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When should you buy a Talking Barbie?

This is a typically question that comes up every now and then when you talk with other collector about the topic.

The Talking Barbies I talk about here were first introduced into the market in 1967/1968. They have a pullstring mechanism that makes a record spin inside the doll in miniature format.

One of my Talking dolls ( no Barbie but a normal Walking -Talking doll from around 1990) also had these little records. More abilities to do something leads to less space inside the doll. Maybe I’m a little bit old school here but I like these dolls. Maybe that’s why Talking Barbie began to fascinate me later.

Almost every collector I know likes them but not all of them are aware what to look for and what not. I for example have another look on Talking Barbie than someone who just wants to have one in his or her collection.

I want to repair them when I buy them. I’ve only bought one Talking Barbie just for fun. The other ones were bought to be repaired.

When you buy a Talking Barbie there are several things you should look for. The main thing to do is to check if you see an offer if the doll is complete or not. I don’t recommend to buy incomplete dolls because you will get problems to find the missing parts. Keep in mind here that these dolls are popular. They are sought after. If you are unsure if the doll you are interested in or not, ask another collector. Some of them are friendly and willing to help.

One of the weakest constuctions of Talking Barbies are her legs. They tend to fall of all the time. In my opinion this is a construction problem. Maybe body and the rubber of her legs did not like each other? I’m not chemist but I can assume.

Some daddies came up with solutions for the fallen of legs. Some used screws to fix the legs but inside the body they damaged the mechanism so that the doll won’t be able to talk anymore. Practically it looks like this inside:

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The real eyelashes of Mod Barbie

Have you been wondering how they did these real eyelashes of the Mod Barbie dolls starting in 1967 with the Twist n Turn Barbie?

Well, originally this was done by a sewing machine. I really admire everyone being able to do this with a sewing machine. I’m not able to do this but I found my own way how to do this without a sewing machine but by hand. From my experience I can tell you it’s a lot of work and it’s time consuming to get these little lashes back it.

It is possible to repair missing or damaged lashes without a doubt. However you need some skills, the right needle and a lot of patience.

I will give you a short video instruction below.

Like mentioned above it’s possible to repair but it’s a lot of work and I think this was stopped after several years due to costs. In the late 90s some collector dolls like the ones from the Great Eras serie suddendly had them again but the had much more lashes in the end than the late 60s and early 70s Barbie dolls. For reasons of comparison I will give you some pics below.

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Twist n Turn Julia 1967
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French Lady from the Great Eras series, 1997 made for collector market
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Don’t be afraid of re-paints

So the make up of your doll is gone? Do you have to throw her away? The answer is no. You don’t need to throw her away. You can restore her with a little bit of acrylic paint, a brush or two and a wet palette. What a wet palette is can you learn in the following video below.

I can tell you from my experience here that your Barbie doll or whatever fashion doll, or doll you have. You can save her. Just have the courage to do it.

Maybe I can help you a little with this article. When I started doing repaints I had no idea that extreme small brushes are available. At first I only looked in hardware stores like home depot for my brushes, tested some nail brushes for artificial fingernails and came to the conclusion they were not right medium for me. So far no problem. I did not spend a lot of money for them. I started to look online for extreme small brushes. I found them under the brand of DaVinci Micro. I don’t want to make any advertising and they are not the only ones I have. My work is not perfect in this stage and I plan to experiment further here with brushes from different brands, check their feeling in my fingers, their behavior when painting, getting to know them until I will find the perfect brush for me.

Problems with beautiful and equal eyelashes

My problem when I work with acrylic paint are still the eyelashes. I tried watercolor pencils but somehow mine are not sharp enough, still looking not realistic enough. Hopefully I can solve this problem with a special kind of sharpener ( which I already ordered for a test) and different brushes.

What I can’t recommend is doing repaints just when you cycled around because you hands will still shiver a bit so that painting details is not recommendable in this condition. I recommend to grab yourself a cup of coffee or tea and wait at least 30 minutes. After that it should be no problem anymore.

What I can recommend is that you try to relax even when your day was very stressful. This has an effect on your result. That’s what I can tell you from my experience.

Stories/Experiences with repaints after cyling directly

Several years ago I cycled home when I still working as a private tutor and after that I want to continue my repaint. My hands were so shaky I really had problems to paint any line. This lead me to the conclusion not do repaints directly after cycling. Like I mentioned before it is better, more relaxing when you wait for 20 or 30 minutes before you start to paint. Then this problem should be gone and it should not be a problem anymore. I only tried this once after painting but having to cycle uphill every time I have to go home I never tried it again.

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Repaint dolls – avoid Cadmium in paint

I don’t know how many dolls you have at home but I saw this phenomenon among my Barbie dolls. I have a Jewel Hair Mermaid Teresa at home nrfb and for some time I observe that her lips started to bleed out even in nrfb condition.

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Jewel Hair Mermaid with lips whose color started to bleed

I think I could fix it when I take her out of the box but I don’t want to do it. I heard from another collector that this could have been caused by Cadmium in the paint itself. I recommend you when you repaint dolls – avoid Cadmium in paint. No good, seems to be the material to bleed.

Liquitex acrylic color

How to solve the problem doing repaints?

In the last years the industry obviously worked on the problems of bleeding. There are for example now some red tones from Liquitex that are free of Cadmium. So when you don’t paint it on the dolls, it can’t start to bleed, right?

How to deal with little paint jars with a cap you simply can’t get open

So and when we talk about paint here at the moment I had the problem recently that I wanted to use some of my little jars filled with paint but the caps were stuck. Man, this really left some blisters on my thumb. It’s very unpleasant to have such a situation. Nevertheless I found a very easy solution in the model making corner.

It’s always good to a pair ( or two) of pipe tongs at home. They come in very handy when you have small jars with the cap problem.

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Take your pair of tongs
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Put it around the lid

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Open the jar with the help of your pair of tongs.
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Time for doing some prototype tops

I know I haven’t posted anything doll related in the last weeks because I had not much to tell but yesterday I finally came across some time for my latest sewing project. I did show how to do the prototyping for a Japanese Exclusive top in the last weeks but I only showed how to do the pattern itself, not how to sew the top because I wanted to cover this in another video together with the tiny Peter Pan collar and the skirt.

You can see the first part of the pattern making here

but like mentioned above it’s only the first part of a journey how to come to the full dress. I must say the first try was good so far. I still have to do small improvements here and there under the arms because the arm holes are hard to do in a perfect way when you just did your first draft.

So anyway, I would like to show you the first result here

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Prototype of the Francie dress

I plan to do more prototypes in the next weeks especially one with the Peter Pan collar. So stay tunes in. The project will be continued as soon as I have two hours time for my sewing machine.

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A quick update for my Windows 10 problem

In the meantime I consulted several forums to get the solution to my problem not being able to work with my lately updated Windows 10 version. Did I get answers? Yes, I did but they were not helpful. Why should I consult Nvidia for a problem with Windows 10? The latest driver is 3 years old. Sorry, I don’t get the point. Nvidia will say it’s a Windows problem. So the poor guy from India got a bad mark from me for his answer. It’s simply not helpful and it does not explain why Windows 10 forgets the driver any time I start my Windows 10. We had the problem 2 years ago too but it was fixable.

So we started to solve the problem with updating my Linux. Yes, I have more than one PC operating system on my PC. I have 3 on it and 2 of it accept the driver without problems. The next problem I had to focus was the problem to explain this. I know a bunch of people only use one operating system on their PC. The update was in general no problem. It only lasted several hours but being at work on a Wednesday and coming home and your PC got its update is a good feeling. Nevertheless we were not able to solve the DaVinci Resolve problem. I suppose my CPU is to old for making it run on my Linux desktop. My PC is from 2012. Graphic driver check, running but CPU not. Obviously the problem is that under Linux DaVinci Resolve is treated a bit like a neglected step-child. So what’s the solution to the problem? Guess what? Spending money and spending a lot of money to be more precise.

We hope to solve this stupid graphic driver problem with a new PC but not just a PC but a really high performance PC with a fast and up-to-date graphic card from Nvidia with hopefully a working driver under Windows 10. I guess it’s exactly what they industry wanted to hear but it’s sad somehow that this problem can only be solved with money and not with a quick fix.

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Oh my god, it’s already April?

I know I haven’t been posting here for the last 7 weeks. I had some time problems with my time-schedule. Doing more sewing videos needed more time to edit and cut and I underestimated this fact somehow.

It’s not that I’m not willing to learn how to do it better but this was somehow different from what I planned. You know you have sometimes great ideas and when it comes to put things into reality then there are some “minor” problems.

That’s not what you want. That’s not what I want but I had to deal with it. For one of my videos I had too much light, another one had a bad tone.

The tone problem could be solved by doing it again. The light problem could be fixed with a little help of DaVinci Resolve but I’m far from perfect. Knowing something about grouping is also very helpful. I only knew I had known it earlier. I know it’s already April and I haven’t posted any for almost two months. Please forgive me but after work I drafted for days and days to get the pattern right. It was not cooperative at the beginning.

I think there are lots possibilities for Francie because there are a lot less fashions for her than for Barbie. So if the demand is high enough the chances are good that you can get more videos about Francie. What do you think? Would you like some more Francie videos?

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Re-rooting a Barbie doll

I just saw that I blogged nothing for about a month. The last month was a very busy one for me. I had less time to work on my projects after work due to winter weather. We got a lot of snow that caused traffic problems. I wasn’t able to use my bike for some weeks. Let’s cross our fingers that the winter will be over soon.

Coming home later caused some time problems. I was not able to blog so much as I did before. I somehow felt tired after work and my projects from January were time-consuming. For example I did a re-root and 3 days after working for approx. a hour daily on it, we got snow. We got a lot of snow. Approx. 50 cm in 26 hours. It was snowing all day long. Nice to look at but bad for the traffic.

So my project lasted longer than I wanted it to last since I did work on several videos when I did my re-root. Last year in September I found a Barbie head worth to re-root. I prefer the Vintage Barbie dolls at the moment. It’s less work because you just have to root the outer circle and it’s not full re-root. I think a full one would have lasted even longer. I already did a Ponytail Swirl Barbie in 2019 in a flamboyant red tone. This time I wanted to do a blond version. Somehow she reminded me a little bit of Marilyn Monroe while I did this. I even found a photo with a similar style. That’s how she reminded me of Marilyn.

The styling always needs a lot of time because the hair in not cooperative. After all I had 4,5 hours of film. I filmed the whole re-reroot of this Barbie but I knew I had to cut it down. Starting with 4,5 hours I managed it to come down to 1,5 hours without problems but even the 1,5 hours were way too long. I didn’t want to make a documentary. I wanted to show my viewers the makeover, the transformation. After cutting for one week I finally came to about 40 minutes. This was way more acceptable than the 1,5 hours. At the end I came down to approx. 35 minutes. Way better than before. If you want to see it, have a look below. I linked the video.

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Flax seeds – incredible versatile stuff

You might wonder how do I mention the tagline? Am I serious about this? Yes, I am. No, this is no joke. After eating them for a long time in my bread I discovered that flax seeds are even more versatile than I thought they would be. Why? You can do so many things with them that you probably don’t know all the areas to use them in. One of them I knew was simply eating them for breakfast or in breads. What I did not know were the other areas I stumbled across.

I don’t know how you feel about wearing a mask due to the coronavirus when doing grocery shopping but I hate to wear it. The result is that I avoid going shopping if possible. My preference is doing online shopping because it’s delivered to my doorstep and I don’t have to care about wearing masks. That’s also how I came across the flax seed gel. Doing some research for some of my next videos I came across a recipe for flax seed gel. I admit I was a bit sceptical at first. Would something that easy really work? Two options came into my mind, trying it or buying a hair gel from a supermarket. Before going to a supermarket I wanted to try the homemade flax seed gel. I always have flax seeds at home. So trying the recipe was no problem. At the end I had a lot of gel even from a small amount of flax seed. The consistency was a bit wobbly and I had my concerns about this stuff.

What to do with so much flax seed gel?

At the end after my repair adventure in the Barbie world I had far more gel than I needed and I had to find a solution what to do with the gel. I did some more research and found out that it’s possible to use it for your own hair care too. You can use it to feed your hair with Vitamine E by simply smearing it into your hair. The smell is a bit strange but it disappears after washing the gel out. I can recommend you to let it in your hair for 30 minutes before you wash it ( if you don’t use any silicone shampoos) to feed your skin. Anyway, here’s the video with the recipe.

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Nothing is impossible – You just have to know the way how to repair your Barbie

I know that I’ve been posting not enough in the last months but I try to improve my number of posts in the next weeks. Sometimes I need more time for my videos because you know I’m a part-time youtube creator. Sometimes you need more time because things don’t work out they way you want them to. It’s normal but you as a creator feeling stressed when it does not work as you want.

This is not always the case but it can happen and I want to encourage you don’t let this come too close to you.

I have an example for you. The creation of the first part of this video was no problem. Everything was running smoothly. This was not my first try. I already recorded another video with the same topic in 2019 but back then I used another cutting program which gave me less freedom than DaVinci Resolve.

It’s just the way how to come from A to B. There is a product that does the work for you.

What caused more trouble was the second part. The hair was not co-operating here in the first place. I had to some tricks to get it under control and needed two evenings to tape the re-creation the hairstyle. After filming I realized that although that my hand was in the way again, like often. So I had to tape the whole process again but with another doll.

The try with the second doll was no problem. It did work out like it should. The little waves at the end stayed in place at my Ponytail Barbie dolls. So far no problem. Only the fact that this first record was anything but professional was annoying me. You know it try to do it as original as possible. It’s not impossible to recreate it but sometimes you have to find creative solutions for strange problems.