Wonderland Patience with Alice in Lalaloopsyland's
white rabbit.
This is my newest addition, Wonderland Patience by Wilde Imagination. I have always been a fan of Robert Tonner and last year I decided to buy a Robert Tonner doll. Except there were no Tonner dolls available that I actually wanted. I liked a lot of them but simply didn't want them. I thought about buying Maudylynne Macabre but it seemed silly to me to buy her when the postage would have costed more than the doll.
And then I stumbled across Garden Patience. Unfortunately I have a rule. If I want to buy something that's over a hundred dollars, I make myself wait at least a week before buying it. (You wouldn't believe how often at the end of the week my response is "Nah, it's great but I don't WANT it.") At the end of the week I went back to order Garden Patience and . . . she was SOLD OUT! I looked around the internet at various doll shops and ebay, and there were some still available but they were twice the original price! I gave up on Garden Patience and instead started checking Wilde Imagination regularly for new dolls. Long story short I got Wonderland Patience!
I love this doll. (Although the boys in my house have declared her to be the creepiest doll I own.) But there are one or two things I don't like about her. Firstly, I don't know much about strung dolls, but I think the stringing in my doll's neck is too loose. Unless her head is tilted slightly forward, it tends to flop backwards in a creepy, dead kind of way. And secondly, from the prototype pictures I expected her to have lovely curls, yes I expected them to be shellacked to death, but I expected lovely curls. The curls are shellacked to death but they are not lovely. When she arrived they were flattened and squashed against the back of her head. A few days later they'd fallen down a bit to look like this
Originally all these curls were flattened right against the back of her head.
I tried to tease the curls down into proper curls, but they just started falling out leaving a limp wave. That's the point her hair is at in the pictures. Since then I've washed out the shellac (One of the most disgusting experiences of my life) and brushed out the curls, next I am going to recurl it to see if I can make it be lovely curls. If it works at all I'll show it in another post.
These disappointments aside, I am completely in love with this dolls articulation! The separate elbow and knee pieces give her a flexibility that most dolls don't have. There is a review of Ahoy Patience on The Toybox Philosopher's blog that goes into her articulation in more detail and I really can't top that. You can find her review here.
The big difference between this Patience and the other Patience dolls is that Wonderland Patience has rooted hair whilst the others are wigged. I'm not sure if there's a reason for this, whether rooting is cheaper and with a wig she would have gone over budget or if it's because her hair is all swept back off her face and that quite often looks funny in wigs, or if they simply felt like it. But the rooting is nice and the hair fibre (once it's not full of glue) is lovely and soft. Also when I brushed her curls out, almost no hair fell out, even though I wasn't being particularly gentle, which to me is a good sign.
Her outfit is quite detailed. Her apron is white cotton trimmed with broderie anglaise and lace. The key is attached to a red ribbon that is sewn to the apron, just above her pocket. It looks better when the key is tucked inside the pocket but I forgot to get any photos of her like that.
Under her apron her blue dress is fairly plain. It has an attached underskirt of soft, white netting that has lace trim on the lower edge.
Patience without her apron.
Dress showing the underskirt.
Under her dress she wears a petticoat of some sort of white nylon taffeta. There is an extra frill of netting on the petticoat to make the dress stand out more.
Petticoat. Unfortunately my camera doesn't like this much white.
Her stockings have a lycra section at the crotch which makes them double as underpants. The legs are a white fishnet with stripes of denser weave, making them white on white striped.
Her shoes are patent "leather", fastening with little bead buttons. These are a lot easier to do up than I expected. Very well made and adorable.
I love Patience's face. When she's undressed her head does look out of proportion to her body, but in her clothes (particularly because her clothes are so puffy) It actually looks a lot more proportional. There was way too much light in the room on the day when I took these pictures to get any good close ups or even many good pictures. Everything came out with a lot of glare and a white haze. So there won't be the usual amount of photo spam at the end of this post, just two more pictures.
One of the reasons I chose this Patience over the others available, is the natural looking facial colouring.
Because of the weight of her hair and her floppy head issues,
I had trouble getting her to balance on her own.
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