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Tutti, Todd and their problems

You have probably never heard of Tutti and Todd. No wonder. I also never heard of them for a long time. Even after starting to collect Barbie dolls I was for a while not aware that these dolls existed.

What’s the problem? Well, they were stopped to be in production almost a decade when I was born and I think they were not as wide spread as Barbie and the grown up family members.

Tutti and Todd are twin baby sister and baby brother of Barbie from the mid 60s until the mid 70s and then they disappear from the family and were never seen or heard of again. For a first impression I would like to link to https://fashiondollz.de/1965-tutti-todd-and-chris/#!gallery-1176-9939

D has always nice pics of a ton of Barbie dolls. But what makes Tutti and Todd so special that I dedicate here an article to these two twins? I recently bought a package with repair parts and among these dolls was a Tutti with a green leg and an open arm. So I was able to show you the wire inside the body. It’s the wire that causes the problem concerning the green arms and legs these dolls have often.

The wire reacted with some kind of liquid, often water. I think this problem is so wide spread because these smaller dolls were produced in one step while Barbie was produced in several steps. For Barbie you needed to produce the torso, the arms and the legs separately plus the head. For Tutti and Todd you needed only body and head. Here was at least a potential to save money and I think that these dolls now suffer from. https://fashiondollz.de/1965-tutti-todd-and-chris/#!

It’s something you hardly find information about but I think they are worth to be talked about even if they are out of production now for a long time. The little outfits have their very own charm and there are lots of outfits for Tutti and Todd around. By the way this Todd mentioned here has nothing to do with Todd https://fashiondollz.de/1977-ken-superstar/#!gallery-557-11415 from 1982, the groom of Tracy https://fashiondollz.de/1971-steffie-face/#!gallery-553-6993

The dolls are not related here. I know it’s sometimes a bit confusing. I hope you like this little article about Tutti, Todd and their problems.

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What you need for a good Barbie repaint

I recently saw that lots of you are interested in the topic of repaint but I found no good video summing all thing you need in a video up. Some videos only show the direct repaint. Some videos only show the brushes, palettes or color but there’s no video where you find all parts combined in one video and giving you some bonus beginner mistakes to avoid.

What’s easier than doing it yourself when you don’t find the correct video for the topic you want to cover. If you want a video showing you an actual repaint, no problem use this here

From my experience I can tell you it’s not always easy to have the right things for repainting at the same time at home. That’s what I have within some years and I think it’s useful for most of you. I don’t think neither have heard about Liquitex ( when you are living in Europe neither from Da Vinci artist brushes). That’s why you should update your knowledge. It is useful to think about these items first, then you buy them and don’t have any negative surprises while you are working.

I bought mine over the last couple of years. I had no idea where to start neither where to buy. There were no videos on youtube. Of course there are some bigger channels than mine here doing repaints. On some channels you have millions of viewers but I don’t have them but want to inform you about repainting as good as I can. What is really helpful for the hobby of repainting is to get yourself a wet palette. I can’t tell it often enough but this little thing is a game changer. You can keep your colors liquid for at least a week. From my experience this is enough time for doing a proper repaint. I hardly needed more than a week. The sponge is great for this. The costs you have are around 25€ for this. It’s always a little depending on where you buy it.

Then you have the colors. I can’t recommend it often enough to use good quality color. The reason why I show here Liquitex colors is that when you use the cadmium free version of this color you don’t have any fear that the color will leave permanent color traces in the rubber of the head. You can see this sometime on Barbie dolls like my Jewel Hair Mermaid Teresa. She’s a nrfb doll but after 25 years somehow the color started to bleed into the adjacent rubber. Have look about what I talk about.

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Jewel Hair Mermaid Teresa with some traces of bleeding color

I know it’s very subtle but it’s happening and I simply want to warn you that this could happen to you too in case of using cheap or incorrect color. It’s not that everything is perfect in the Barbie world. I never said this but for future projects we can avoid the problem when we know where it comes from. That’s at least what I think here.

The biggest problem I had when I wanted to start with repaint was the brush question. I heard from other collectors what they used. I bought the brushed, made my first strokes and found out that they were way to thick for my problems. Later I accidentally came across very fine and thin brushes suitable for the project. I use a lot of Da Vinci Micro Nova brushes. They are not cheap but I’m satisfied. Since 2021 you can also buy the bend versions you can see in my videos.

Another problem I had when doing repaint was the color consistency. For most of the projects the paint was way too thick. I only use undeluted color for the white dots in Superstar Barbie eyes. For all the other projects I thin the color out. The wet palette is your friend here. Even if you have used way too much water it’s no problem. You have to wait a day and then the color will be okay again. Very helpful for beginners. So I hope that this little article gives you some more background information to understand what to do and what to avoid when going shopping or doing your very first repaint. Keep in mind what you need for a good Barbie repaint.

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Have you ever tried to re-crimp Barbie hair

When you grew up in the 90s you know what I’m talking about. If not let me tell you that crimped hair were wide spread in the 1990s not just for dolls. Especially in the early 90s this was a big thing. Even my cousin had a crimping iron. I did not know about this whole trend until she explained her crimping iron to me in 1995 or 1996. I know this is rather late for crimping irons but they still exist. You can still buy them today but the trend as big as it was in the 1990s disappeared somehow. Mainly due to fashion reasons I think.

Maybe they come back in some years like many trends come back every 20 or so years. I’m showing you a pic of what I’m talking about.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CZvV35WFC4p/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Anyway Mattel used this unique hair technique to make the Barbie dolls look like they were very hot, cool, stylish, trendy. In my childhood almost all of the Barbie dolls I knew had these waves. In my world these waves had no names. One could not imagine that it might change one day with the waves. I know this sounds crazy especially when you came to Barbie later or earlier but in the 90s these crimp waves were huge. However with in the almost 3 decades that passed by since these crazy crimp waves appeared for the first time. Many dolls have somehow lost their waves. My Totally Hair Barbie suffered under this problem almost from the beginning. I think she lost her waves after being braided with a normal 3 stand braid for a longer time period. So this phenomenon is not new to me but I search for ways how to restore these waves and try to make them look like they were freshly deboxed. This is not always easy because most of the time they are missing a lot of hair in their ends due to the fact that the hair fibre used mainly is Kanekalon hair. Some rare dolls also had Saran hair and their hair stayed intact. You can see this when you search for Hollywood Hair Barbie and compare the offer with Totally Hair Barbie dolls on ebay. Hollywood Hair Barbie never had this problem. The reason is the fiber. I never understood it as a child. That’s something I learned along my way as a collector.

In the 1990s we find mainly Kanekalon hair. It’s the cheapest kind of hair that can be mass produced. Maybe that’s the reason why a lot of these 90s Barbie dolls had a huge amount of hair at first? After the first tangles they had less and less hair. That’s also the reason why the ends of the Totally Hair Barbie/ Ultra Hair Barbie can often be found with very thin ends. Tangles – the dead of every Barbie doll with Kanekalon hair. If you compare this fibre with earlier Barbie dolls from the 1960s, 1970s or 1980s the 90s is the first decade where the problem of general Barbie doll hair loss appears.

Now let’s turn back to the main problem with the waves. Kanekalon as a fibre is easy to work with. You can bring the hair in any form you want and you can curl the hair with every curler or curling iron you have. The art here is to find a way that your doll hair keeps this position permanently and here my job starts. I try to show you easy to follow ways to get your doll to a shape as good as new. This is not always easy and a lot of testing is necessary for good results but you get them as soon as they are available. If you have ever tried to re-crimp Totally Hair Barbie or Ultra Hair Barbie successful let me know your recipe.

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How to make fashion for Supersize Barbie – the background story

Sometimes it’s just an idea and sometimes you put things into reality. I already had the idea to dress my new Supersize Barbie in December but the time was lacking. You know we were just preparing for the holidays, taking our annual X-mas vacation to see your parents. Bad time schedule but January came and so the time to put this plan into reality.

I don’t know how you do these things but I need time to work these things out properly. I hate it to be interrupted during my creative process so I do these projects mainly when I’m alone at home. It’s always my most creative time of day. I admit I’m a morning human. I prefer to do all the important things in the morning to make sure to get them done. I know there are different types of humans but my most productive time is the morning. So I used the last weekend of my holidays to begin with this project.

Sewing projects are always time consuming. It doesn’t matter what you do so you need a good schedule, prepare things in advance like marking and cutting the fabric, do the sewing the next day and continue so on. I prefer to have all steps to be planned in advance when I’m working so that I have a certain thing to do every day but on the same hand I can be sure to get things done.

I can give you the advice to plan more days than you will actually need because you don’t know how the result will turn out. From my experience I can tell that I had stress with finishing projects and videos more than once.

It’s a big advantage when you have several projects to work on simultaneously because you can always release at least one video a week. If you can produce in advance do it. I will have to improve my skills here because I’m always short on time. I hate it but it happens more often than planned. Don’t let anything interrupt you. The filming I did was at least two hours and I think I had to cut 10 hours to get it down to 20 minutes, correct the tone, the lighting and so on.

Nevertheless this was a project I wanted to do from heart because I don’t like my dolls to be naked. So I got to work and made the markings, the patterns and prepared the whole fabric for my sewing machine. At the end this project was very nice because my technique works so well that the Supersize Barbie has clothes now, is not naked anymore and the clothes only need a few adjustments for the perfect fit. I have to read a little bit before doing the final adjustments but for now I’m satisfied and it happens seldom enough to say this.

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25 years of collecting and not even realizing it

Last month I had my silver Barbie collecting anniversary and I didn’t even realize it. I think it happened due to a lot of work in the pre-December time. December is always the month with the biggest amount of work. I have holidays around Christmas and I have to pre-produce my videos for December/January in advance. So time is short and the time schedule really tight.

That’s how I completely forgot about my silver Barbie collecting anniversary. It all started by the end of November 1996 after having seen a Barbie Collectibles catalog with all these great Barbie dolls from the Great Eras collection, BobMackie, Escada, The Hollywood Movie series, Wedding Flowers collection with a lot of porcelain Barbie dolls that are unfortunately not produced anymore and other great Barbie dolls.

These dolls made me start to collect although they were very expensive at first and were marketed exclusively through only very special toy shops. You were not able to find them in every toy shop. So at first I had to drive with my parents to Hamburg, Germany or Bremen, Germany to have a chance to see any of them. I was living back then in a province near the North Sea. We had toy shops in town but they had no Collectibles. The Dolls of the World ( like the one below) were the only Barbie dolls to be found. With 50DM (25 euros) of costs for one doll they were pretty expensive while normal playline Barbie dolls were only up to 35 DM (17 euros).

In times when the internet just started it was impossible to buy online especially when you were under age. I was only eleven when I made the decision to become a collector. This was a very intentional decision. Through all my collector life I was able to learn a lot of things. I learned more than other fellows in the same age. For example one of the first Barbie dolls that inspired me was the Victorian Lady Barbie ( one of my very early gifts from my parents) and made me interested in this time period concerning fashion and other things. It’s not just this one doll that inspired me to look beyond my own nose. I not even improved my English for understanding the texts on the boxes better but also inspired me to learn more than just one foreign language. I focused my learning habits around what interested me and it made me pretty successful in school.

By the way I think I often made my parents mad because my interests were not the interests of a normal teenager. My ideas were always different and I made my parents often to drive to special toy stores in the pre-Christmas time in the hope to find one of these very special dolls. Sometimes we were lucky and sometimes not.

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Francie and her Let’s Dance dress

I know I should have written more about this project in the last months but time was short. That’s at least why I’m writing now. I started in the begin of 2020 with this project and did not finish it until now. But be assured now the project is finished. I finally found a solution for the design of this dress and it fits Francie perfectly. I only have to adjust some little pieces to make the cut perfect.

Nevertheless that’s what I plan to do in 2022. We still all need goals for 2022, don’t we?

Here’s a link to the video of the final version that I did recently.

Why lasted this project so long

Well, I admit I had problems to find the perfect top measurements for Francie for a long time. I did several drafts for Francie but I missunderstood what I was doing there. I’m really sorry for the delay but I found a solution in the last months. There’s a little channel on youtube showing you the basics for designing clothes for Barbie dolls and I used the knowledge and transferred the knowledge for Francie. That’s how I found my mistakes and re-drafted my designs. Furthermore was I lucky enough to find more pictures of the original dress to study the design. I thought I had understand the design and then saw another mistake. I oversaw that the design had a cummerbund which is not really visible in the original dress. It’s hidden under a ribbon. That’s one of the thing causing problems. Another one was adjusting the design. I had a perfect top by the end of the summer but I misunderstood the cummerbund. That made me re-draft the whole top. I needed several nights to find the correct idea. Then attaching the cummerbund caused unseen problems but I finally also found a solution for this problem. The easiest part of the whole project was the skirt with my ruffler.

Things I have learned from this project

No matter how long this project lasted I learned several things from my mistakes. The biggest learning effect had my design itself on me. I learned a complete new method how to make the body measurements for a doll. It’s really easy and really simple to use. I can only recommend this method. It made me understand what I was doing. After understanding this method I made really progress with my designs. I made several designs for tops, skirts, a jacket which are still in prototype stadium but the next year will bring us new projects and we can finish what we started in 2020 and in 2021.

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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.

Catsilk3
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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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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Suburban Shopper, a vacation and a lot of work

I just saw that one month passed by since my last post. Ghee whiz, the time is really flying away at the moment. So at first my colleague had vacation in August and after her return it was time for me to take a week off. I admit it was really nice to have one with with no pressure, really good food and no time limits to keep. Really enjoyable after having had 14 years of no vacation.

It’s been a long time since my last real vacation after finishing from school I began with my studies and then had jobs with no vacation, working all year round. I don’t mind to work hard but I sometimes need brakes. In the begin of September I took one.

I was offline for almost one week and I have to say it was not even that bad. Now the first two weeks of work are over and I have started with my third working week, doing the 5 day 7,5 hours thing and after closing time my youtube channel, social media stuff and getting better with it. By the way I also had my first dance lesson again after almost 6 months of Covid 19. I admit I really liked it.

Coming to Barbie I have lots of plans for new videos, have a lot of videos to prepare, have only a few new Barbie dolls but I got the Suburban Shopper dress, the Vintage one, not the Unique Vintage x Barbie dresses, not the reproduction. This is gonna be one of my next projects because it needs some repair.

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My new broken Suburban Shopper dress at the moment

So I think that’s enough for today.

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Short update for pattern making friends

I can’t believe how fast the last week passed by. Last week I designed my first top pattern for Francie and I was really nervous how this would turn out because the pattern form I got for Francie was very similar to the pattern I did for Barbie. Had I used the right measurements? I was so nervous that I didn’t want to start sewing it. This sounds strange, I know. Again I had the same problem like with the one for Barbie. My front middle part had too much fabric to fit in a perfect way. I had this while doing my Barbie top. After my first Francie top try I already knew where to modify the pattern. I think the next try will fit much better because of the modification. This time I tried to document what I did because I realized that I forgot a lot. Additionally I took the measure from my Vintage Skipper so that I can do patterns for her or Ricky too in the future. Maybe pattern making becomes easier the more often you do it. At least I hope so.

If you ask yourself why I suddenly started to do pattern making for Francie, well this is due to the fact that I was not 100% satisfied with the pattern I used for my “Let’s dance” Francie dress project . So I decided to try another approach and doing my own top to come as close to the original as possible. You know I’m a purist. If you’re not familiar with the topic, just watch the first part of my new video series.

I’m going to insert a pic of my first try here in the next days. I’m still sitting here and write this article.