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Custom Draculaura Complete!

So here she is, my first custom Draculaura doll, clearly though she is no longer a Draculaura! Anyhow through the painting process I realized that A) I bought a acrylic medium that was glossy and B) I need smaller brushes!! I thought the detail brushes I used for dollhouse stuff was going to be small enough, but clearly I need something even smaller.

Overall I’m really happy with how she turned out. She has a few flaws, a wayward brush stroke on her belly which looks like a scar, and her bangs are messed up a little since I accidentally pulled some out after removing the hair protection for when I sprayed her with sealer. I think her eye paint could be cleaner, but I think that’s a matter of needing smaller brushes and practice. I am going to go back to the art supply though and try to return the gloss medium. I don’t know if art supplies take returns or not, but for the price it is, I should at least try.

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“De-greasing” Saran Doll Hair

For those of you who may not have been aware like I was, saran doll hair usually has this slight filmy feeling to it, or as others have said it is “greasy” or “oily”. It truly is oily and has the unfortunate side effect of making your doll look like she has nappy no-shower in a week hair if you don’t wash it properly. You can see in the picture above that the doll hair on the left has this oily problem, whereas my freshly washed sample piece on the right does not. I spent quite some time google searching methods to degrease hair with no luck, so finally I just started experimenting with things until thank heavens I found something that works!

So here’s what you need to do to get that greasy, oily feeling out of your saran hair…..wash it with a dish soap that has a degreaser in it. It’s as simple as that. Most dish soaps on the market have some sort of degreaser in it, for me, we had Palmolive in the house so I just used that, but I’m sure any other quality dish soap on the market will work. After I gently washed the fibers in the dish soap I made certain to rinse the hair thoroughly, because obviously you don’t want to leave soap film in the hair. Here’s my tip though, don’t blow dry the hair afterwards. I found that with my test sample of washed hair that blow drying the hair caused it to get a static build-up with flyaway hairs. Letting the hair naturally air dry solves this problem, however it will take all day. 🙁 I even set my dolls head out in our 103 degree summer heat outside and it took her hair all the way until the evening to be mostly dry!

Well, that’s it for now, hopefully if you were struggling with this problem I was able to help you out! Look for more progress on my custom Draculaura soon now that I’ve “de-greased” her hair, lol.

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Monster High Re-root Progress

So the above pic is a series of progression shots through my reroot. I’m not going to go into an in-depth reroot tutorial because I already posted a list to reroot tutorials in a previous post here. Basically I started in the back using the reroot tool and filled up each hole. I saved the bangs until the end so it would be easier to keep them separate from the rest of the hair. Also, naturally you save the part thatching for the very last. Part thatching is probably the hardest part of a reroot, but there is also a great tutorial for that in the post I previously mentioned. 🙂 So, after you get all the hair in, you need to smooth it down how you like and set it with boiling water. You can also use steam to set the hair as you work on your part thatch, which helps to discover any weak areas that may need more hair.

So, if your hair is already washed and the hair is exactly as you want it, you can wrap the head gently in saran wrap and pour boiling water over the head. You can see the before and after in the shots above. Keep in mind this technique is for SARAN FIBER!! Saran fiber has different temperature requirements from nylon or kanekalon. Saran can easily handle boiling water and in fact you pretty much need the heat of the boiling water to style it.

Anyway because I didn’t wash my saran fiber before rerooting the doll I decided I should go ahead and pour the boiling water directly on the fiber so it not only removes the film that is often on saran, but also sets the hair as well. One thing to keep in mind when pouring boiling water on unsecured hair though is you must be gentle and slow otherwise you could get some hairs out of place and that would be no good. In the future I plan to wash my saran so I can use the previous saran wrap method. Another thing you want to keep in mind is you shouldn’t expose the plastics to boiling water for too long. 20 seconds or so should suffice without worry of melting any fibers or causing frizzing.

I also found this nice little tutorial site for styling doll hair which helped me suss out some of these methods for setting the hair. I will leave you with that link here: http://www.dolls-n-daggers.com/Dolls/OOAKtipshair.php These tutorials also cover cutting dolly hair as well as how to style hair to be curly. Lots of great info!

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Monster High Custom – Just Beginning


After my dollyhair order came in I wanted to get started on my custom Draculaura right away while I am still feeling all excited about the new hair. The first thing you have to do naturally is remove the head. Most tutorials I saw suggested running the head/neck area under water until the head became soft enough that it would allow the anchoring apparatus to be pulled out of it. Personally if I can avoid using water I will, and I found out that it’s quite easy to just take a blow dryer, blow dry the head/neck joint area for 30 seconds or so until hot, and then just pull and yank the head off while it’s still hot from the dryer heat. It took me all of a minute and I didn’t have to get anything wet or wait for hair to dry or anything.

Next step was to cut off all of her hair, lol. Anyway for whatever reason I felt like saving the cut hair, it’s too short to root with, but I imagine it could still be useful for MLP tails or maybe it could even be wefted and used for a Brownie wig, who knows.

After cutting the hair, you then need to take your tweezers and start pulling out what’s left of the hair from the inside of the head. Often times there is glue inside rooted doll heads, and there definitely is in MLP toys, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that there was NO GLUE inside my Draculaura head. You may be wondering then what was holding it all together, and I shall tell you what I suspect. I suspect they use heat to melt the hairs inside the head, but I can’t be positive. At first I thought it was loop rooted, but then I started noticing these tiny bits of melted plastic bits here and there falling out. Either way because there appears to be no glue, once you start breaking apart and pulling out plugs of hair, you can also pull hair from the outside of the head as well, which is helpful because Monster High dolls have small neck holes. Also one more tip is to squish your scalp close to your neck hole so you can easier see the hair and nab it with the tweezers.

After removing all of the hair, it’s time to wipe the face paint off. Customizers will argue up and down on what to use to do this and what not to use and they are often contradictory. Some people swear by Windsor and Newton brush cleaner, while others will tell you acetone, in the end it’s your call what to use. I myself for this particular doll used acetone. Acetone will without a shadow of a doubt remove all the paint from the head no problem, BUT it will take a while because the paint WILL SMEAR so expect to spend a good 15 minutes scrubbing the head. Don’t panic though once you see a smear, because it will come off with a fresh cotton ball and more acetone. Because the paint smears, you will also have to spend time removing the scalp color because there is no way you can remove the face well enough without accidentally hitting the scalp color and smudging it all over the place. My last piece of advice when dealing with acetone is be sure to rinse your doll’s head thoroughly in water afterwards!! Acetone is a solvent used to remove resins aka plastics, so it can destroy your doll if you do not fully rinse and wash all residue off afterwards. It should also go without saying that you should never leave a doll to soak in the stuff, like EVER.

Anyhow, moving along, in the above pic you may notice I have a spot circled on the dolls head and I have out a tube of glue. You see, when they rooted Draculaura’s hair in the factory they put some plugs so close together in her front part that it kinda made a big hole. 🙁 After some research I found that the best thing to do would be to fill the hole with a flexible glue. To be honest there really isn’t that much information that I was able to find out there for patching doll heads. The one site I did find with the most info suggested gel super glue, however just because a super glue says it’s gel doesn’t mean it will dry flexible. I figure that it is necessary for the glue to dry flexible otherwise the glue will just pop out during the reroot process. I have decided to try Loctite’s vinyl and plastic glue that dries flexible. Doll heads are vinyl afterall, so the theory is this should work. Anyway taking a toothpick dipped in glue, I carefully put a few drops in the problematic hole (the area circled). This particular glue dries in 30 minutes, but requires 24 hours to cure, so I plan to leave the doll alone now until sometime tomorrow. I’ll just have to wait and see how well it fares against the reroot tool!

EDIT! – I am happy to report that the Loctite vinyl and plastic glue works fabulously! 😀

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Dollyhair Comparisons

So my dollyhair order finally arrived and I went ahead and shot some fiber comparison pics in the hopes that it might be helpful for other people who are trying to match colors and whatnot. Above is the Kohl Brown Kanekalon hair from dollyhair.com next to my Liv wig. It is a very very close match and will do nicely for patching up the bald spots in the wig. The fiber of the Liv with though is a little smoother and softer, but it is definitely not saran, and has that “dry feeling” like the Kanekalon, and is too fine a fiber to be the nylon. So I’d say it’s up in the air as to what kind of fiber this wig is made out of.

These are the two shades I am waffling between for my Draculaura re-root. On the left is Bitter Chocolate Brown, and on the right is Raven Black. Raven Black is of course a true match for Draculaura’s factory hair, but it’s not hard to match blacks usually. :B The Bitter Chocolate Brown is actually a bit darker than in the photo. It is as advertised as being the closest brown you can get to black and it does not have any red tones.

Next up is the Sherbert Pink comparison. As you can see from the pic that Draculaura’s hot pink streaks are a scootch bit darker than Sherbert Pink. It is very close though, so probably if you wanted to just add a few extra strands of pink in her factory hair, you could probably get away with using this color depending on how fussy you are. I actually bought this hair for a custom Twilight Sparkle I plan to work on after I finish Rainbow Dash who is coming along nicely by the way!

Lastly I bought some Hematite (on the left) and Pacific Ocean (on the right) nylon hair. This pic is fairly close to the true color, though in person I feel you can see the hint of plum in the Hematite more and Pacific Ocean has a touch more teal in it. I purchased these two colors with the intention of rerooting my Twilight Sparkle with them. Seeing Pacific Ocean in person though makes me feel that straight Hematite may work best for her reroot though. Originally I thought to mix the two colors, but now I’m not so sure. Anyhow all of those color comparisons are for another day as I am nowhere near starting that project yet.