"Bratz" doll makeovers

Because I need something simple and non-troubling. This is a link to someone who redoes discarded Bratz dolls - she takes off the exaggerated make up and paints simpler, more childlike faces on them, makes them simpler clothes....the headline is "Which doll would you rather play with" which I admit is a leading, clickbaity question, but....yeah, I'd have rather played with the remade doll.

Even as an adult, I'd probably rather have the remade doll, she'd be more fun to sew for.

The faces on those dolls remind me a bit of the old Kathe Kruse or Sasha dolls - more "neutral" expressions that you can read as either sad or quietly happy or pensive depending on your emotional state at the time.

It's interesting to me how much younger the doll looks remade. (Perhaps, by extension, the reason people often take me for younger than I actually am is that I wear fairly little make-up?)

I also like the idea of a doll getting a second life. (There has been for a while a whole cottage industry - maybe industry is the wrong word because many people do not sell their finished product - of people who remake discarded dolls, clean them up, repaint them if needed, re-dress them. "Serious" collectors might sneer at that, I suppose, because to the "serious" collector, mint-in-box, or "better" never-removed-from-box is the holy grail. But then again - you can't have much fun with something in a box, and one thing the whole Beanie Babies bubble should have taught us is that buying alleged collectibles, you better be buying something you don't plan on making money off of, because if you can resell it there's no guarantee it will be for more than what you paid.)

I think actually the reason I didn't play with dolls as much as a kid was that there weren't that many just-little-girl dolls out there when I was young. There was Barbie, whom I've said before I didn't really relate to....and there were baby dolls, and frankly, once my brother was born I decided babies were kind of loud and boring. So I shifted my allegiance to stuffed animals, which could be just about anything...they could be surrogate children, or creatures out on an adventure, or even "real" wild animals living like "real" wild animals.

But I might have played with a little-girl doll who could have had little-girl adventures I would have understood.


ETA: You know? I may declare this weekend (even including part of Friday afternoon, provided my finals are all written and grading is done) a Sewing For My Monster High Dolls weekend. I got the dolls and patterns and fabric and then never did anything other than knit one single dress.