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My first doll

Spurred on by Dollightful's challenge, I bought some dolls from eBay. As Monster High seem to be very popular among customisers I bought a Clawdeen Wolf and Venus McFlytrap. As I don't have any pastels or airbrush equipment I chose Clawdeen to start with because her skin tone is already natural.

I prepared her - cleaned her face with acetone, cut off her hair, cut off her ears, pulled off her head and cleaned out the roots and glue from inside.

The doll's theme was going to be 'tropical', but I had no idea what her outfit would be. I did, however, know that I wanted her to have natural Afro-Caribbean hair, so I used black wool, split into strands, and re-rooted that with a home-made tool. I cut off a needle and stuck it point-first into the rubber on the end of a pencil. Crude, but it worked!

Once the hair was finished it was time for the face up.

First layer of colour down
Again I wanted to go with natural colouring, so the eyes would be brown. I know some people have awful trouble with eyebrows, but I managed to get them how I wanted at the first attempt! Maybe it was beginner's luck... They're not identical, but as make up artists will tell you, 'eyebrows are sisters, not twins'.

For the clothes I found some little bags of offcuts in my local fabric shop. They had all sorts of fabrics and colours in the just the right amount to make doll clothes. I wasn't sure what to make - a crop top and skirt, or a summer dress, or a bikini, or something Hawaiian, or something else. After some experimenting I found something suitable.

You'll see the final result in my next post :)
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