QOTW: “Refining” the Family?
Written on April 28, 2014 at 12:00 pm by MichelleFiled under: Question of the Week
Every day, there is someone listing a doll for sale. Reasons for these sales range from being bored with the doll to having some kind of emergency that money could fix, or at least help. People have all sorts of rationales for which doll gets listed. If you’re having financial crisis, listing a custom by someone sought after or a Kenner is a good idea. Some people go with the ‘last one in, first one out’ idea where the newbie is the one that gets the boot for no reason other than being new. Some people decide to focus their doll family more and more as time goes on, realizing that they’re madly in love with custom dolls and not stock, or vice versa.
For my dolly family, most of my dolls are stock, or mostly stock. A few eye chip changes here and there does not a ‘custom’ doll make. Some people would call me a purist because of that, the idea that because I preserve the dolls in their original (or mostly original) state that I don’t like or appreciate customs. Which would be a lie, because I adore the one full custom that I have. But purist or not, I would have a hard time figuring out how to ‘shrink’ my doll family right now. If I had to, it would really depend on why I’m refining (or downsizing) the doll family. Reasons give rise to motivation, and that would probably help to narrow down the choices even more for me. For reasons where I’d need money, I’d probably try to sell the most expensive ones first, or even just popular stock dolls because they’d be sought after. Seeing as how I don’t have a translucent doll or a BL, that really limits my options. I know which dolls that I would absolutely keep though – and mum’s the word on who I play favourites with (besides Primrose, everyone knows that I love her).
How do you go about “refining” your dolly family?
I am the worst person to ask…aside from a large family of new releases I also adopt a lot of girls from friends. I tried selling one girl a few years ago and couldn’t do it at all.
Everybody has such different reasons they collect Blythe in the first place, it’s no small wonder people have really different methods and reasonings for downsizing their collection as well. I’ve only ever sold one doll that I didn’t really “bond” with for whatever reason, but if I were to downsize again today, I would gravitate towards parting with the girls I find more difficult to dress/style and therefore don’t play with, photograph, or pay attention to as often.