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La Dee Da Repaint!

Here’s my first attempt at a repaint of a La Dee Da doll. I confess my paint wasn’t thin enough this time as I was in such an all fired hurry…for what I don’t know. Anyhow you can’t tell from the picture, but if you look at her up close in person you can see my tiny brushstrokes and that makes me sad. TAT It’s exceptionally sad because I think those eyebrows are some of the best I’ve ever done on a doll. Anyhow she’s going to stay this way for a while until I can find the time to wipe down her face and try over again. She still looks pretty cute though despite her flaws, so overall it was a good practice I think. 🙂

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La Dee Da Doll Customizing – Head Removal

I was unable to find very much information about customizing La Dee Da Dolls, so I thought I would go ahead and post some of my findings here. The first thing every customizer usually wants to know is how to remove the head and I am happy to report that removing the head of a La Dee Da is fairly easy. All you have to do is apply some blow dryer heat to the neck joint area until it becomes a little softer and more pliable, then you’ll want to gently pull out the head plug. The head plug is somewhat similar to Monster High head plugs in that it has a prong attached to the top of the plug. You can see this in the picture. Now here’s the bad news, the neck hole is really really small as you can tell from the picture. Because the neck hole is so small I don’t think it’s a very good candidate for rerooting. You might be able to do it using the reroot tool, but I have no idea how you could fit tweezers in the hole to pull out the old roots.

Looking on the bright side though, she can always wear wigs. Here I have her wearing a size 6-7 Kemper wig with all of her original hair tucked inside the wig cap. If you want to cutt off the original hair, I’m thinking a 5-6 wig ought to be a better fit. However I would like to point out that because of her cranium shape which is kind of like Blythe’s in that it’s not as rounded in the back as a normal skull, when you tuck all of the original hair inside the wig cap it can round out her cranium so it will not look weird. You can see the side view below.

So, this is as far as I have gotten with my customizing experiments on her, but I will be sure to post more info when I have it. Hopefully this will be helpful to anyone else who wishes to customize these dolls.

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La Dee Da Doll

I’ve come to like the look of the La Dee Da dolls, and with a price cut currently going on at Target I thought I’d go ahead and purchase one of these cuties. They have big heads and oversized eyes similar to pullip and the fashion on this particular “city girl” doll is bright and cute reminding me of something Blythe or Pullip would wear. You can see from the photo above how she sizes up next to Blythe, Dal and Pullip.

So, the clothing that she comes with is a little blue next shrug, a pair of tube stockings, shoes, a hair flower, dress, earrings, and a little plastic pincushion wristlet. The dress’s ribbon is attached with velcro which means you can switch it out with the hair flower as it also has velcro on the bag. However unfortunately the hair flower is initially velcroed AND sewn into the head, so you will have to cut it loose to do anything with it. Also velcro is not kind to plastic doll hair. ^^; Anyhow the other versatile part of this outfit is the dress has a pull ribbon in the back so it can go from being a bell shape to being cinched into to a balloon shape.

As for the doll herself, she doesn’t have nearly as much articulation as Monster High or Pullip. She does however have knee joints and rotating hip joints. Her shoulder joint has more mobility than the classic barbie, but as you can see she does not have wrist or elbow joints.

I thought I would show a little comparison of the feet here, because I have great news! The feet of La Dee Da dolls are tiny and slender just like Dals, which means, yes, they can share shoes. Also they work fairly well on Blythe’s feet, but they will not fit on obitsu feet. On the flip side, La Dee Da dolls can also wear some of Dal’s and Blythe’s shoes as well.

For clothes sharing however you aren’t as lucky. La Dee Da bodies are slender like Monster High Girls, which means most of their clothing will not fit Dal as you can see in the above image. However clothes that would fit Dal will mostly work on La Dee Da, though they may be a bit more roomy. Monster High and La Dee Da can of course share clothing perfectly.

So next up I decided to take a closer look at the scalp of the doll to see how well it was rooted. Sadly I cannot say it is rooted very well. It is fairly easy to part the hair and see large gaps between plugs. The good news is this can be solved with some additional rooting which is easy to do. Also apparently the La Dee Da dolls who are styled with their hair up are worse off in the rooting department.

Well I think that’s about it for my review/comparison. I plan to customize this girl, so I will have a few more posts about those kind of things coming forthwith. 😉