Road Kill Monika

For my first post, I'll share a doll who is not actually for sale.  I love her, but she has way too many imperfections to make me comfortable selling her.  She's a good reminder that none of the dolls I restore end up perfect--these are old dolls and they carry with them the wear and tear of decades.

This Denika made a brief appearance over on The Toy Box Philosopher, but I never offered any follow-up.  She's become a bit of a mascot for this new site.

The poor thing arrived with a thinning wig, a moldy dress, missing eyelashes, no eyebrows...and a body that looked like it had been slashed to bits and dragged behind a car.  No joke.  But the Denika face mold--oh, man!  It tugs at my heart:

Denika when she first arrived.

I already have a Denika in my collection, so I named this girl Monika.  The My Twinn company called this face mold Monique, so I thought Monika would be a good intermediary between that and Denika.

I bought this doll because her face looked perfect and she has a lovely pale skin tone.  I thought her eyes would be keepers, too, but it turns out that one of them was horribly scratched and gouged.  I probably paid too much ($40 plus shipping) for such a damaged doll, but I find entertainment value in a project this challenging.

Also, she looked so sweet in her auction photos.  Here's a snippet from one of them: 

Help me!

The seller was supremely honest about Monika's condition, too, which I appreciate.  There were lots of good photos and the doll was being sold "for parts."

What I didn't notice in the photos but is pretty clear in hindsight is that both of Monika's arms (and both legs, too) had big scuffs in the vinyl.  Can you see in the photo, below, how both arms have patches where the vinyl isn't shiny?  Well, that's because the whole top layer of vinyl was jaggedly scraped away.  

Ouch.

I really can't imagine how this damage occurred, but it looks like Monika was dragged behind a car.  

And of course her cloth torso was in rough shape, too, with multiple repaired slashes and some black marker lines.

Monika arrived with a bad smell and a sticky, oily substance all over her arms and legs.  I unpacked her and laid her on the floor (away from my other dolls!) to inspect the damage and snap a few pictures.

I often try to salvage a doll's original wig, but this one was missing too much hair in the front.  I haven't figured out how to fix that yet:

Monika's body tag had been cut off, but her white cloth torso means that she's from the Denver era of manufacturing (1997).

I have so many hypotheses about what happened to this poor girl's body, but I guess we'll never know for sure.  She was slashed open pretty savagely at some point (judging by her cloth "scars" and the damaged foam inside her body) but somebody also took great care to mend her:

Here's a slightly better look at her shiny, gouged limbs:

This arm was especially bad:

I started by removing Monika's head and taking her body apart.  It was smelly and stained so I knew I'd have to wash it, and I was hoping I could get some of the black pen marks out, too:

I left the original stitching in place while I washed the body, but planned to re-sew most of it since several areas were coming undone:

Back when I was fixing Monika, I hadn't decided to start this blog yet, so I didn't take any pictures of the process.  That means I can't really show you the stages of her restoration. 

This scarcity of photos will (sadly) be the case with several of the dolls I sell early on.

I'll quickly summarize everything I did with Monika:

1. Washed and bleached the body slip and the foam (the pen marks didn't come out).

2. Re-stitched the damaged parts of the body.

3. Repaired the slashed foam and re-assembled the body.

4. Sanded (and sanded, and sanded, and sanded...) down the gouges on the limbs.

5. Replaced the eyes.

6. Repainted the face.

7. Replaced the wig with an original My Twinn wig that's almost identical to the one she originally had!

8. And last, I covered her scarred body with some original My Twinn underwear:

She looks good from a distance!

I'm pretty happy with her face, but one eyebrow is a little higher than the other:

I did these eyebrows with watercolor pencil, too, and I've stopped doing that because the color doesn't last.  Now I only use acrylic paints.

This wig is gorgeous, but the cap curls up a bit in front, so I wasn't able to glue it completely flat right at the very top.  This bugs me, so I might remove the wig some day, try to flatten the top, and then re-glue it for a better fit:

The new stitches I placed on the front of the body are pretty good:

But the back is a mess!

There was a section on the left side of the body that I had no idea what to do with.  There were too many little scraps of fabric.

The limbs are not perfect, but they're very clean and feel really nice now!

If you look close enough...

You can still see a lot of little scuffs and scratches:

These are the areas where the gouges went so deep that I couldn't sand down to their level.

Here's the really bad arm:

The nice thing is, I can't feel any of these scratches.  The surface of the vinyl is perfectly smooth and soft.

Monika got to be the first doll to model one of the outfits from Doll Clothes by Carole.  I chose the green stripes to match Monika's eyes:

The lighting inside isn't great (I tore down my studio equipment from the Toy Box Philosopher...) and so I grabbed a few quick shots outside for some different lighting:

I'll probably tinker some more with Monika's wig and re-paint her eyebrows, but for now she's taking a small break from her restoration work and enjoying an honored spot on the shelf!

In the coming week, I'll post a few shorter stories about some of the dolls that are ready to go up for sale on Etsy.  The shop should open shortly after that!

Thank you for stopping by!