Draculaura doll restoration

This is actually an entry I've been working on for a week. Yes, a week on the calendar! But since I wanted to make one little change, I accidentally hit "Delete" instead of Revert to Draft, and poof, it was gone with the wind. I do want to share this particular restoration so I will be reproducing the original contents to the best of my ability. This entry will be much shorter though, since I wrote the original on a step-by-step basis as I went along. Thank you, Blogger!

Anyways, on the 3rd of July I came in possession of this Draculaura doll:

Subsequently I was tasked with a full clean up and restoration, having to then return the doll to the owner.

Older Draculauras are SUPER expensive nowadays, and I never even had one, so I admit, I just wanted to hold one in my hands. I started by getting an ID on her.

She was a very decrepit Die-ner Draculaura, missing her stockings, shoes and obviously, her entire playset. It doesn't surprise me, what would actually surprise me would be one of those in pristine condition, lol.

I broke the restoration down in 3 parts: skin, hair, clothing.

On the skin I worked with acetone-free nail polish remover, which is a bit shit at doing its job compared to pure acetone, but it was the only thing on hand. I started with the bigger surfaces like face and body:

Yeah, she had grime everywhere.

Just look at her hands and feet:

Her joints were already frail so removing this proved to be extra hard. But I just had to insist, careful not to break her limbs off, and had to do several rounds.

As you can see almost all of it came ofd, save for some yellowing where the nail polish (?) Was. I couldn't get rid of it. But I decided to stay true to the kid's own modifications and paint her nails and toes, using a straightened paperclip:

Whatever, her hair, was by far the worst part. It was a tangled matted mess. I started with some useless fabric softener soaks that did absolutely nothing for her, other than make her hair smell nice.

After that, I got smarter and managed to identify the hair material: kanekalon. It tangles up in a specific way. I was able to find information for this type of doll hair, now there isn't much to say I just followed this tutorial. I just didn't have a toy brush which complicated things.

In these pictures I was just starting to brush her hair. It became clear to me that this couldn't have been done without breaking hair.

post-brush

post-washing.

Anyways, for her clothes I just washed them and colored the missing parts in with fabric marker:

After putting everything together she was about done and ready to go back to her owner:

It's not perfect but I am pretty proud, I think I did a good enough job at giving this Draculaura a makeover😊😊