Liriel

I feel like in every collection I put together, there's a troublemaker: a doll whose makeover has a bunch of rough patches.  The Ariel repaints had been going so smoothly, I suppose I should have been anticipating some trouble at this stage...and yet it always manages to take me by surprise.

Meet my latest troublemaker, a 2002 Ariel with a beautiful skin tone and the hint of a smile:

2002 My Twinn doll with the Ariel face.

Sariel

Unlike Gabriel, the doll I'm going to show you today was one of the most inspiring Ariels in the whole group.  She really stood out from the pack with her dark hair and distinctive eyebrows.  While (spoilers!) I didn't preserve very much about her original appearance, those eyebrows gave me the idea I needed to make this girl different from Cassiel and Gabriel.

Thanks to Lilium's excellent suggestion, this version of Ariel will be named Sariel (yet another angel name!) which I tend to shorten in my head to the cute nickname Sari:

2001 My Twinn doll with the Ariel face.

Gabriel

Of the five Ariel dolls that I have left to work on, two of them came with bad staining on their limbs.  The stains are nothing like what I found on Cassiel, but the marks will still take a while to fade.  While the Remove-Zit is working its magic on those limbs, I've been focused on one of the un-stained dolls.

Despite the relatively good condition of this girl's body, for some reason I found her uninspiring.  Sometimes a doll's original appearance--no matter how beat-up or dirty--will speak to me in some way and give me ideas about what her makeover should entail.  With this girl, something about her heavy, blonde bob and pale, generic face paint left me feeling neutral.

To make matters worse, her fair coloring and heavy bangs made it really hard to take well-lit, clear pictures of her.  She was always trying to fade away into the shadows:

2001 My Twinn doll with the Ariel face.

Cassiel

I'm already feeling a bit frazzled by too many Ariels!  Everything was fine when they all still had their original wigs and eyes in place, but now that I'm starting to dismantle each doll and remove her eyes and paint...well, it's getting hard to tell everybody apart!  I've labeled all of the Ariel bits that are strewn around my workshop, so at least nobody will get matched up with the wrong body parts.

I didn't want to add to this confusion by naming all six of the dolls Ariel (kind of like Dr. Seuss' Too Many Daves...), but I did want to choose a naming theme that would acknowledge this celebration of the Ariel mold.  So, I decided that all of the girls should have names that end in -iel.

The first doll I'm going to share is the one I've been working on the longest.  I bought this girl in February and have been gradually fixing her up ever since.  She's a 1997 Ariel who I re-named Cassiel:

1997 My Twinn doll with the Ariel face.

An Abundance of Ariels

We're hunkered down here in Maine, waiting for whatever is left of Isaias, so I figured I'd get something posted before the power goes out.  I hope everyone further down the coast is doing ok!

The next collection is going to feature one of my favorite My Twinn faces: the Ariel mold.  This face is extremely common, and so there are always plenty of Ariels on the secondary market.

I was looking at my stash of dolls the other week and realized that I've amassed *five* Denver Ariel dolls with the same skin tone!  Apparently my fondness for this face (and its relative affordability) have caused me to accumulate an abundance of Ariels:

My Twinn Ariel dolls from the Denver era.