I love helping with the kindergarten sunday school. I donated some Barbies last year, and some clothes I had found on eBay. the girls have loved playing with them. Recently, I noticed they were getting pretty straggley. I brought them home and redid their hair. I realized that I had only blonde white girls. HAHA. That won't do at all, so I'm on the hunt for Barbies that more of the girls can identify with. I used to have a beautiful hispanic doll, 2 black dolls, and brunettes... but in a fit of insanity I sold all my Barbies and the huge stash of clothes I had too.
I found that Value World sells Barbies for $1.01, so I've kind of been snatching them up. It's funny that people just toss the Barbies because the hair is ratty. I work a little bit, and make the hair nice again, and they're good as new. I like doing it too. Maybe I should start my own Barbie Refurbishing business. :)
I found a large group of generic Barbie clothes at Marcs... but when I got them home.... hardly anything actually fits! the capris are way too small. It was a very frustrating waste of money.
I don't like the clothes Barbie (and similar fashion dolls) is putting out now, it's all way too revealing. I think it's definitely the wrong image. Little kids shouldn't be thinking about sexy clothes, and bodies like that. They need to be able to associate Barbie with their own mom, or teacher, etc. I get sad seeing little kids trying to pose all sexy for photos, and wearing clothes that are way too grown up for them. Sigh, well, that rant is done, so I'll move on. LOL.
There is a fantastic seamstress on Etsy called
White Squirrel that makes nice Barbie clothes that are more modest. I plan on buying them sometime, but for now, I just wanted something to dress these girls, so I could take them on Sunday.
My solution was just to make my own clothes for them. I had a ton of sleeves left over from the Tshirt Bags I make, so I just started stitching away. I think in the future I would actually like doing it by hand much better than the machine, just because the machine is like a runaway horse sometimes. It was pretty stressful trying to get the machine to do what I wanted on such a small canvas. Here are some photos of my refurbished Barbies, and the clothes I made for them. I did find a pretty black Barbie, but she has the wind up mechanism in the back for wings, so I'm going to continue my hunt, and use her only if I can't find better ones.
