Reroot progress report

Yesterday I ignored the large pile of laundry sitting grumpily in the bathroom and instead spent a pleasant few hours working on Poe's reroot. I know people complain about how much slower mohair is in comparison to saran, but I am finding that it seems to be coming along quite quickly. Maybe I'm doing something desperately wrong! I have nobody to show it to, so I'll just have to cross my fingers and hope that it will work out ok!





I am using a method I saw on Flickr a while ago. There used to be a tutorial on how to do it, but it has since been removed, so I am kind of just combining the info I have gleaned from all over. It is a knot method, but instead of tying the knot at the very end of the plug, it's tied in the middle and the two ends are fed through adjacent holes. It leaves a really neat finish on the inside imo, and seems to be very secure. It's only suitable for long length fibre, but it's a nice compromise between lock and loop and the usual knot method. I use a large headed needle to feed the mohair through the holes. It isn't terribly fast, but then I have yet to find a method I can successfully use that is! Having the mohair all nicely combed is a huge time saver, and I just make the plugs up as I go.

I am glad that I did that disastrous reroot on the Basaak - even though it didn't work out terribly well I did learn a lot from doing it (mostly, what NOT to do!) and I feel a lot more confident this time, even though I haven't worked with mohair before. The Blythe scalp is sooo much softer and easier to work with in comparison!





I have given Poe a thatched side part - as you can see her scalp was very damaged along the centre part and although I have repaired it (that's the big white strip), I don't feel comfortable having the closely rooted rows in the torn plastic. I've just started the upper fields which are also very closely rooted - once I've done the first couple of spirals I'll start skipping holes. Poe's Disco Boogie scalp seems to be have the holes more closely spaced than a normal scalp, so I'll probably just do every third hole and see how that looks. One thing I do know, it's going to be poofy - which isn't the look I was going for. I think that perhaps those lovely wispy straight reroots tend to use lots and lots of extremely fine plugs and take a bit more skill than I posess right now. Maybe next time.

All this fussing about with Poe is giving me a lot more of a feel for her identity. I am kind of excited to be sending her away for her faceup. I have decided that I am going to get her lips carved rather than leaving them stock and I think she might be a lashless girl. I have found an amazing Australian customiser and although I am on the list to send her overseas for a free faceup, I am thinking that maybe one of the other girls might go there in her stead and I'll just have the work done locally - the list is very long and I am really looking forward to seeing her completed now. I'm pleased that I didn't end up selling her - she has real character, even if she is still a trainwreck!

Mohair processing - not for the impatient or inflexible!

As some of you might know, I've been in the process of trying to find some fibre the right length (and price) to reroot poor Poe with for a while now. A few days ago my fibre arrived and I've began processing it so I can begin the reroot.

The mohair I ended up buying is from an Aussie seller, and as I mentioned, pretty much straight off the goat's back. I will admit that I was expecting it to be kinda gross and stinky, but I have to say that I was pleasantly surprised. While it was absolutely not perfectly clean and lovely, it wasn't too bad and even better, the seller kept the locks all nice and together so I don't have the nightmare of untangling a big messy wad of fibre. Here's how it looked straight out of the bag.


In it's unwashed state it is kind of greasy, and there's a bit of "VM" (that's vegetable matter - hay and possibly...goat poo!). It does smell a little bit goaty, but not terribly so. All the same, if you are finicky about such things, then attempting to process your own mohair is possibly not for you. Looking at the fibre in its raw state it is difficult to imagine it gracing the head of one of my Blythes!

Most of the info out there on processing mohair is geared towards spinners rather than doll makers, who need that lock kept nice and intact through the cleaning process and if you follow their methods you will end up with nice clean mohair that has ended up in a tangled clump, rather than the nicely combed locks we need. Luckily I found this excellent guide to washing mohair by Mohairhouse. Quite possibly what I did is not the best way to wash mohair, but here's the method I used.

I basically separated the mohair into three smaller bundles, tied at the top with a silicone hair tie and followed the method for washing locks using dish detergent and very hot water. If I was to do this over again, I would have picked out the bigger pieces of VM before I wet the mohair. As I discovered it doesn't come out in the wash, but the water does help to distribute all of those tiny pieces right through the entire lock, making your locks really dirty. Oh well, you live and learn...

The fibre was very dirty, and after three washes was still not looking lovely and white so I soaked it in some very hot water with dish soap for a good 20 minutes to see if I could get it any cleaner. Next time I'd pick out the VM first, then wash once to get most of the dirt out, soak in hot soapy water and then rinse and wash again. It is entirely possible that my mohair is stained or the goat that it came from isn't white but cream (actually I don't really know why I assumed that it was white as the goats come in several colours including blonde and a silvery colour) because even though it was much cleaner looking after the soak, it still wasn't really super white like other mohair that I have seen - more like white with blonde tips. So at that point I figured that that was as clean as it was going to get, rinsed off the dishsoap and conditioned the fibre using a generous amount of human hair conditioner (just squishing the conditioner into the tied locks, not agitating at all) and put it into ziplock bags for 20 minutes or so. I was pleased that at this stage I had barely lost any hair at all from the 3 bunches - yay for silicon hairbands!



After I rinsed, dried and brushed a section of it, (at which point it turned into a cloud of frizz that was only subdued by dampening it), I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed with the result. My mohair seems to be of the super crimpy variety rather than the loosely curling type that I wanted, not especially shiny and worst of all, it's a pale straw colour that I am not a fan of at all.



It is also apparent that I will have to dye it as the colour does not suit Poe's skintone. Ironically it looked pretty good against the paler Blythe-in-bits, but I have already got a scalp for her. I am looking at using Landscape Acid Dye to improve the colour in either Pacific or Tasman - both are shades of blue/green in different intensities. They are really pretty colours, I just hope that it dyes up nicely and doesn't end up going bright green on the cream mohair. I am also considering playing with food colouring to see if I can get a pretty pastel colour I can live with.

At this point after all the work and the less than satisfactory result I've achieved, I would not recommend trying to save a few dollars by processing the mohair yourself if you have a particular look in mind for the finished scalp. It's not the amount of work involved that I consider to be the issue, but rather the unpredictable (and in this case, somewhat disappointing) result. At the end of the day, the look of the combed mohair depends mostly on the animal it came from (age, genetics, colour, living conditions) and also the part of the fleece that the locks were taken from (some parts of the fleece are guaranteed to be stained or just very very dirty). Buying mohair fibre without knowing these things means that you can't be certain how the processed fibre will look.

I wanted to achieve white or cream shiny mohair with a gentle wave and so far, after several hours work have ended up with pale blonde mohair that is matt and crimpy. It's still quite nice, but it isn't what I wanted and will look very different to the way I had envisaged.

The fibre (including postage) cost me $14.00, and I also spent an extra $10 or so on a brush, conditioner and conditioning spray. On top of that, I now need to purchase the dye which will set me back another $14 or so. I think that all up it would not have cost me much more to have purchased the fibre I really wanted in the first place and I have had to accept that the look that I wanted for Poe's customisation will now have to change to accommodate the mohair that I have ended up with. If you are patient and flexible with your customisation than it is quite doable, but for specific results you are much better off buying your mohair already processed.

Re-roots, Wigs, scalps and domes explained

Another post for the newbies! This issue came up on the forums and I remember being confused by all the options and new terms out there too. Hope this helps to make it a little clearer.

Domes

In human terms, the dome is kind of like the top of the skull. It's the hard bit on top of her head under the scalp. As you might know, Blythe comes in different facemolds and these different kinds of Blythe have different kinds of dome. The older girls (BL, EBL and SBL) have the dome attached to the faceplate of the doll. This means that if you want to open her for customising or change her hair, you need to remove the scalp first. It's not an easy process, but that's a whole other post for another day.

Here's an EBL dome.



On the newer Blythes like RBL and FBL Takara/CWC have kindly made the dome a separate piece and attached the scalp to that. This means that opening these molds is much much easier (you don't need to soak or saw) and results in less damage to the doll. It's also really easy to swap scalps with another Blythe of the same mold in your collection.

Here's what an RBL dome looks like. The scalp is on this one as I am too lazy to pull it out again, but you can see the hard plastic dome on the inside.



Sometimes you can buy RBL and FBL Blythe without a dome - be warned, they can be difficult to source and without a dome, your Blythe's scalp can dent and well...look wierd.

Scalps

The scalp is a rubbery covering with hair rooted in it that covers the dome. Removed from the dome, it looks like this (on the underside anyway...the other side is considerably more attractive!).



The little sticky out lip on it is called the flange. This helps it to sit nicely between the dome and faceplate. This scalp is an RBL Saffy Encore.

You can also buy blank scalps from Coolcat that look like this. Obviously, this isn't my pic. Don't sue me Coolcat! I think your scalps are great :)



They are used for rerooting a new head of hair when a stock scalp is not available. They are a litte different from the stock scalps in that they are made of thicker rubber and obviously, don't have holes in them yet. They only come in one colour, so might not match your Blythe's faceplate very well if she has dark skin. They are great for mohair reroots, scalpless Blythes or if you simply can't bring yourself to cut the hair off a stock scalp to reroot it.

Wigs

Unlike most BJD's a Blythe's wig is not really her hair (that's her scalp). In some ways a Blythe wig is just like a human wig - it's a fun way of having a new look, but you can always tell it's a wig and it has limited styling options. A wig is not made of rooted plugs like a scalp, it's made by stitching wefts of hair to a stretchy or net base. If you move the hair the wrong way, you can see the wefts.



Here's Poe in her wig. This photo was taken after a bit of primping and from a carefully chosen angle. It is sitting directly on her dome as she does not have a scalp and it does not sit right. I have heard of people using them directly over a blank scalp either glued or velro'd on, but you have to remember that your styling options will be limited.



Wigs are best used over the top of a scalp, with the hair tucked up in a wig net. The nets are very inexpensive and most of the places that sell the wigs also sell the nets. A word of warning though, expect to have to wash your Blythe's hair after using a wig - especially if she has bangs. Her hair will be very messy when you take it out of the wig cap and her bangs will be all over the place.

Re-roots

A re-root is exactly that - re-rooting new hair into a scalp. Unlike a wig, this is more permanent and it takes quite a while to do. Blythes are rerooted to repair badly executed haircuts, to give them a new kind of hair, like mohair or to give them a unique new colour that isn't available on the stock scalps. The best way is to use the Blythe's own stock scalp to ensure a great colour match between face and scalp - also I have heard that it is much easier to use the holes from the factory hair, rather than having to punch your own. If you don't have your own Blythe's stock scalp, sometimes clean ones or ones with ruined hair come up for sale. You can also use a blank Coolcat scalp and punch your own holes in it. I will be doing one on my bait Blythe soon and will probably cover the process more thoroughly then.

Hope you found this post informative. I will be doing a follow-up on all the different kinds of hair in the near future.

Ouch!

Rerooting hair is painful. Especially when you stab yourself repeatedly in the thumb with the crochet hook. I had not realised this, having never used such a small one before, but they are equiped with a needle like tip and will slip into the pad of your thumb like a hot knife into butter. Painful. Then there's the shoulder pain from forcing the awl in to make additional holes in the hard unforgiving Basaak scalp again and again and again (the partline had barely any scalp holding it together so I had to go on either side of it). Many times in today's session I've caught myself fantasising about sinking the doll needle into the soft squishy surface of a cool cat scalp. If I ever decide to do this again, I will use one of those!

I say doll needle rather than crochet hook because with the harder scalp and my inexperience, it just wasn't working for me. Somehow the strands of saran were catching on the rough edges of the holes and the loops on the back were really untidy...not to mention that I spent a lot of time pulling out poorly secured plugs and redoing the same row. Not fun. In the end I've decided upon an unorthodox method that uses a needle threader and a doll needle. Not nearly so stabby that way. I may revert to the hook once I'm onto the spiral bit and the holes aren't so close together - we'll see.

Also, a word of warning to anyone contemplating taking on this madness - when the tutorials say to keep the saran wet they mean it. It dries very quickly and becomes impossible to handle. Oh and the puchi collective tutorial is great, but when they refer to using "a small handful" of hair at a time, they actually mean a small amount of hair - about as much as you can pinch between two fingers. Because if you pull out too much at once, you can't separate the strands nicely and end up with a hideous tangled mess and will more than likely need to throw it away in frustration, thus increasing the worry about not having ordered enough hair... Not that I speak from experience or anything :P



This is my pitiful progress for the day. Not much huh? All I managed to complete so far is the partline. I will at least concede that I have gotten neater and faster and don't have to unpick any more. Over the weekend I hope to thatch it. I live in hope that this is the slowest and most difficult part of the process, otherwise I may go crazy before I'm done.

I do like the colour though. Bit of a change from the blonde!