Loose Ankle Lilac

As usual, my week was slightly busier than expected (with both kids heading back to college this month, I should have known...) but I'll show you my second pair of matching dolls today, and then hopefully get the last two photographed by the end of the weekend!

The big girl in this pair is a Denver Madison with very pale vinyl.  I found her on eBay with a super short haircut that made her even more appealing to me.  I love her pixie-like appearance!

1997 My Twinn Madison.

The only other Madison I've worked on was the post-Denver girl I used to practice finger replacement over on Toy Box Philosopher.  I was excited to see a Denver-quality version of this face!

I'll admit that I don't always love the Madison face mold in pictures.  It looks haughty to me or something.  But having seen it in person a few times now, I'm a huge fan.  The mold has big eyes with a great shape, full cheeks, and a lovely, subtle smile.

This particular doll was in pretty good shape, with a very clean, low-snag cloth body and only some mild squeaking in the armature:

She had some dirt on her vinyl limbs, too, but nothing major in terms of staining or scuffs.

I was tempted to leave her beautiful face (and hair!) alone:

But the haircut is not very well done, and nowhere near as pretty from the back as it is from the front:

I suspect this was a salvation haircut for a doll with a horribly tangled wig.

Also, Madison's face had quite a bit of scuffing, some missing paint, and some black marks near both eyes:

Madison's eyes were also one of my least favorite My Twinn eye colors.  This kind of eye can look very blue in photos, but in real life they have way too much purple for my taste.  In addition, the left eye was lighter (and more purple) than the right eye.

Madison's mouth had some missing paint on the upper lip, and some dark lines on the lower lip and along the middle of the mouth:

Madison's most puzzling flaw was that she kept tipping over when I was posing her for pictures.  I often have dolls tip over because of heavy wigs, but to have a doll with super-short hair fall down all of the time was weird.

I finally figured out that Madison has elastic strung ankles.  This was the first time I'd ever noticed this feature on a My Twinn doll.

As I mentioned in Berkeley and Clementine's post, I think the elastic joints are only found in the very earliest of the 1997 bodies.  The later white-bodied dolls have ankles that are connected to the upper leg with plastic armature.

The elastic band inside the joint is nice and thick, and it looks like it'll last a very long time, but in Madison's case, the band had loosened a little, giving her too much instability in her ankle joints.

I decided to see if I could stabilize the ankle joints a little bit.

I also decided that--as much as I liked her original look--I would dive in and give Madison a full-blown makeover.

This next comment will give some of the makeover surprise away, but it explains a few of my upcoming decisions: Doll of a Kind has a Rapunzel-inspired wig that I used as my inspiration for Madison's makeover.  This idea involved using a lot of purple.  It's also why I decided to name this doll Lilac.

Very purple.

I love lilacs.  

Anyway--The first thing I did was remove Lilac's wig and eyelashes:

You can see the discrepancy in her eye colors a little better in this picture.

I replaced Lilac's eyes with new acrylic eyes from Eyeco (P056) that I thought would be an ethereal grey-ish blue.

The left eye was extremely stubborn about going in, though!

Inspecting her left prefrontal cortex.

After many attempts (and some very sore thumbs)...

Watching a mosquito on the ceiling.

...the eye finally went all of the way in.

Looking at the camera!

There were a few problems, though.

First of all, the new eyes look almost exactly the same as the old eyes.  They're way too purple...and not at all grey.  And even though purple is a big part of the theme I had in mind for this doll, I still don't like purple in the eyes.

Before (left) and after (right).

I basically swapped in slightly less attractive versions of the original eyes. Way to go, me.

The other problem was that all of my struggles with the left eye had made the eye socket larger than it used to be!  Ack!

I reheated the head a few times and tried to encourage the socket to go back to its original shape.

It got a little better after the head fully cooled:

Eyeco P056 eyes.

But then, after all of that, I ditched the Eyeco eyes and reverted back to an old standby: Secrist Ocean Green eyes:

Safe choice.

Disney's Rapunzel from Tangled has green eyes, so I feel like I should have chosen green eyes from the start.  Better late than never, I guess.

Anyway, next I turned my attention to the lips.  They looked better after a light cleaning, but there were still large scuffs on the upper lip that I had to deal with:

You can see that I was also in the process of sanding down some imperfections in the face at this point.

I tried to patch up the lip paint because I liked the original bold color, but I find this kind of repair to be really hard.  I can never get the paint to match exactly, and I always darken the overall appearance of the lip in the process.  In Lilac's case, this led to lips that were way too dark.

In the end I gave up and stripped all of the paint away.

For Lilac's new lip color, I tried to mix a tiny bit of purple into my usual paint mixture.  It's my opinion that adding any kind of purple to the lips has to be done very, very carefully.  If it's overdone, the doll can look sickly...or like she's suffocating.  Not good.

This is the mix I finally settled on:

Purple-ish.

I think it looks pretty good on Lilac--not too purple, but not my standard dark pink, either.  It makes me think of a watercolor painting:

I don't have a great picture of Lilac's original eyebrows.  They were fine, but they were significantly faded during the cleaning and scuff-removal process: 

I enhanced them with a light yellowish sienna color that I hoped would match the wig:

With Lilac's face paint under control, I turned my attention to her loose ankles.

There's no way to re-string this style of ankle because the elastic is rooted deep into the vinyl of the leg.  I figured I could glue the joints, but the ankle articulation in these dolls is very useful for balance and posing.

So, I decided to try and increase the friction at the joint.  

I found these 2-inch felt discs online:

I cut a dime-sized hole in the middle of them:

And then I glued the felt to the top part of the foot, like this:

The felt peeks through a little at the joint, but it's not too bad:

I moved the joint around a lot, to test the stability of the felt, and--not surprisingly--it didn't hold up very well:

I decided to coat the felt discs with a liquid sealant, to see if that would strengthen the felt. I painted several coats of sealant onto each disc and let them dry for several days. This technique did strengthen the felt nicely, but it also made the surface of the felt smoother--reducing the friction a bit.

The felt also looks a bit messier now:

But, this was the best ankle solution I could think of, and it was helping Lilac's body to stand securely on its own, so I quit while I was ahead.

Meanwhile, Lilac's little companion was coming along in her own makeover!

Meet eyeless Iris:

Iris originally had faded blue eyes and matted blonde hair.  I'm guessing she was Brittany, who I've found (in my limited experience) to be the most common and least expensive My Twinn Cuddly on the secondary market.  

I didn't take a picture of her original face, probably because I was very anxious to see if I could do an eye swap on a Cuddly Sister the same way I've been doing it with the larger dolls.

As it turns out, the vinyl on these little dolls feels and acts exactly the same as the vinyl on the larger dolls, and the eye placement technique is also exactly the same, so everything worked perfectly.

Here's Iris with her own set of Secrist Ocean Green eyes:

Iris also needed fair amount of spot cleaning on the cloth part of her body.  She wasn't stinky or permanently stained or anything like that, but she did have a lot of discolored areas like this:

I just wiped all of the fabric down with a very mild bleach solution and left Iris to dry thoroughly for several days.

I left Iris' original lip paint in place, but I painted over it with the same purplish-pink mixture that I used for Lilac:

I also enhanced her eyebrows with the same paint mixture I used on Lilac:

Iris' body has a different style than Wren's, and I was surprised by how floppy she was.  I couldn't get her to sit up straight at all.

So, I decided to remove her head and see if I could add in some more plastic pellets to the stuffing.

Honestly, I was also just really curious to see what the construction of a My Twinn Cuddly doll looked like!

Iris' head is attached to a long, felt-covered peg:

That was a surprise!

I presume that the peg is just to help the head sit upright.

The inside of the body is filled with pellets, but there's also a little compartment at the front (on the belly) that's stuffed with Poly-fil:

I added a few more pellets to the body and then re-attached the head.

It's nice to know that if I ever get my hands on a badly stained Cuddly Sister, I could remove the head, empty out the pellets, clean the fabric thoroughly, let everything dry, and then re-fill the body with fresh pellets.  I was a little worried that the Cuddly bodies would be impossible to deep-clean.

Once Lilac and Iris had their heads back on their bodies, I was ready to attach the wigs!

If you're at all familiar with the Doll of a Kind wigs, you probably already know which one I chose for Lilac and Iris.  Because 13" wigs fit perfectly on Disney Animator dolls, Romina makes many of her 13" wigs with a specific Disney character in mind.

Lilac and Iris got the purple-streaked yellow-blonde wig that was inspired by Disney's Rapunzel: 

This is probably the least realistic wig I've ever used, but I love it anyway!  It has a mix of lavender, yellow-blonde, and platinum streaks:

Here it is again with the waves freshly brushed:

It matches Lilac's coloring pretty well, too:

It was at this point that I realized I'd forgotten to give poor Lilac her eyelashes!

That's embarrassing.

Oh, man.  I really was distracted these past few weeks!  Facepalm.

Here she is again--with eyelashes this time:

Good job, Emily.

Much better.

Here's a peek at Lilac's back (with virtually no picks, stains, or snags):

She does have some staining at the very top of her arms (which took me forever to notice):

Her armature also has some mild squeaks, but her body is in excellent condition overall.

I started to take some close-ups of Lilac's face: 

From various angles...

But she kept collapsing at the ankles as I was posing her.  I think it was the addition of the (really) heavy wig that was too much for her modified ankle joints to handle.  Sigh.

So, I removed the felt discs and added back a double layer of sealed felt onto each ankle:

This thicker padding looks sloppier than the single layer of felt:

And it's a bit more visible from certain angles:

But at least Lilac can stand on her own two feet!

I still think that this doll would be safest if she's displayed with a doll stand, and so I'll include one with her when she goes to her new home.

The felt discs can also be removed at any time.  They're held in place with hot glue and are, as I discovered, pretty easy to pull off.

Fortunately, little Iris couldn't care less whether or not she can stand on her own!  She's perfectly happy to just flop and lounge around:

If anything, the super-long wig actually helps Iris with her balance!

With her new plastic pellets, Iris can also perch pretty well on a shelf or chair:

Here are some full-body shots of Iris:

Her body is also in good shape, with just a few faint remnants of the old stains on the cloth body:

There are also a few shiny marks and darker spots on her vinyl limbs that I couldn't remove with Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, but they're subtle.

Here are Lilac and Iris together, waiting for their new outfits!  You can see that while Lilac has very pale vinyl, Iris has the more common medium skin tone.  I'm not actually sure if any of the Cuddly Sister were made with ultra-pale vinyl.  I have yet to see one, at any rate.

For Lilac, I asked Carole Anderson to make a lavender dress with a coordinating white hat.  I thought that this combination might show off her unusual hair a bit better than the bright-print sun hat that the other girls in this collection are wearing:

The outfit does suit Lilac, and it's beautifully made, although I'll admit that I'd hoped the purple in her hair would match the dress a bit better.

Still, if you like purple, this is your girl!

I love how the gentle waves of hair in this wig fall around Lilac's serene face:

As usual, I also wanted to show off the wig without the hat:

Here's Lilac's official "after" shot:

With a GIF:

The new Lilac definitely has a much softer, sweeter look.  But, as usual, there's a piece of me that's sad to lose the sassier, bright-lipped, short-haired version.

I didn't have any more balance issues with Lilac during her photo session.  She could even handle this walking pose with her heavy hair tipped slightly to one side!

This is my favorite photo of Lilac:

I like it in part because her hair looks so pretty, but also because the expression on her face is so sweet.

There's a babyish quality to the Madison face mold that I'd never really appreciated before.  She strikes me as a younger sister to some of the more grown-up looking girls like Audrey, Wendy, or Denika.

Carole made Iris an adorable tee shirt and shorts set that matches Lilac's outfit:

The extra pellets I added to Iris' body made the shorts in this set a bit of a tight fit, though!  

I decided to go back and take out a few of the extra pellets I added.  Nobody likes a waistband that's too tight!

Here are a few portraits of Iris:

She balances perfectly in the palm of my hand!

I'll end with a few shots of this purple pair (with lots of hair!) together:

I like these two together, with Lilac so calm and serene, and Iris a bundle of energy--always ready with something she wants to say:

And of course Iris is always asking that Lilac tell her the Rapunzel story just one more time...

Despite little differences, though, they're the best of friends, and totally inseparable!

Lilac and Iris are a distinct contrast to Sadie and Wren.  Their fairy tale hair and unusual coloring walk a line between realism and fantasy that I don't normally associate with My Twinn dolls.

Neither girl needed a lot of cleaning or general restoration work, but they both had pretty transformative makeovers!

Here's a list of everything that was done to Lilac:

-her vinyl parts were cleaned with Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

-scuffs and marks on her face were sanded away

-her old eyes were replaced with Secrist Ocean Green acrylic eyes

-her face was repainted, including lips and eyebrows (no freckles)

-she was given new eyelashes and a thick, luxurious new wig from Doll of a Kind

-her elastic-strung ankle joints were reinforced with a double layer of felt coated in protective sealant

-she is wearing a dress and hat outfit from Doll Clothes by Carole

Lilac's ankle modification definitely helps her balance, but the felt strips are visible from some angles and are not very attractive.  Also, I still have to assume that she'll be less secure on her feet than many My Twinn dolls.  I'll include a Kaiser stand with her when she goes to her new home, just to be safe.

Here's everything that was done to Iris:

-her vinyl parts were cleaned with Mr. Clean Magic Eraser

-her cloth body was spot cleaned

-some extra plastic pellets were added to he bean bag body

-she was given new Secrist Ocean Green acrylic eyes

-her face was painted, including lip and eyebrow enhancement

-she was given new eyelashes and a new wig from Doll of a Kind

-she's wearing a tee shirt and shorts outfit from Doll Clothes by Carole

Iris has some minor scuffs and marks that show her age, but nothing too obvious. Another flaw of sorts is that her skin tone doesn't match Lilac's.  I think that everything from her wig to her face paint takes on a slightly different feel with the different skin tone, but she still coordinates well with her big sister!

This pair of dreamers has gone to a wonderful new home.  Thank you very much!