Rainbow Hair

After watching a video on one of our favorite You Tube channels, I felt a little inspired and asked Amalia if she'd let me completely redo one of her Barbie's hair.  Usually she balks at any permanent change of her dolls, but after showing her the video, letting her peruse my yarn collection, and showing her which doll I was thinking of, she actually said, "Yes!"

I think the selection of the doll was what really got her on board.  You see, her doll Honey Lemon (named after one of the characters in Big Hero 6) - seen here on the right - has some unfortunate hair.

From the outside it looks okay.

But once you start brushing it and pull the top layer aside, you find the under layer is disgusting.  Apparently they were a little heavy-handed with the glue when they initially rooted her hair, and some of the glue they put inside her head has seeped out through her "scalp holes".  It is a sticky, greasy-looking mess.  Or, at least, it was.

But then Mollie let me take over and try to fix the problem.  First, I had to remove the hair.

Cutting her hair off was fun, but it was also insanely sticky and I was really happy with our doll selection for this project.

Next I had to pull out all the tiny little hairs from the inside.  And, as it so happened and as I figured it would be, I also pulled out a TON of glue.

This is just part of the pile I removed from her head.

Now, with a wonderfully blank canvas ...

... it was time to start the reroot.  Amalia picked a multicolored yarn to use, as I has suspected she would, and I was excited to get going.  Each strand is put into the scalp using a doll needle (found at our local Field's Fabrics and then knotted before it is pulled back into the head and snipped at the other end.  (The aforementioned You Tube video does a great job showing how to do all this.)

I'll admit, the whole process was a bit morbid, and Mollie eventually requested that I stop making screaming noises every time I pushed the needle into Honey Lemon's head.  I agreed that it was probably a good idea.

I didn't reroot every "scalp hole" because the yarn is much, MUCH thicker than the regular hair and would have given her an unmanageable head of hair.  As it was, her new 'do was pretty full!

Once I had all the strands in, I gave her a trim.

Then I cleaned off the neck post (it, too, was covered in glue) and reattached her head.  Voila!

Mollie is super excited about the results, and I have to say, I'm pretty happy with them as well.  It's certainly different, but she's got a ton of blonde Barbies so this is certainly a nice change of pace.

Mollie wanted to style her hair like the one in the video, so we found a clip and pinned it back.

Then Mollie added another one for safe keeping/fashion.

It was a little tough, especially taking out all the old hair, but it was also a lot of fun and I'm glad we tried it!