Belle 2

As a follow-up to my Disney version of Princess Belle, who you can see here, today I'm going to show you my interpretation of the historical version of the same character.

The earliest recorded version of the Beauty and the Beast tale, called La Belle et la Bête, was published by French author Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve (what a name!) in 1740.  A more popular, abridged version was released in around 1760. Wikipedia has a nice summary of Villeneuve's story, and it's quite similar to the version we're all used to--with a bit of Cinderella-like siblings thrown in for good measure.

In my discussions with Leah, the talented and lovely seamstress who made all of the historical princess gowns, we decided to cheat a bit and make the historical Belle doll from 1770 rather than 1740.  Leah already had a beautiful pattern for a 1770s gown, and hair from that time period was really cool.  There were plenty of popular versions of the Beauty and the Beast story that emerged in the 1770s, including an opera (!), so it's only cheating a little bit.

2000 My Twinn doll with medium vinyl and the Madison face.

Both of my Belle dolls have the My Twinn Madison face.  This is a pretty face that's quite easy to find.  Ideally, this Belle would have very pale vinyl just like the Disney version (pale complexions were desirable in 1770), but pale Madison dolls are not so easy to find, so this girl has the more common medium vinyl.

Belle came to me in structurally good condition, but she was covered in dirt, scuffs, and stains:

Her old eyelashes were hanging on by a thread, which makes her look pretty funny in these early pictures!

Here are some close-ups of Belle's very dirty, scuffed-up face:

Poor little urchin.

She has a fair number of small pulls in her fabric torso, and quite a lot of staining on the fabric areas:

Maybe you can see that she has some slightly darker areas on her back, and also a large green spot on the left side of her bottom:

Her legs were also super-dirty and covered with scuffs and green paint:

There was more dark staining on her right arm:

And the vinyl of her arms was dirty and scuffed (with a little bit of green paint here and there):

The dirt and paint on this doll was slightly intimidating, but most of the marks ended up coming off with a thorough washing.  I did need to completely disassemble her body and wash all of the parts separately.

As an aside, the Madison I've been showing you was not the doll I originally had in mind for historical Belle.  When I started the project, this girl from 1997 (who I nicknamed Makeup Maddie) was my first choice:

She was begging to be a princess.

This doll was in good shape overall, but she had a lot of eye makeup on her face.  Notice, also, the orange mark on the lower part of one cheek:

After I cleaned this head and stripped away all of the factory paint and marks, I realized that there was a pale spot, slightly larger than a quarter, in the vinyl of her face--right where that orange mark used to be.  It's super-hard to see in these pictures, but it is noticeable:

I've circled the spot here, but it's still really hard to see:

Anyway, I'm not sure what causes this type of discoloration, or whether it was related to that orange mark, but I've seen it once or twice before.  It's one of the very few things that will cause me to trash a My Twinn head (or use it for painting practice).  There's no way to correct the bleached/lightened vinyl, and I suspect that these spots will get worse over time.  Poor Makeup Maddie.

You can imagine how relieved I was when I saw that the green marks on my second Madison hadn't caused any long-term damage!

Let's get back to that doll:

I removed her wig and old eyelashes:

She can finally see!

She had very pretty green eyes under all of that mess:

She was still very dirty and scuffed, though.

She had white scuffs and green marks on her face:

I popped her old eyes out (and kept them) so that I could give her head a really thorough cleaning:

Fortunately, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and some acetone got rid of all of the marks on her face...and didn't leave any pale areas behind!

Belle had a bit of a scuffed nose, but that was easy to sand down:

I gave her some new brown glass eyes:

These are glass eyes from Lauscha, Germany.  They're not quite as pretty or expensive as the Hand Glass Craft eyes, but I still love them.

I'm not thrilled with the eyebrows I gave Belle.  I was kind-of going for Emma Watson brows (since she played Belle in the Disney live action movie), but they ended up looking like all of my other brows.  Sigh.  Some day I'll figure out how to change things up. 

Here's a close-up of one eye and eyebrow:

And here's a side view of the eyebrow so you can see how far it extends:

I finished Belle's face-up by giving her blush and new lips:

I really like how her lips turned out.  The Madison mold has nice lips, and I painted them to be full and rounded:

Once Belle's paint had dried overnight, I gave her head another coat of sealant, let that dry, and then reassembled her body.

Rather than follow the Disney model and give Belle a dark brown wig, I decided to go with an auburn human hair wig from Monique.  This is one of my favorite wigs of all time.  I also had a good practical reason for choosing this particular wig that I'll explain in just a sec.

The wig is not as red as it looks in that last photo.  It's more auburn than red.  I paired the wig with dark brown eyelashes that match the brows.

I took a few pictures of Belle undressed and with her wig let down, just so you can see how her body looks now...

...and how her wig looks when it's not styled:

The human hair wigs are so beautiful and soft.  I love how easy it is to manage the hair, and it hardly sheds at all.  It's really sad to me that Monique has closed and that these wigs will soon be extinct.

All of the darkened areas on Belle's fabric torso washed out, but not all of the green staining went away:

Here's a better view of the remaining faint green stain:

These dark lines on Belle's left leg didn't wash away, either:

I also treated a dark stain on the back of her leg with Remove-Zit, but that wasn't 100% successful:

I thought about how to style Belle's hair for quite a while.  The later 18th century is famous for its tall, elaborate hairstyles, and I really wanted to capture that with this doll.

I looked at several pictures for inspiration, including this portrait of Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (the author of La Belle et la Bête):

I also really like this painting of a woman from the 1770s:

Notice how pale she's made to look!

The 2017 live-action Beauty and the Beast movie was also an interesting source of inspiration.  Based on the costumes and hair, I suspect this movie is set in mid-to-late 18th century France:

I chose the Monique auburn wig for Belle's hair specifically because I knew I had an extra human hair wig in this color.  I bought a similar wig with bangs a while ago, but the sizing was not right for My Twinn dolls.  So, I decided to use the extra wig as a hairpiece to add height to Belle's hairstyle.

I glued the bangs of the extra wig to the underside of a piece of foam, and then separated the hair into different sections: a large ponytail at the top, and two smaller sections on either side:

I sewed the hairpiece to the main wig in two places.  The thread can easily be seen and cut if you want to remove the hairstyle.  I know how easy it is to remove the thread because I started over with this style twice!

I used some bobby pins to secure the hairpiece even more:

Then I brushed the hair from the front of the wig up and over the hairpiece, and tied all of that hair into the ponytail of the hairpiece:

After the majority of the hair was secured into a ponytail, I used the smaller sections of hair from the hairpiece and some equivalent sections of hair from the main wig to fill in the ugly gaps all around the head. 

Aside from the thread and bobby pins I used to secure the hairpiece to the wig, everything about this hairstyle is held together with decorative claw clips.  I thought this would be an attractive way to organize the hair, and the claw clips can easily be removed and repositioned as desired.

This was my first attempt:

I was pretty happy with this, but it made the doll unreasonably tall.  I also hadn't secured the hair very well, so the style started to droop.  This was before I figured out that I had to stitch the hairpiece into the wig.

Here is my second attempt:

This style wasn't tall enough.  Most of the volume was on the back of Belle's head, and that didn't look right.  It also didn't help with her balance!

Finally, I settled on this version:

The hair is tall but not too tall, and I like how the ornamental clips can be seen throughout the style:

While I've got Belle looking so nicely at the camera, let's do a quick comparison GIF:

She's definitely come a long way!  A true rags-to-riches moment.

But what about the dress?!  I casually started showing pictures of Belle in her full outfit like it was no big deal...but it's a big deal!  I absolutely love this amazing creation:

Like all of the other historical gowns I've shown you so far, this dress was made by Leah from Chrisalem. Leah chooses the most incredible high-quality fabrics and trims, and she can make a pattern for just about anything!  I adore her work and own about ten of her My Twinn gowns.

As I mentioned earlier, I actually chose the 1770 time period for this Belle because Leah showed me a beautiful dress from 1770 that she'd made for another doll, and I fell in love.

I'm picky, though, and so I made some small changes to this dress.  I'm fortunate that Leah puts up with my shenanigans. :)  

The original dress had some white trim across the red part of the bodice, like this:

I like the idea of a decorated bodice, but the white trim reminded me too much of ric-rac.  I'm not sure what happened to me in my childhood, but I have a bad reaction to ric-rac.  In addition, some of the trim was a little crooked.  

So, I took out the white stripes and hand-stitched some green satin rope trim to the edges of the red area.  I also glued on some embroidered petals in order to hide the ends of the rope trim:

The bodice is more understated now, which I like.

And just so you know, Leah would never glue anything in her work.  That's all me.

The ric-rac trim appears elsewhere on this dress, but for some reason it looks beautiful to me in these other locations.  For example, I love how it pairs with the antique lace on the sleeves:

And it looks nice alongside the elaborate lace trim of the skirt:

The dress is made in two pieces.  The red skirt is separate and has its own waistband with snap closure in the back.  The two skirts give the dress extra fullness and a wonderful weight.

I paired the dress with off-white tights and grey slip-on shoes:

One other thing to notice about Belle's outfit is that it includes a little skin-colored tulle dickie at the neckline:

The dickie is crooked in this photo, but it's a nice detail.  In fact, this makes me very glad that I didn't end up using the white-bodied Makeup Maddie for Belle!  The white fabric on her neck would not have looked as nice through this delicate dickie.

Now that I've given the dress the attention it deserves, let's go back and look at Belle's hairstyle in some more detail.

Here's the hair from the top view:

And from each side:

All of the curls were created by wrapping the hair around my fingers and then clipping it in place with one of the mini claw clips:

I really like how this style looks from the back:

I'll tidy and tighten up the ringlet curls before Belle goes to her new home.

Belle has good balance, even though she's top-heavy, but I didn't end up moving her around very much during her photo shoot.  I think I was just being super-careful with her.

I finally let Belle dance around a bit towards the end of the photo session.  She was thrilled!

This is one of my favorite indoor pictures of Belle:

I think she looks very regal!

With both Belles together, you can see the difference in skin tones clearly, and you can also see how tall the historical Belle's hair is!  I thought Disney Belle had a big bun....

To be fair, the historical Belle is standing slightly in front of Disney Belle, so she looks taller overall, but still.  It's a big hairstyle.

Like so many of my dolls, Belle really came to life when I brought her outside for some extra photos.  The lighting here shows off the color of her hair really accurately, although it makes her complexion look slightly fairer than it actually is.

There was a slight breeze on this particular evening, and I loved how it blew the delicate ringlets all around!

Here's another look at Belle's hairstyle from a few different angles in the natural light:

The hairstyle is a little messy, as you can see, with some shorter tendrils of hair loose around the face, but the mini clips do a pretty good job of holding things in place.

Belle noticed that some of the leaves in our yard are starting to change color (already!):

And the deep red leaves coordinate really beautifully with her dress!

I usually edit out about half of the pictures I take outside, but for some reason this girl didn't take many bad shots!  I should probably wrap things up, though.  Here's just one more:

I really like how Belle's hairstyle came out, but I think it's important to note that it might not last.  I refuse to use hair spray or any kind of chemical in the hair, so I can't guarantee anything about the style's longevity.  I'm not even sure how I'll secure the hair for shipping--but I'll do my best!  I've tried to design the style so that it can be re-done fairly easily, by just repositioning all of the little clips.  I also think that Belle looks beautiful with her unadorned wig.  That hair could be styled into a much simpler style and still look amazing.

Hairstyle aside, this doll has a lovely gown and some beautiful new glass eyes that I think make her look serene, mature, and level-headed--just like the Beauty character in La Belle et la Bête.

Here's a summary of all the work that was done on Belle:

-the head was removed from the body

-the old eyelashes and wig were removed and discarded

-the old eyes were removed and saved

-the head was thoroughly cleaned with Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, soap, and water

-acetone was used to strip away the factory paint and then the head was washed again

-the body was disassembled and all parts were cleaned

-a stain on the back of one leg was treated with Remove-Zit

-a scuff on the nose was sanded down

-the head was sprayed with Mr. Super Clear UV cut matte sealant

-new brown glass eyes from Lauscha, Germany were placed

-the head was repainted using artist-grade acrylic paints and then re-sealed

-the head was reattached to the body and glued in place with hot glue

-the back seam was re-sewn

-new eyelashes were placed using tacky glue

-a new auburn human hair wig was glued using hot glue

-the hair was styled using a hairpiece made from another human hair wig that exactly matches the primary wig.  The hairstyle includes nine large silver rhinestone claw clips and lots of smaller flower clips

-the doll is wearing a beautiful two-piece gown (three pieces including the dickie) made by Leah from Chrisalem on Etsy. I modified the gown slightly and paired it with tights and shoes.  Belle will also come with a name bracelet

Flaws: Belle has some picks on her cloth torso and some faint stains that were resistant to cleaning. She also has a few dark spots on the back of one vinyl leg that did not completely disappear with Remove-Zit treatment. Her hairstyle is designed to be removable and may not stand the test of time.

I can't believe I'm almost done with the princess series!  I feel like this project has stretched out for longer than any of the others.  I'm super-excited to begin work on the Cinderellas, though, as you might imagine.  I have two beautiful Lenora dolls to play the part of Cinderella, and I'm excited to make the Disney-themed doll's ballgown on my own!  As I start work on those princesses, I'll also have a few 19" My Way Kids to share with you, just to mix things up.

I hope you've enjoyed seeing the two versions of Belle!  They have both sold.  Thank you!