Random updates: Ken reroot, shoes for Lottie, and another sweater

Just some doll stuff that's been going on this week: 

I finally finished Ken's reroot! Well, I finished rooting about 6 months ago, but I procrastinated on the cutting and styling. Luckily I found a couple of good tutorials and it didn't turn out quite as bad as I feared. 

I took a billion photos and dumped on my Flickr, but here's the before&after: 

I don't know what I did with this picture, it just looks uncannily real somehow:

Spooky! 

I used nylon in color Nickel (at least that's what MyLittleCustoms call it) and a reroot tool since I couldn't get his head off. The thing is, I always thought it's nylon that fries easily in boiling water, but I may have gotten it wrong. This took a couple of boil perms (wrapped head in a strip of fabric, poured boiling water over it, then cold, then set to dry) to make the hair lay flat; it wouldn't have worked otherwise. 

Since the boil perm worked without seeming to damage anything, I tried it with Young Sweethearts Michael's hair too. I haven't mentioned him but I got him used and his 70s hair looked, well, like this: 

"My hair is a bird - your hot tap water treatment is ineffective!"

Using the same technique as with Ken, he now looks like this: 

Much better! 

The little 21cm Volks guy needed some more clothes in his size, so I made him a sweater. I learned a lot from the one I made for Darren and from stuff I've sewn since, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Some day I'm going to see if I can replicate it in a more interesting color (somethig which would've been easier if I'd saved a proper pattern...). 

Of course, when I say it's done there's still a random seam or two left. 

Oh, and my package from Amazon arrived today. Hunter and Ashlynn will have to wait, but Barbie Style Teresa (is that the name? It's what amazon calls them) has already been deboxed, undressed and had her body donated. Somehow I've run out of floating heads in that particular skin tone, so I used it for upgrading Diva instead. 

The weird thing is Teresa's necklace looks exactly like the one Dreamhouse Midge is wearing in the box art. Midge the doll wears a pretty ugly simplified version without the painted blue dots, so I don't know why they put the "real" version on Teresa?? 

LITD Midge left, Teresa right. 

Also, Lottie has two new shoes that came with robot accessory pack! The interesting thing is, it's not an outfit pack, just a robot buddy for Robot Girl Lottie - but it still comes with twice as many shoes as the outfits do! And since shoes are the hard currency of the doll collecting world, it was an easy choice. 

Pink and green! The stickers are for customising the robot.