Wilde Imagination's Patience as Glinda

Wilde Imagination's Patience as Glinda

 I had a problem with my Patience in Wonderland doll. I wanted to make her clothes, but I couldn't stand the idea of redressing her. I love Alice in Wonderland and I love my Patience in Wonderland. I kept putting off taking her clothes off to measure her for new ones and eventually I just had to accept that I really didn't want to do it.

 So I had to buy another Patience. (At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.) There was simply no other choice.

 And now I have a Patience as Glinda. Actually she's been sitting in a box in my wardrobe for several weeks now, I just haven't had time to open her up. And luckily, I've never liked the Wizard of Oz (come on Dorothy is supposed to be like nine years old but she's clearly a full-grown woman, that's creepy.) so I'm not going to have any qualms about redressing her. But first, I thought I would share some pictures.

Can we get a little more pink over here?

 My first impression after I deboxed my Glinda was that she looked like the sort of thing a six-year-old girl would hallucinate after overdosing on fairy floss (cotton candy to you americans.) She is exceptionally puffy and fluffy and pink! And sparkly, but there was so much pink that I don't think I even noticed the sparkliness for several minutes. And the skirt is frankly enormous.

The dress is standing up by itself here!

 That dress! Seriously, it isn't the sort of thing I like, but I can't help being impressed and a little overwhelmed by it! The dress itself is made of some sort of light pink nylon taffeta with an overlay of palest (almost white) pink chiffon. The sparkly clusters are not glitter but more like tiny silver studs with some sort of oversized glitter pieces here and there and of course sequin stars. 

At the neck there's an attached silver star shaped ornament with rhinestones and a plastic like butterfly shape that's absolutely covered in iridescent glitter (and yes it sheds glitter). The sleeves fasten at the wrists with snaps, something I don't think I've ever seen before in a doll this small.

Layers and layers of skirt!

The skirt is made up of several layers so that the dress can actually stand up on it's own! Under the sheer sparkly layer is the taffeta of the dress itself which is lined in a fine pink net that gives it extra stiffness. Under these layers is a separate petticoat of a coarser white net.

Even the petticoat can stand up by itself!

And if that wasn't enough, when I took her dress off I discovered it had a little bustlelike attachment sewn into the waistband as well!

Just in case the rest of the dress wasn't frilly enough

The back of the dress is a little more subdued.

Normally I'd call this sparkly, but compared to the front it's positively somber.

Under the dress she wears pink glittery shoes with and elastic strap. They're cute, but not very interesting.

When she arrives her accessories are taped to the side of the box in a little plastic bag. Two little plastic bead bracelets, another glitter covered, butterfly cut-out (this one is threaded on ribbon to be worn as a neklace) and a wand. The bracelets are nice, but not really anything special. The glittery butterfly cutouts, I don't like. They look a little cheap compared to the rest of the outfit, they shed glitter which is not one of my favourite things and tying the necklace on nearly drove me insane.

Jewels fit for a. . . fairy?. . . witch? I'm not quite sure.

I was surprised by how heavy the wand was! It's a metal rod with the star and rhinestone thing from Glinda's neckline repeated on the top, except instead of rhinestones there's a large pearl. And from the weight it's clearly real metal. Actually the weight presented a bit of a problem. The wand comes with an attached poly band to tie it to Patience/Glinda's arm, but I found that unless I balanced it just right as soon as I let go of it, gravity would take over and the star would fall to knee level and Patience/Glinda would have a wand handle poking her in the face. The only way I could get her to look like she was holding it was to balance it on both of her forearms rather than her hands.

The wand and crown. Sounds like the name of an English pub.

The crown. . . I'm still not sure how I feel about the crown. I'm either impressed or disappointed. I can see what they were trying to do, and when it's on the doll, it looks how it's supposed to look. It fits in with the outfit and looks like the crown from the movie when the doll is wearing it. But when the doll isn't wearing it and you look at it by itself, it's kind of clumsy and blah. It's made from some sort of cloudy, translucent acrylic, and like the wand, surprised me with it's weight. It's absolutely covered in a fine, iridescent, glitter, I'm not sure if that is sprayed on or embedded in the plastic. Details are picked out in chunkier shedding glitter that's a little messily applied. There are little sequin stars again, and the rhinestone star again at the front and the lower edge is completely encircled in rhinestones. The rhinestones at the bottom are coming away in several places. And there's an attached poly chinstrap. Which is good. And bad.

The chinstrap is good because there is no way the crown would stay on without one. It's bad because once you put the weight of the crown on top of the dolls head, combined with the weight of all her hair and the weight of her already large head, Patience/Glinda's teeny tiny body is kind of crushed. This isn't an issue of artistic balance, the skirt's so big everything looks in proportion, it's a question of physics. Once Patience/Glinda has her crown on, it's really hard to get her to stand up, even with a stand. Her head kept tipping to one side so much that she would twist out of the stand, or one side of the stand would end up on her waist, the other side would be in her armpit. With the combination of the wand and the crown if you were the sort of person that likes to rearrange their dolls and change their poses frequently, Patience as Glinda would probably be the most frustrating doll in the world.

Lucky for me I am never going to put her in this outfit again, so I will never again have to do the crown and wand balancing act. The fully dressed doll looks amazing, the outfit is lovely, and detailed, and slightly overwhelming but not my thing at all, and the doll is great. My Patience in Wonderland arrived with her hair all squashed and weird, with Glinda that problem has been avoided by turning her head to one side in the box. Simple but effective. And I can't wait to see who else she might be.

Wonderland Patience Again!

I restyled Patience's hair into the ringlets I wanted her to have in the first place. I like the way it turned out. Because I washed all the gluey varnishy stuff out of her hair, it's a LOT softer now and prettier. I took these pictures right after I undid her rags, so I hadn't tidied up the ends yet. The frizzy bits on the bottom of the curls are the very ends of her hair, I trimmed them off after I took the pictures. Also if you can see a black smear in her hair - it's ash. I didn't realise it was there until I was cropping the pictures.

Sometimes Patience looks like she's plotting something!

Probably plotting to steal Alice in Lalaloopsyland's rabbit.

 

 The Littlest Pet Shop Peacock always tells Patience the best stories.

 

I also had a play with different clothes.

I discovered that I have no other doll shoes that fit Patience at all. Longer Living Dead Doll outfits fit her but most of them are disturbingly short (which is why I didn't take pictures.). I have a large Alice in Lalaloopsyland doll and thought her dress would look cute on Patience but it was nowhere near long enough, the hem only reached Patience's hips! Some clothes for twelve inch Kish dolls will fit her. But  Patience is both thinner and longer in the body so some clothes won't fit or will just look silly.

But I love Patience in Olivia Primavera'a dress!

Patience is charmed by this dress, but isn't sure if she's a ballerina or a fairy.

 

 Why, hello there!

 

 What an unusual bird!

A bird in the hand is worth. . .

 

I'm not sure yet if I'm going to be making clothes for Patience or not. I really like her original outfit and don't want to change her clothes, but at the same time I keep coming up with other things I could make for her. I probably will eventually but for the moment I'm going just keep her as something to look at. . . until that face gets to me.

 

 PLEASE make me a new dress!!!

New doll - Wonderland Patience by Wilde Imagination

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.