One of the hobbies I have besides thrifting is cleaning up dolls I find on my thrifting adventures. I do not collect or keep the dolls I just enjoy finding them and cleaning them up. I usually sell them or give them to my friends little girls. You would not believe the dolls I find when I am out.
This post is to show you how I clean the dolls, it is rather easy to do and it feels therapeutic to me for some reason. I picked 3 dolls to work on today that had a bit of crazy hair going on and some surface dirt. I will explain what all I use and what I do to get them clean. I will say that most of my routine came from watching a youtube channel called At thousand splendid dolls (link is provided), she is very informative and her tips are easy to follow and work out very well!
First off are the utensils you need for the job, dish soap (or shampoo body wash) to clean the body, conditioner for the hair, baking soda and tooth brush for harder to remove dirt, pet brush (with metal bristles), large tooth comb and a rat tail comb. I also have two towels (one for laying them on to comb the conditioner in their hair and one to help with drying the hair. I also use a large measuring cup for boil washing the hair but that is optional.
These are the 3 ladies I am fixing up today, not really too much just taming the hair a bit.
After I wash their bodies with the soap and scrub them with a little bit of baking soda I rinse the off and wash their hair. I lay them on the towel and put conditioner on their hair (I do let them set for about 5 min with the conditioner on). Then I comb their hair starting at the bottom and working my way to the top of the head. I let them set about 5 more min.
Then I do the boil wash on them (I will tell you if you have a doll with curly hair and you do not want to loose the curl DO NOT BOIL WASH, most of the time it will make the hair straight as a board). To boil wash I put a 4 cup measuring cup full of water in the microwave for 3:00 then I dunk the head in a few times then let it set for about 5-10 min. After that I rinse the hair in the sink one more time to get the rest of the conditioner out then towel dry, comb/brush.
Then I lay them out to dry, can you believe the difference already in these girls??? Their hair look so shiny and of course straight. I did want to curl the dark haired doll but then talked my self out of it. She originally has big bouncy curls but I was afraid to mess her up, she looked so pretty with straight hair.
These ladies turned out lovely, again I really do like how they all turned out. If I could change one thing I would not have boil washed the dark haired doll she had some curl to her hair that fell out when I did that but her hair did turn out good. All of their hair turned out nice and shiny! That is how I clean my thrift store dolls, I really do love doing this and will keep sharing when I do!
No comments:
Post a Comment