About two or three months ago, I almost had a heart attack when one of Pinkachu's pull strings snapped off while I was giving her new eyechips. There was no way around taking apart her head to put a new (stronger) string on. With Shawn's help and his natural talent to fix everything, we dove into the repair process. The minor surgery ended up being the beginning of a beautiful new craze for me: Blythe customization.
I had tried my hand at customizing the dolls back when I first started collecting Blythes-- so around late 2004, early 2005-- but I didn't have a passion for it back then. Blythes were still a rarer hobby and there weren't many tutorials around for customization newbies, so a lot of the customizing that happened among collectors was done purely by trial and error. Now that Blythe collecting has picked up quite considerably, it's easy to get tips and tutorials from those who have had a decent amount of experience taking apart Blythes and doing detailed work on them.
When Shawn and I had to take Pinkachu's head apart, I was both scared and excited. (Pinkachu's original customizer did such a fantastic and perfect job with her makeup; I didn't want to mess up anything!) Her stock doll is My Little Candy, which is an Radiance Blythe mold (RBL). The RBL mold was created more for customization use, so lucky for me, my first experience with taking apart a Blythe wasn't too difficult. Fixing her up gave me the drive and a bit of nerve to start thinking about customizing my own Blythes. I loved adding my own custom touches to Pinkachu; creating an entire Blythe with so many ideas pent up inside me made me giddy!
I immediately started looking for a stock doll that I knew would be cheap(er) and easy to come by. I chose to search for a Simply Lilac because I liked the idea of working with a doll with fantasy colored hair. I put the word out within the next few days and a Twitter friend contacted me to let me know she would sell hers to me. The dolly arrived and I dove right in to the customizations.
I completely took apart her head to familiarize myself with all of the different parts inside. I then started to sand matte her face so I could start fresh with makeup. After reaching this point, I had to put aside my new hobby for a few weeks. One of my kitties (Ed) had an infection and the vet bills started to pile up for me. The next stages of the customization process required me to put larger chunks of money towards tools and whatnot, and I decided that Ed was much more of a priority (obviously!).
After about a month of medication, Ed's infection went away and she was back back to being happy and healthy again. With those bills out of the way, I can now continue to work on customizing. I'm currently learning how to carve and paint lips, which is something I've wanted to learn for the longest time. After I master that part of the process, I'm going to start learning how to airbrush makeup.
I'm a huge, huge, HUGE perfectionist so I think all of the steps during the customization process will take me a while to reach my own standards. In the end, I think all the time and money put towards the hobby will really be worth it. I would love to start my own customization dolly business and I think blogging about my progress will be a great help along the way. ^___^
Such an exciting post!!!!! :))) I loved reading all the details of your customising "journey" haha :)
So THAT's how it began.. by changing Pinkachu's pullring.. hmm that's good to know!!!! so that started the spark of interest in customising Blythes... :)
oh your poor kitty (Ed is a girl?heehee) I'm so glad to read she's okay now...!!
Well these things take time, I agree with you and I agree about taking your time for each step of the process (personally, I would take a long time haha because I like to take it slowly and carefully) so do take your time. I'm so happy to read all this, that you're enjoying the customising so much, that's the most important thing, ~(I think a lot of the times the anxiety and nervousness of not knowing what to do (when it comes to opening a blythe head, starting customing her etc.) would get the best of someone, that's one reason I didn't jump on the "customising a Blythe" bandwagon... you know what I mean?) But for you, I know that if you believe in something you will do it and with all the help of people who know and with the tutorials out there, you will have great results on your Simply Lilac I'm sure. (I hope I didn't put added pressure on you, I'm only rooting for you !!!) ^_^
good luck, sweet Lauren!! :)
Posted by: Denise | November 04, 2010 at 09:27 AM
Wow, I can't wait to see how your customization goes**
This reminds me that I have a Blythe at home that waits to be customized too...
Posted by: Sadie89 | November 04, 2010 at 09:58 AM
Good luck on the Blythe customization!And the pic of Pinkachu was really kawaii!I hope you have a great time on customizing Simply Lilac! (gomen for using to many exclamations >_<)
Posted by: Kat | November 19, 2010 at 10:27 PM
Pinkachu is very cute and im enterinf
Posted by: Daniele | March 01, 2012 at 04:39 PM