I never really understood the appeal of struggling to put tights and leggings and socks onto the legs of Blythes. To me, it’s a chore. I mean, they’re nice to look at, but they’re just a challenge to put on the dolls. I have a hard enough time with putting tights on me because I don’t like pantyhose. But it’s not like there’s a way for me to find thigh-highs for Blythes with accompanying garter belts (unless you happen to know of someone who does make them, in which case please leave a comment below with a link to their store!). And while I am capable of sewing tiny doll clothing, I occasionally have a feverish case of the Lazy and I just can’t be bothered. Which is probably why I don’t sew as much of my dolls’ wardrobe as I’d like.

But I’m rambling.

My local Blythe group (an absolutely wonderful group of ladies from British Columbia) had a great person who took on the task of organizing a group order on some popular site (you may have heard of them, they sell eye chips and tights and things like t-bars and scalps and may have the name of an animal in their site name). This was a fantastic idea. And a bad idea. Fantastic because group shipping is cheaper than all of us paying for our own shipping costs and bad because it made me go “Ohhh, I could buy X, Y and Z and save on shipping? SOLD!”. I’m weak, I really am.

Of my little bag full of goodies, I bought some nude fishnet tights. Nude because I didn’t really want them being obvious. To me, the nude fishnets would be the tights that remain on the doll for a long, long, long time. Only to be removed when they start getting dingy.

But then I went and tried to put socks onto my doll’s leg after having put on the fishnets (that fought me the entire way – I had to see a little bit of baby powder on her legs first). And they [the socks] slid up the legs without fighting me. It was like a lightbulb moment where I realized that there was an actual benefit to leaving fishnets on my dolls. It makes putting socks on so much easier.

Fantastic, isn’t it? I finally get it.

Now if I could just remember to put shoes on my dolls when they leave the house.

And jackets. It’s cold here and it looks funny when there’s snow on the ground and my dolls are out and about without a jacket on.

Sometimes I look at my dolly stuff and feel like I just have too much. Too many dolls, too many little shoes, too many shirts, pants, dresses, hats (oh, especially the hats!). It’s all just stuff, after all, and sometimes there’s just too much clutter, too many things in my space that make me wonder why I have so much to begin with.

I found that it’s common to feel that way, I’ve read threads on Blythe Kingdom where others have expressed feeling overwhelmed. Some because they started adding up how much they’ve spent on Blythe (if you want to feel really guilty really quickly, this is probably a good way to do it – otherwise, I do not recommend doing this), some because they realize how much money they have tied up in little doll dresses when they could be clothing themselves.

I’ve slowly added to my collection of dolly clothes over time. I got two dolls before I really started to get any clothes for them. For more than a year, I was pretty okay with my group of girls (6) that the only Blythe that I’d added recently was purchasing a grail doll (redheaded Kenner).

If you are feeling overwhelmed, maybe it’s time to make the dolly family smaller. Maybe it’s time to do a little closet clean-out and then you can have money for things that you really need (food, hydro, rent) or things that you want (new dolly, new doll clothes). When I’m feeling overwhelmed, I remind myself that all of my Blythes were bought because I had the money available and that I’m not hard-pressed for cash right now so it’s okay to enjoy them.

An important thing to note is that it’s really easy to spend money in this hobby. There’s always another doll up for sale, another custom OOAK Blythe somewhere. There’s always a dress, or a pair of shoes, or a pair of jeans available. And what is really important is being able to take stock of what money that you do have and what you can afford to spend on dolly stuff. If that requires giving yourself a monthly or annual limit, then so be it. If that requires you to ‘recycle’ dolls that you’re no longer in love with or clothing that you don’t like on any of your dolls for more dolly money just to buy more dolly stuff, then go for it.

As long as you’re not needing the money and needing to buy things that are necessities, I don’t see the problem in having a hobby that’s a little pricey. There are a lot more hobbies out there that require a lot more money! (But that’s really not the point…)

 From Kenner Fever to Cured is a three-part mini series of me detailing my journey from just being feverish with wants of a Kenner Blythe to actually getting my first Kenner, an absolute dream girl. In Part 3, I include a lot of information about what I did to do some restoration work on my Kenner Blythe.

This is what worked for me, if you don’t feel comfortable doing work on your vintage Blythe, please send it to someone with experience restoring the dolls to their fullest potential. I am not a professional Kenner restorer at all, so please take that into account when you read about what I did. Where possible, I reference the source of where I learned these tips from.

I left off part 2 of From Kenner Fever to Cured about my Kenner Blythe’s hair. It smelled and it most certainly needed a wash. Also, what I didn’t mention last time is that when I had gone to thatch her hair, I may have found the old exoskeleton of an insect’s moult. While I love entomology and all that goes on with insects and their habits, that was really gross. And so I needed to clean her hair – immediately.

Washing her hair wasn’t too much of an ordeal compared to when I first washed the hair of my very first Blythe (Sophie – Cappuccino Chat). For starters, my Kenner’s hair was not attached to her head. I just filled the sink up with hot water and put in a little bit of soap in there. There are a lot of people who tell you different things about what to use on doll hair. The most important thing to note is that whatever product you use to clean her hair, it has to be washed out. I don’t care if it’s fabric softener, dish soap or regular liquid hand soap – it needs to be washed out completely. Human shampoos or conditioners will not do much for doll hair because those are for human hair (eg. natural fibre, hair proteins, etc.) while doll hair is plastic (gorgeous and silky feeling, but still plastic).

I just decided on a nice mild baby shampoo because I have it on hand (it was a sample, yay for free cleaning products). It had a light scent and I just cleaned through the doll’s hair with it. I didn’t really work it into her hair, but rather to just get all the hair nice and soaked and then run soapy water through it. The water was a bit dingy afterwards and her hair had more a sheen when it dried, so I would like to think that it somewhat worked! Seeing as how Kenners are nearly 40 years old, that’s a lot of time to collect dust and other grimey things in their long hair.

After rinsing thoroughly, I used a fine-tooth comb to comb through her hair – I start at the ends and work my way up near the scalp. Always comb in small sections at a time, and I hold the hair when I’m combing it so I don’t pull on it. This way I won’t pull out more hair from the doll’s scalp but also you won’t stretch the hair. Stretching the doll’s hair is what causes it to be frizzy because it gets pulled and stretched. When I was done with one section, I put her hair into foam curlers. This is both because a lot of people seem to put their Kenners into curlers and because it was a nice easy way to get the hair out of my way as I worked on the next section.

Tip! You can find foam hair rollers in the beauty section of department stores or at dollar stores. My local dollar store carried them at $1 for 8 rollers and they feel the same as the more expensive ones from department stores. Fine-tooth combs can also be found in both locations. The supplies needed to work on her hair should not cost an arm and a leg!

I’d resigned myself to the fact that she was pretty much going to have to live with the fact that she has frizzy ends. But on the brightside, with her hair combed out, it looked like she had a lot more hair than I originally thought (due to how her hair looked in both auction photos and when I first pulled her out of the box). Her hair was a lot longer and while she did have two bald spots (one due to 3 missing plugs, the other due to a section of scalp that had never been rooted in the factory where she was made), her hair was gorgeous and shinier after getting washed.

On a side note, redhead Kenners will occasionally have discolouration in their hairs that has a slight greenish tinge. Emmalynn is no different – she has slight green in a few of her plugs at the front of her scalp. I like it though, it’s quite pretty. Some redheads will have the greenish discolouration through all of their hair or just part of it. One theory that I’ve read about this greenish discolouration is due to the hair’s exposure to the sun.

After the initial washing, I took her hair out of the curlers and then felt her hair. I really did feel like this could be improved, so I took a microwaveable dish and put some fabric softener (please, if you going to do this, make sure you used something that does not contain any dyes!) and water in it. I microwaved this concoction for 2 minutes on high and then pulled it out. I wanted the water hot, but not boiling. and then I put the scalp into the fabric softener and water mixture and I covered the top of the container to prevent the heat from leaving. I left it like that for more than 30 minutes. Then I went and rinsed the fabric softener out of the scalp and hair as best that I could (using hot water directly from the tap) and set to work combing and putting her hair back into rollers.

Tip! Whatever fabric softener you decide to use, make sure it doesn’t contain any dyes and that it has a scent that you can stand (or use unscented!). If you don’t have liquid fabric softener handy (or if your liquid fabric softener has dyes or a strong smell), I’ve also been known to take fabric softener sheets and put those in water as well. It does work, it’s not as strong compared to using liquid fabric softener though.

With her hair sorted out, I waited until the next day to put a very small amount of water soluble glue onto the thread knots on the inside of her scalp. The brand of glue I used was Aleene’s (the one we all know and love when we swap out eyechips on our Blythes!) and I allowed the glue to dry for several hours before even thinking about handling her scalp again.

At this point, there were only two things left that I wanted to do to fix her up: fix the pelvic seam crack and to open up her head because after finding an insect exoskeleton, I didn’t want to leave her head dirty inside too. Plus I really wanted to give her eyeballs a bit of a cleaning and couldn’t get at some of the parts just from the outside.

Opening up a Kenner’s head isn’t as difficult as it may seem. Once you remove the scalp and hardcap, two more screws are revealed. In total there are four screws holding the two halves of the doll’s head together. Also, remember to unhook the spring if you want to keep it (and to not stretch it out). The screws or spring may be rusty – you can always bring the screws into a hardware store and ask someone to help you find some replacements! And if your doll’s spring is rusty, you can either replace it with a Takara or ADG Blythe’s spring or you can find other replacement options online or locally (I know that Cool Cat carries replacements and that some people have suggested the springs from pens as well).

Kenners can have cracks all over their bodies. Some have cracks in the torso, some have cracks in the pelvis, some have cracks in both places. My Kenner had a crack right along the seam of the pelvis (where the two halves of the mold met during production of the piece). It’s a common place for a crack to occur – the seam is a ‘weak’ spot. in the piece. Other parts of the Kenner’s body can have cracks as well, but I will only be talking about this one as that’s what I’m presented with.

I learned about company called Loctite, which is a brand name, that makes epoxies and glues. I found a particular product called Super Glue All Plastics – 2 Part. It’s designed and is safe for all types of plastics and is a two-part system. I got it at a local hardware store for ~$6+tax (CAD). I had removed my Kenner’s head from the rest of her body when I repaired the crack. Or rather, I had my boyfriend help me repair the crack. My job was to make sure that the pelvic area was clean and had removed the legs (which already pop out anyways -they had been cleaned separately from the rest of her body).

Tip! There are great resources on both on the This Is Blythe and Blythe Kingdom forums. I learned about the Loctite Super Glue for plastics over on TIB on the thread about Kenner cleaning and repair tips. There are a lot of other fantastic tips for cleaning your doll and repairing her to her former glory.

You don’t necessarily need to use this specific product, but whatever glue product that you do use for fixing cracks needs to be safe for use on plastics (specifically, hard plastics – but it’s best to find one that’s safe for all plastics as the glued seam will likely come in contact with the legs of the doll)

The doll pelvis was put into a clamp (cushioned on both sides to prevent marks from the clamp) and then we put the glue into the crack and turned the clamp to push the sides back together again. Always read the instructions of adhesives before using them! It’s supposed to be an instant bond, but I’m a touch paranoid about needing to do this again because of my unwillingness to wait, so she stayed in the clamp for a bit before I took her out and then attempted to push her legs back in. It failed to hold and the crack opened up again. I tried a second attempt of gluing the pelvic crack back together again and left it in for a much longer period of time – the glue failed to hold under the pressure of pushing the leg back into the socket even with putting the plastic into hot water first to made it more pliable.

With  my caliper (calipers are super useful if you’re ever interested in making jewellery, one of my other hobbies) I measured the gap with the legs in. It’s just a smidge over 3mm (but before 4mm). No amount of gluing and clamping is going to make that glue hold. Why? Because different plastics have different shrink rates. They also react differently with the present of things like humidity, elevational pressure, to make a few variables. The plastic of the torso/pelvis and the legs are different. The holes in the pelvis for the legs are smaller than the plastic joint on the legs themselves.

I still have my boyfriend enlisted in helping me out figuring out what to do with the crack – his current mission is to find an epoxy that will work for a Kenner pelvis.

So she’s not completely restored yet, she’s still waiting for that medical miracle to fix that little issue she has with her pelvis. It makes sitting rather uncomfortable, as you can very well imagine. But while we’re waiting for the surgery that’ll fix her right up and make her good as new, she’s still part of the dolly family and I plan on including her in as many Blythe photos as possible (even if she’s currently not on a body).

And this is my gorgeous Emmalynn, a seven-line, side-part redheaded 1972 Kenner Blythe. She’s older than me, sassier than me and I’m utterly in love. (She whispers to me about buying her expensive clothing that’s proportional to her worth, we’re still in negotiations.)

I hope you’ve all enjoyed the three part series of how I went from wanting a Kenner to winning an auction and how I took an expensive doll and restored her the best that I knew how (for now). I will be posting one final post about the restoration process of Emmalynn after I’ve figured out how to fix her body as I really do want to keep her on her original Kenner body. I don’t know when this will be, but I’m hoping it’ll be relatively soon.

Thank you so much to everyone who gave me support both on Twitter and on Flickr as I talked about my restoration process and when I sought out help and counsel for what I was doing.

 From Kenner Fever to Cured is a three-part mini series of me detailing my journey from just being feverish with wants of a Kenner Blythe to actually getting my first Kenner, an absolute dream girl. In Part 2, I include a lot of information about what I did to do some restoration work on my Kenner Blythe.

This is what worked for me, if you don’t feel comfortable doing work on your vintage Blythe, please send it to someone with experience restoring the dolls to their fullest potential. I am not a professional Kenner restorer at all, so please take that into account when you read about what I did. Where possible, I reference the source of where I learned these tips from.

When I last left off, I had been impatiently waiting for Canada Post to finally scan in the tracking number to let me know that yes, she was at least in the country! They took their on sweet time on it, of course. 3 days after the tracking number on UK’s Royal Mail website updated as having left the UK, Canada Post let me know that she had arrived! Two hours later, she was out of Customs and in the hands in the postal service. The postal carrier made an attempt to deliver her the next day, but unfortunately no one was home. So I waited (again, impatiently) until the next morning (October 4th) and went straight to the post office just ten minutes after they had opened.

Within minutes of getting home, I had cut open the tape and pulled her out. My Kenner. And in the first hour of having her in my grabby hands, she was inspected, photographed and her scalp was taken off.

Tip! For those who are wanting to remove their Kenner’s scalp – I ran hot water from the tap directly along where the edges of her scalp are in order to soften the rubber enough to edge it out from under the hard cap. The scalp has a ‘lip’ that goes on the underside side of the hardcap. The construction of a Kenner’s head is pretty ingenious, I don’t know why Takara or ADG ever felt the need to use glue of all things when they had a simple (but effective) original construction to follow.

Upon first inspection, I made a mental list of all the flaws. She had frizzy ends, very little thatching left for her part, missing plugs (which means loose plugs!), one visible scalp tear (I later found out that she had more than one), very mild yellowing of the front faceplate, yellowing where the two faceplates meet, a small liprub, a horizontal pelvic crack  (both legs come out very easily) and dirty legs (some of it came off, but I think an ink spot is destined to stay). So she needed a little bit of love to go back to the way she once was, but she was my little bit to love. She told me that her name is Emmalynn.

Click to read more of this entry.

 From Kenner Fever to Cured is a three-part mini series of me detailing my journey from just being feverish with wants of a Kenner Blythe to actually getting my first Kenner, an absolute dream girl.

My Eden (PuPe) with Amanda-Ruth‘s Maggie Mae (Kenner) at the cocktail party the night before BlytheCon 2011 (Portland). Maggie Mae’s pip was the first I’d ever heard. Photo by me/chelleshocks.

Just over a month ago I asked how you cured a dolly fever and for a very long time, I wasn’t quite sure of the method to do it either. When I first discovered Blythe, it was around the time that Velvet Minuet had been released and I wanted her badly. But I didn’t come to own her until I had five other Blythes. I wanted Love Mission (second Blythe) and Margaret Meets Ladybug (fourth Blythe) just a little bit more than I wanted Velvet Minuet (my sixth). But there was always another doll that I wanted more than possibly most of my Blythes combined: a Kenner.

I wanted a gorgeous 1972 Kenner Blythe. And not just any gorgeous 1972 Kenner Blythe, I wanted a redhead.

Don’t ask me why I wanted a redhead. And truth be told, I considered blonde or brunette more than once as they come up a lot more frequently than reds do. But it was the redheads that I fell in love with and when I finally got to hold a Kenner for the first time ever (thank you, darling people who attended BlytheCon 2011 in Portland for these opportunity!) and then I got to hear the pip (!) I was in love. And I knew then just how badly I wanted a Kenner. However, getting to see dolls in person also had the opposite effect on some other stock dolls – I realized which ones that I really didn’t want at all! So luckily I wasn’t immediately drawn to the idea of spending all my money on a Kozy Kape (after all, BlytheCon in Portland was also a Kozy Con!) or other pricey Blythes.

Just wanting a Kenner wasn’t enough though. I just had to have my dream girl at this point. So in June of 2011, I made the decision to set aside all of my overtime pay from my summer job towards a Kenner (I also set aside all of my tax-credit cheques from the government as well as my paid-out vacation pay when I left my job to go back to school for my dream Kenner). I can’t really budget for getting overtime pay, which made it the perfect source of extra money that I could put towards a Kenner Blythe.

I had been searching on eBay and on buy/sell/trade forums for the “perfect Kenner” for pretty much as long as I’d been in the Blythe hobby. I wasn’t looking for a minty mint Kenner, just one that really ‘spoke’ to me. And then a decent looking Kenner popped up on eBay one day with an absurdly high shipping charge (later revised to a more conservative amount after the seller realized where I was from) and the dolly was from overseas in the UK.

It’s hard to explain the differences between a modern Blythe and a Kenner unless you have the two of them side by side. They feel different. The plastic used in the 70’s to produce Blythe feels a lot different than the plastic used now to manufacture Takara Blythe. This is most obvious when you feel the original arms of a Kenner and compare it to a more modern version of Blythe. The pip that people describe that comes from a Kenner is not an exaggeration, they really do sound different. And there’s just something about the sweet little vintage faces that really shows off the difference.

According to my eBay records, I’ve bid (unsuccessfully) on just over a dozen red-headed Kenners. Some auctions ended at just $10 more than my maximum bid. Others ended at several hundred dollars more than my maximum bid. But fourteen unsuccessful bidding attempts later, I bid on this pretty looking Kenner.

She had some faults (a crack, missing hair plugs), but overall looked like she was in great shape from the auction photos. I think one of the major turnoffs that people felt was that the shipping price was so high (£80) for international buyers. (I had messaged the seller to find out the real shipping costs from UK to Canada and let’s just say that it was significantly less!)

After I won the auction, it took a few days to go over shipping methods with the seller, and then after I paid on September 25th, I had to wait (impatiently?) for the tracking information. The seller told me how she was going to package the doll (wrapped up in bubble packing and then double-boxed). I asked her to wrap the doll first in a paper towel before putting her in bubble packing – of all the issues that could potentially happy, I did not want the plastic of the doll to react with the plastic of the bubble packing. I don’t know if it had happened before or not, but it was a very expensive purchase and I would have been very upset if she got damaged that way while shipping. But the seller did it, without question.

So after I got the tracking information, I first repeatedly refreshed the tracking information on the Royal Mail website and then it told me that it had left the UK for Canada. But the Canada Post website kept on telling me that the number was not in the system. I can’t forget to mention that it took forever for Canada Post to finally scan her in as having at least arrived in Canada…