after their "initial" combings (Ariel isn't finished at this point). As you can see, I had to find clothing for Belle, too, to get the cat to quit hissing at her. She is wearing the black ball gown I first knitted to determine if I could do the knitted dress project.

I was able to finish combing out Ariel's hair the next morning before work. Here is a back shot of her hair. It was much longer than I expected it to be (which ended up being a good thing). You can see my kitty was trying to get in the picture. She's a ham for the camera.

And the front picture. The bangs are still a mess and so are the ends. I had to figure out something! It was time to resort to my internet findings.

 So, after I got home from work, my kitchen (please pardon the background mess, we just finished with a remodel) became a doll salon! Much to the dismay of those animals and person who lives with me! Belle had something sticky covering her hair and I wanted to wash Snow White just to be safe since I did get these dolls at a second hand store. I was also trying anything I could to even half way restore Ariel's hair. Here they are with their hair dripping in my sink. You can see the comb which Ariel broke two more tines off of as I was trying to finish her hair that morning.

Hot water didn't seem to help enough on the endings, so I tried the next thing on my list, conditioning the hair. I didn't have any fabric softener, but I did have some extra conditioner. So she got soaked with conditioner (which also made her smell like the ocean because of the scent, lol). She stayed in this bowl for about 2 hours as I cooked dinner and then we ate.

Well, as you can see, conditioner didn't do much for the ends, though it did soften the hair back up and help me get out the final few tangles. So, I thought I had to do something, it was time to give her a perm. Ariel's hair comes wavy, so I figured this would be the best way to cover up the horrible ends. Here she is laying with a section divided out for a test curl. I went ahead and trimmed off about 2 cm off the end of the hair because there was just going to be no saving it.

And the small section around the "roller" (AKA a drinking straw). I just wanted to do a single test curl before doing her entire hair. It did work and so it was time to grab straws and head to a more comfortable place to do the rolling than standing on the hard tile kitchen floor.

But before I did the curl job, I took care of Belle and Snow White who had dried in the mean time of me dealing with dinner and Ariel. I was very please how pretty they were with just a simple wash, especially Belle.

Snow White really didn't show much different from the front, so I just took a back head shot.

And here is Ariel with her curl job in process. 1/3 of the way through....

2/3...... 

Did she meet a straw factory?

I think so. I never imagined that I would do a perm job on a doll.

And here she is after 30 second hot water and 30 second cold water dunks. She has to dry with the straws in her hair with no help from towel or blow dryer (blow dryer would destroy the hair!).

The drying process took about 24 hours, but I won't make you wait that long for results. Here they are:

It's a curling nightmare!!!!!!! But the frizzy ends are covered.

Here's after a little bit of combing out to tame the curls a little. I did find in combing out the hair that it was still a little wet on the underside, but it turned out okay.

 

And pulled back into a pony tail. Still some frizz, but much better than what I started with.

And now for just a little bit of dress progress. After working on my boring paper, I wanted to do a little bit on the dresses, and of course, I had to go back to my favorite, the yellow ball gown. I also wanted to see what it looked like on an actual Belle doll, so I switched the dress over to the Belle doll after working on it some. I added about 1/2" to the length...

And I never imagined how realistic it would look!!!!!! I was so happy when I saw it on the actual doll. And I found my beads to be able to do all the accents after the knitting is done!!!!! I love this project!!!! Thank you so much for allowing me to do this (you know who you are ;) ).

192.25 DAYS TO GO!!!