Not long before Shosh arrived with Heidi yesterday, a box arrived all the way from Singapore. Inside was poor Picabo, who I adopted recently with plans to attempt to lovingly make her over. You see, Picabo was not treated well in her previous life. She is a PWP who was poorly "customized" and needs LOTS of love and time at the dolly spa. Here she is shortly after arriving home. We dressed her up in a fuzzy robe and combed her hair. She arrived nude and wrapped in plastic.. poor dollie.
When Shosh arrived we inspected Picabo more closely. Her hair has been cut, she was dirty, her eye chips had been painted black, were scratched and one set missing. She has gouge marks on both sides of her head where someone tried to pry it open with a nasty tool. Her scalp had been removed and reattached poorly. She had sparse eye lashes on her right eye and none on her left. She was a mess.
We decided to dive right in to cleaning her up. In order to remove her eye chips they needed to be wet to loosen the glue and figured since the scalp was practically off we'd attempt that too. After the initial dunking the scalp came right off and we prepared her for eye chip removal.
The next step was removing the eye chips. The first one was so scary but once its over it actually isn't too bad. Her chips came out pretty easily. It just looks evil.
In between chip removal you have to redunk or moisten to keep th glue loose. Her she is in one of her dunks.. looks like a specimen jar. Poor thing.
After the chips were removed I soaked them in rubbing
alcohol to loosen the paint. One set was a complete loss as I think enamel was used.. NOT GOOD. Fortunately they were the orange chips so I tossed them. After the chips soaked for a couple of hours I was able to scrub them with an old toothbrush and remove the yucky dark paint. The pupils will need to be repainted and the fronts buffed but I think they are salvageable.
As you can see there was a lot of paint left in the sockets as well as a mark on the forehead from when the eye chips came out. I had to use a needle, q-tip, tweezers and alcohol to remove the paint residue and the left over eyelashes and glue. I fashioned a little hospital gown out of a paper towel for this procedure but think I will make her a little cotton one as she has many more surgeries left to go.
Here she is with cleaned sockets and no eyelashes.
The next photo is actually a step back but shows what bad shape her scalp is in. There is hair embedded in the top like epoxy was used or the scalp was burnt. I used my dremel tool with a cotton buffing pad to try to flatten it out a bit but got a bit scared so I am going to attempt hand sanding first and go to the dremel as a last resort. This image also shows the condition of the sides of her head.. so sad..
So, the next steps will be to sand mate her face and try to clean up her scalp. I have not figured out what to do as far as the gouges on her head. In the
TIB forum someone suggested resin but I need to do more research.
and sawing...
sawn and ready to unhook the spring mechanism
Shortly after these pix we got cold and went inside. My hubby was able to do the final crack of the skull and open her head. I am now faced with repairing the wobbley neck and the gouges in the side of the head....
