I am working so much, that it is hard to take on something that will keep me out in my garage. Besides, it's cold out there right now.
That leaves me only a couple options to choose from right now. Sculpting dolls, or customizing dolls.
I really want to revisit sculpting. I tried this week, but my hands are so dry and cut up from work, that I mess up whatever I start. My dry skin leaves groves where I try to smooth the clay, and it gets in my cuts and burns like acid... It sucks. I don't seem very good at using only tools, I need my fingers.
So I have decided to do better at taking care of my hands. YAY! GO ME!... I will be wearing gloves when I am handling sharp material at work, and I have been using lotion at the rate of an adolescent boy. I already see improvement, but I have a lot of ridges left in my hands and fingers, that still need to heal.
So, like I said, I was going through my crafty stuff, and I found this big tub of Barbie stuff. I have a pretty big interest in looking at customized Barbies, and I have told myself in the past that I was going to try it, so I guess it's about time.
I have so many heads without bodies, that it's perfect. I am prepped them for my work tonight.
I picked out 3 floating heads to start with.
One is an '80's head. It was the red-head from Barbie and the Rockers... Don't ask me how I remember what heads were what Barbie, I just do...
One is another '80's head, from Safari Barbie...
And one is a head from a princess Barbie I bought for my daughter 4 or 5 years ago.
I have decided that I want fresh pallets... I even wanted to get rid of the nasty, rat nest hair. So I started by cutting the hair. All the tutorials I read say to cut the hair as short as possible, and then pull the hair from the inside of the head through the neck hole, to take it out.
My scissors did not want to get very close to the tiny scalps, so I used one of my leg/pit razors to actually shave their heads. You know? They aren't kidding when they say it takes patience. I was just about ready to cut their damn skull caps off.
The newest one seemed to have a glue coating on the inside of her head (Which no tutorial I read prepared me for!) It was a mess. The old red headed one had mass amounts of hair. I was amazed so much fit on it.
So, I went from scissors, to tweezers, to scissors some more, then pliers, then the Lady Schick, to pliers again, to tweezers, to a sculpting scraper, to some more tweezing. I finally threw up my hands and boiled the damn heads, which I didn't see in any tutorials for pulling hair, but it made my life a whole lot easier when it came to getting the rest of the work done (Not to mention getting rid of the gluey stuff inside the brunette's head). I finished off with pliers.
I finally got all of the hair out. Next I just took acetone and wiped off the faces. Once again, the tutorials are not exaggerating when they say it takes a lot of elbow grease, and a lot of patience.
After I removed their faces with acetone, I washed the heads off very thoroughly with soap and water. Acetone is not good on anything rubbery in the world that I know of, and so it makes me wonder that some tutorials that say to use acetone nail polish remover don't mention a thorough wash down when you are done using it on a doll head...
I hope to do some blushing and painting on them through the week.
While I am working on the heads, I am hoping to find 1/6 articulated bodies to put them on. I don't want classic Barbie bodies. I am thinking about trying an Obitsu, or Volks body for them, if I can them cheap enough on E-bay or Amazon. I figure I will be doing some shopping this week for this project as well.
Here's hoping for spare time.
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