Another bunch of dolls are at home getting some beauty treatment before being put out on the shelves at the Op Shop.

This week I have several Barbies with very tangled hair and some vinyl dolls with marker on their faces and hair tangles to sort out. The Barbies have clothing but some of the other dolls don’t.

The Barbies are a mixed bunch, a couple of Fashion Fever types, a more recent ballerina Barbie with blue legs and a blue plastic torso and surprisingly an old African American doll with a twist and turn waist. I thought she may have been Dee Dee from Barbie and the Rockers .

I must apologise in advance for the quality of the photos in this post. I wanted to do a quick turnaround on these dolls so they could be in the shop on Saturday. We don’t usually open Saturdays but about once a month we do so that people who work during the week can come in. Sunday is Father’s Day here so this weekend seemed a good time to do it. The photos were taken late in the afternoon or at night and in a bit of a hurry. I did not fuss a lot about posing them.

Here are the Barbies  after they were tidied.

I didn’t bother to put shoes on them because the little kids usually just lose them anyway but I made sure each doll had a spare dress or accessory to go with her. The African American doll had terribly tangled hair. I don’t usually like to do too much to curly hair but it was such a mess that I trimmed off the worst of the tangles and combed de-tangler through the rest. This is the sort of doll that is good to experiment on if you want to try boil perms etc but I just wanted to make her tidy enough to look good on the shelf. If you think her neck looks funny you are right. Her head was flopping about everywhere so I took it off to have a look. The neck knob was not broken but for some reason it was loose and wobbly so when I was done I pushed the head back on to her neck a bit further than usual to stop the wobble.

The blue plastic doll just needed her hair tidied. I do dislike this type of doll as there is little else you can do with it . I included a long dress so that the new owner will have something to change her into. The articulated Barbie had a mark on her nose but a bit of Oxy 10 took it off. I’ll explain more about this in another post.

I think this may have originally been Dee Dee.

This Barbie has Oxy 10 on her nose to get rid of a mark.

Ballet Barbie

There was also another Kelly sized Simba toddler in this batch. She had ridiculously long hair which was so matted and tangled that I decided to cut quite a lot of it off. This is one reason I don’t really like overly long hair on dolls. It gets messed up too easily and, unless it is Rapunzel, just is not realistic. Simba baby took a long, long time to tidy up. She did have a dress but as it was a long dress I decided to save it for a bigger doll and knit her something. By the time I had watched the entire first series of “The Ex Prime Minister ” and two episodes of “Offspring” I was done. Here she is.

This Simba doll had really tangled hair.

Back view of hair.

After tidying.

Knitted dress on the revamped doll.

One last thing I’ll show you today is a My Little Pony Clone which I brought home with this batch of dolls. It had marker on the body and the mane was a tangled mess but I figured that the same methods I used for Barbie would work.

I don’t seem to have taken a before photo of Pony but what I did was to cover the marker with Oxy 10 and leave him in a sunny window for about two days. Most of the marker came off with a wipe, I could probably have got it all off if I’d left it a bit longer but what is there now is very faint. I then combed the tangles out of the mane and tail the same way I had done for the dolls hair. This is the result.

I have been asked by a couple of people to write something about cleaning dolls up and provide some links. I’m working on that post now and hope to put it up over the weekend. You will see some of my other Op Shop dolls in that post.