More clientele

The Lego cash register has been very popular, thanks for your comments.  I bet there are lots of things that could be made out of Lego and then disguised to look appropriate for the dollshouse.

I've now finished the final three dolls that I am upcycling.  The shops now look fairly well populated although there should perhaps be another staff person.  I will keep my eyes open for a decent doll to be a shop assistant.  I do have some other dolls in my stash but unlike these dolls it is their heads and limbs that look mutated, not just their hideous clothes, so no good for this project.

Here is the 'before' picture.

The doll at the left wasn't that bad apart from fur-like hair and a gravity-defying cardigan.  I tamed the cardigan with some hidden stitching, and glued some additional hair onto her head right over the old hair.  There wasn't much I could do about her silhouette which suggests she is wearing the mother of all push-up bras - it's because of the edge of the china head plate across her chest.

The other two dolls are ultra-cheap dolls dressed in hot-glued travesties which I immediately removed.  Amusingly they had glued on lace underwear, which seems a surprising amount of detail considering how hideous their dresses were.  And their bodies are actually quite nice, full china bodies with moving arms and legs. I tried doing something with their nylon hair, but it was too springy so I had to scrape it off.  Their heads have a hollow in them.  I decided that they deserved to be in skirts and dresses to show off their well formed legs.

I've discovered that despite my large stash of ripped-out magazine articles on dressing dolls, and my library of dollshouse books, I don't actually appear to have any modern clothing patterns.  So I had to wing it.  For the first doll, I made a sort of shift dress cut on the bias from very thin cotton denim, and used some of the rick-rack trim from the travesty dress for a belt.  I added a leather handbag I had in my stash, and some blond hair.

For the second doll, I made a blue velvet mini skirt, and then stretched my doll-dressing skills to the limit by constructing a Liberty-style blouse with collar.  For the hair, I tied the centre of a hank of hair tightly with thread, and glued the resulting lump into the hole in the head.  Once that dried, I arranged the hair with a bit more glue around the hairline, then gave her a modern hair cut.