PLAYER PROFILE/RESOURCE: Lola The Crazy Barbie Lady

Lola's collection of plus sized dolls. She's thrown in a BBBBarbie for comparison. L to R: Rosie body wth substitute head, Tracy Turnblad, BBBBarbie, That's So Raven - Non-Mattel version, Mimi Bobeck and ?. The last one may be Happy Family Mom body with substitue head.

It happened like this.

I was emailing with a doll friend, Lola, and she said, “I personally collect Barbies but since my quest is to own every plus-sized fashion doll, a lot of mine aren’t Barbie brand.”

It was a record-scratch moment.

Every plus-sized fashion doll? There exists such a thing?

Lola laid it out for me: Edna and Tracy Turnblad, Mimi Bobeck, one version of That’s So Raven.

She pretty much gave me the list and I got to work assembling it.

In the meantime, I was inspired by the pictures Lola sent me of her collection. As she tells it, her interest in starting a collection came about like this:

“I never played with barbies as a kid–I loved My Little Ponies,” Lola explained, ” It wasn’t until my 6 year old had her own barbies, and traded some with a neighbor.  I realized she had traded one of MY favorites. [That's when] I knew I needed my own:)  I traded back for the traded barbie (a portugese princess) and so my little collection started.”

Lola’s collection, and her personal interest in the Plus-sized dolls (and other miscreants) reminded me of the true diversity of adult-barbie enthusiasts.

Lola sent me this picture of her Motley Crew and I knew right then that this was a woman I HAD to be doll friends with.

Lola did not, at that time, have a blog. But she does now, and her blog is a great one to follow.

While some blogs by adult-barbie-enthusiasts operate more as marketing vehicles for etsy shops or “look what I bought” or “look what I made even though I don’t care to share with you how,” Lola’s blog is truly one where a person can learn something.

Information is shared. Tips are given. Tutorials are offered.

Lola performed surgery on a Rosie Body and a Fashionista head. She made this wonderful plus-sized beauty.

And given Lola’s interest of dolls that are outside the Glam/Slutty Mainstream, you can bet her tutorials are too. Lola’s interest in Rosie O’Donnell bodies led her to find a way to replace the head.

This brought a discussion and wider enthusiast interest out into the light. As it turns out, the Rosie O’Donnell doll body is highly appreciated by more people than just Lola and me.

We heard talk of people buying a Rosie, then buying a second Rosie – in hopes of giving Rosie 2 a different head.  People either wanted to do this, or attempted to do it and failed. And all the while none of us realized there were others out there that liked Rosie’s body and wanted to do more with it.

Now, thanks to Lola and her blog,  if there are people out there wanting to do it but not feeling certain of how to go about it, Lola has a tutorial for it.

So this post is part Resource Link (go check out Lola’s blog), part Player Profile (Lola is an inspiring player), part Love Letter/Shout Out/Thank You (because Lola woke me up to the world of Plus Sized ladies) and part Preview (next up is an in-depth review of the Plus-Sized players I’ve purchased thanks to Lola sharing info with me).

So, with all that said, I hope you are inspired to go buy two Rosies. Keep one as Rosie herself, and maybe give her a Michelle Doll wife.

With the other, replace her Rosie head and make her just one of the gals.

As always – please comment. Kudos, corrections and additional info is always welcome. I see the comments section as an addendum to my post. Any info you can add for other readers only makes the blog more valuable to readers who might stumble across this post in the future. I am never offended when people say, “Yes, but…what about…and did you know….and you forgot to add” – those are my favorite kinds of comments.

PLAYER PROFILE: Marie Chandler

Recently I did a profile on the various Adult Barbie Enthusiasts I have met since I started building Leah’s Barbieland last summer.

This is a profile of one of those enthusiasts, how I found her, why I enjoy her work and a few things she’s taught me.

Once when I as trolling eBay I saw a playscale washer and dryer for sale. The photos included with the ad captivated me. She was showing the washer and dryer within a diorama she had created.

The Picture Marie had with an eBay ad selling a Washer and Dryer set.

What I think captivated me most about the diorama was that the doll in the photo was the Happy Family grandmother and she was wearing a housecoat just like my grandmother used to wear.

I stared at the picture a long time, taking in all the tiny details the diorama contained. I enjoyed scanning every quarter inch of the photo picking out all the details the diorama creator had so painstakingly, and perhaps lovingly, created.

I wrote to her about the washer and dryer set and complimented her on her picture. She wrote back and told me to check out a Community Chat Room on eBay called the Barbie Bulletin Board. [NOTE: Since this post was originally created, the Barbie Bulletin Board has been repurposed significantly and no longer includes the free flow sharing of pictures it once did. I have contacted Marie to see if she is now posting her diorama pics in other places].

I scrolled through the discussion going on there. There were a few other diorama makers but the ones created by my pen pal, the eBay user emeraldroselane, were my favorites.

The 70s Kitchen

A few months after seeing that first diorama picture I visited the board again. I wanted to hear more about this diorama maker’s creative process and understand what intrigued me so much about her work.

The Creative Processes of other people has always been fascinating to me. When I was a kid, I was considered a “good artist” – this meant I could sketch a reasonable cartoonish depiction of a human or animal. I remember that I used to say “Tell me something to draw” and my mom would say, “Draw whatever you want,” and I would say “That’s too easy. That’s not fun. Tell me something to draw.”

I realized from an early age that creativity doesn’t come out of thin air – it comes from limitations and parameters. The more limitations, the more likely you will come up with something truly ingenious.

Limitations, that’s what spurs creativity.

So what was again about these dioramas? Well diorama work could be said to be the playscale equivalent to stage design in the theater or set design in film.
In some ways, creating playscale dioramas is easier than creating human-scale set designs. For example, barbie couches are much cheaper than human couches and if you have the gumption you might even make one in an hour out of fabric scraps, hot glue, some cardboard and either cotton or foam. Try creating a human couch that way.

Victorian Diorama

In other ways, creating dioramas in the barbie world is harder. If the character who calls your theater set home loves French Beignets you can call up the local French Bakery and have some delivered, but how are you are going to come up with Beignets for barbie? The answer: You are going to have to get pretty creative.

And that, I realized, was what had so intrigued me about Marie’s work. She wasn’t just doing dioramas. She was doing dioramas that were specific to time periods and the back stories she had developed for her dolls.

1950s Kitchen - Are you starting to see Marie's range? It's amazing.

As Marie shared various diorama pics with me I was delighted by the way her furniture, clothing, food, curtains, wallpaper, dishes – you name it — how every small detail reflected a specific place, time and character she had created.

Marie uses her dioramas to tell short stories. She narrates each frame with a sentence or two. In this way, her stories are small vignettes. They run like soap operas – in that she has families established that she visits over and over again and picks up stories where she has previously left off.

A totally modern kitchen. I might have thought it was a pic from the local home show tour!!

Marie’s Ten Tips for Barbie Play

1 )  Use shelves as barbie houses. Paper the walls with human wallpaper – and use wallpaper glue to attach it to the shelves.

2 )  Look for 1:12 scale items that can be used in a 1:6 scale setting. A large dollhouse light can be used as a small barbie light. Crystal prism Christmas tree ornaments also make fantastic chandeliers.

3 )  Use dollhouse wax to attach things like pictures to walls or dishes to tables. The wax doesn’t stain and can be reused. It is designed to be a temporary adhesive and it works great for temporary set-ups.

4 )  A good way to generate ideas for your existing dioramas is to do calendar based themes – decorate for Halloween, Christmas, Valentines etc. As you look for decorations and add them to your dioramas, ideas for stories will develop naturally.

5 )  Windows are easily made using pretty scenery pictures. Look through old magazines for pictures of flowers for a Spring time scene. Place fabric on the sides and you have an instant window. If you don’t sew and don’t want to learn, you can make curtains using fabric and a glue gun.

6 )  Birthday parties for your dolls can be fun.  Use real party streamers for your doll’s party. Cut the width of the streamers down to about 1/4 to 1/2″ and hang just as you would with life size streamers. Doll house wax works well to adhere the streamers. For a fabulous Halloween party, use orange and black twisted together.

7 ) To make presents for any holiday, use empty mini raisin boxes and wrap with human wrapping paper.

8 ) Crocheted or knitted doilies are perfect as an area rug in your doll’s kitchen or living room, bedroom, or even bathroom. You can find these at thrift shops or antique shops.
9 ) Placemats can work as wall-to-wall carpet or can be cut down to create area rugs. If you cut them down, use an iron to turn the edges under and then either use stitch-witchery (an adhesive activated by heat, found at fabric stores) or glue to hold the edges under.,

10 ) Use pretty, decorated hankerchiefs as tablecloths for your doll’s dining table. Even a pretty fabric dinner napkin cut to size works well as a tablecloth. Fabric stores sell a product called “Fray Check” that keep the cut edge from unraveling. Follow the instructions on the label.  It will dry clear and invisible and add some extra weight to help your fabric drape more realisticially.

PLAYER PROFILE: Adult barbie Enthusiasts

When you start building your barbie collection you inadvertently run across a world of barbie enthusiasts you had no idea existed.

There are thousands, seriously, thousands upon thousands of adults who love dolls and especially love dolls like barbies.

The adult enthusiasts fall into several broad categories:

• NIB Collectors – these are the collectors who leave all dolls in their boxes. They never open them and they display them in their boxes. They call them “New in Box” (NIB), “Never Removed from Box” (NRFB) or “Mint in Box” (MIB) so I dub them the NIB Collectors for short.
• Stand Collectors – these are the collectors who carefully remove them from their boxes and display them carefully on shelves or in cabinets. Collector Barbies always come with plastic stands and Stand Collectors use the stands to help their dolls stand up.
• Adult Players – these are the adults who don’t leave the dolls in their boxes and don’t try to preserve them perfectly. They play with the dolls in various ways. Players might change clothes and shoes, cut and style hair or even pull off the heads and put them onto other bodies.

Adult Players are the most interesting to me because I have the most in common with them and I learn a lot from them regarding how to change dolls, repair dolls and basically get or make what I need or want for Leah’s Barbieland.

Adult Players also tend to fall into some general categories. Of course some people fall into several categories and others don’t fit in any cateogry at all.  Even with this in mind, I hope the classifications prove somewhat helpful.

Fashion Designers – the players who design and make clothes for their barbies.

Fashion Stylists – the players who artfully combine clothes, shoes, other accessories and hairstyles to bring a “look” together.

Fashion Photographers – the players who are able to take shots of their barbies (after styling) that have the look and feel of human fashion photography. These photographers often combine lighting, props and backgrounds to create a look. They also often carefully pose to dolls to achieve an expressive look and take care with stray hairs and focus.

Interior Decorators – the players who create intricate dioramas, most often of indoor settings. They combine wall coverings, furniture, textiles and props to make realistic settings.  These players often combine manufactured items with homemade items and a variety of materials used creatively to achieve a realistic setting.

Set Designers – these players take Interior Decoration activities to the next level by imposing boundaries on themselves that require even more ingenuity and tenacity than that of the average Interior Decorator. By choosing specific time periods, specific cultures or imagining inhabitants with highly developed personalities, they create challenges for themselves that require not just coming up with say, a couch for a room, but a couch that would be period appropriate and reflects the “taste” of the inhabitants.

Illustrators – these are the players who use dolls and props to illustrate ideas. These ideas may be simple or they may be complex. They may convey ideas in a single frame or they may use a short series of frames. They may narrate the frame or sequence and may even include a few lines of dialog.

Storytellers – these are the players that take their storytelling to a much more complex level by creating a long series of storyboards that convey a detailed story usually with extended dialog.

Filmmakers – these are the players that create video – not through a progression of stills but through well placed (or not so well placed) manipulations of dolls while a camera “rolls”. You can find hundreds of these on You Tube. Many seem like teens coming up with a crazy idea and executing it sloppily while others are extremely well executed and showcase advanced videography and post-production skills.

OOAKers - these are the players that remove doll makeup and paint completely new faces. Their creations are referred to as One-of-A-Kind or OOAKs.  They cut off the hair and change it dramatically. Some of them also design clothing and enter the dolls in contests.  Some of them create celebrity look-alikes. Others use the OOAK dolls in Illustrative sculptures. Still others sell their creations at a profit. Many of them have websites set up to showcase their work. Some offer online tutorials and at least one I’ve seen offers instructional DVDs.

Crafties - these are the players who dabble in just about every aspect of the miniature world. If the can’t get what they want, they’ll try to make it themselves. From furniture, to clothes to food. Since they enjoy being creative, they try making just about everything at one point or another. Others stick to a single craft – like furniture or food and get very good at it.

Trollers - these are the players who never stop thinking in miniature and see potential barbie items where ever they go. I was a Troller and a Crafty as a teen and I remember my mom opening a pizza box and seeing a plastic device meant to keep the pizza box from collapsing in the middle, “End Table!!!” Trollers see potential in dollhouse scale items (“that large light for a dollhouse living room could be a small light in my Barbieland”) as well as children’s toys (“that novelty eraser would make a great flower vase!”)

So those are the groups I have noticed so far. My plan is to start profiling some of the more interesting players I have met through eBay, Flickr and Facebook and try to share some of their insights and tips.  I would think these tips would be especially helpful to pre-teens and teens who want to continue playing with their collections but are starting to feel pressured about being “too old” for “playing with dolls.”

This blog should provide proof that real world skills can be developed through so-called play as well as evidence that many well-adjusted adults participate in barbie-related creative activities and derive the usual satisfaction from it that most hobbies bring.