Jen Levels Up - +2 to Restringing Skill!

Pickings have been mighty slim on the local Craigslist lately, but about a week ago, I saw a post advertising several AG dolls for $50 - including a #21. 21 has been on the wishlist for a while now, and it seems that retirement rumors keep popping up, so I went ahead and contacted the seller.





Her hair was a bit fried, and her legs were the floppiest legs I've ever seen. It took a lot of careful positioning to get her to stand up without immediately buckling over.



I decided I could live with flopsy legs, but something had to be done about that hair. Into the Downy she went!

Unfortunately, after the Downy treatment, while I was putting curlers into her hair, I noticed that her cloth body was an "off" color under the plastic wrap. It wasn't a flaw - it was just soaked through! (I think her head is one of those with a hole at the crown, and when I turned her right-side-up, all the water poured down her neck.)

Since she had to be unstuffed anyway, I decided to Level Up in my doll care skills, and tackle a restringing.

FAIR WARNING: past this point there are photos of one dismembered doll.

Everyone ready?





Lucy, Robin, and Sunny were just a bit horrified at what was supposed to be a simple hair treatment gone terribly awry.



Twenty-four hours and one trip to Lowe's later, I was armed with mini bungee cords, copper crimp sleeves, and all the YouTube tutorials ever.

Turns out, restringing is really easy! By far, the hardest part was getting the little white cups out of, and back into, the legs. Mine now have little indentations where I got overzealous with the pliers. Have your hairdryer handy to soften the vinyl! (My hairdryer now is housed permanently in the Dollcave - I don't need it with my pixie-cut hair!)

The aftermath...



And the result:



Introducing Miss Merrill Amelia Johnson, freestanding and curly-haired!



THOSE CURLS.



Merrill (not Merry, never ever Merry :D) is a great big science nerd. While most 12-year-olds dream of Hollywood and keep a picture of Justin Bieber in their lockers, Merrill dreams of the Large Hadron Collider and her locker picture is one of Carl Sagan. Her personality is a happy medium between laid-back, idealistic Sunny and fiery, mercurial Robin. Merrill is calm but stubborn, practical to the point of joy-killing, and deeply cynical. She likes John Scalzi novels and Discovery Channel documentaries (though ones with fewer explosions than Robin prefers), and nothing annoys her more than willful ignorance and dumb-blonde jokes.



My little band of science nerds. Robin's mostly a science-pop-culture nerd - her real love is political science. Sunny prefers biology and wants to work in conservation. Merrill wants to be an astrophysicist and colonize other planets.



Poor Lucy felt left out! Team Modern can be evenly split between Science Nerds and Art Nerds, and right now, Team Science outnumbers Team Art 3 to 1! Of course, that just means I need to get Nadira (#46), Becks (Rebecca), or Tish (#58) to even the score, lol!