#my twinn dolls

[desertdollranch]

Julia, wearing her Christmas reindeer jammies, unwrapped her first Bitty Baby doll this morning!

[jointed-custody]

Question for the #dollblr community: I recently purchased a pair of My Twinn dolls. They arrived very quickly, which was nice - but one of the dolls smells like she’s been stored in a hot car for a decade or more. The smell of heat-dried and crumbling auto upholstery is…overpowering.

How can I remove or neutralize this smell? Any ideas?

Edited to add: I’m probably going to open her up and wash the body/stuffing. Her right arm is disconnected from the internal skeleton anyway and needs to be fixed.

[icetwinkluck]

here’s some nightmare fuel for u tn

[beep-beep-sunny]

Help me name this absolute QUEEN 👑 I love her. I'm looking for more old fashioned names I think. She's my first my twinn doll, and I think she's my twinn Wendi? I OBSESSIVELY looked through the faces trying to decide which one she has. If you think she isn't the Wendi face please let me know!

Please send me your name ideas 🥹🥺🥺

[aiiaiiiyo]

[trickster-whim]

You know that terrible Annabelle doll from that horrible movie? (I’ve never seen it lmao, but I do have a parasocial hatred for the Warrens)

Yeah, she doesn’t have anything on this My Twinn doll on shopgoodwill, who I thought was a custom when I was just scrolling through the site.

[stellaluna33]

It's HILARIOUS to me that I immediately recognize the origins of that eye color chart that keeps getting passed around in various posts, and it's even more hilarious to me that the origin is the "My Twinn" doll catalogs from the late 1990s. 😂

[pancreasnostalgia]

Meet my mini me! I’ve had a My Twinn doll since 1999, but never spent much time with her. These days she doesn’t resemble me very closely, so I wanted to look for a AG Truly Me that reflects my adult appearance. It was a toss-up between 55 and 69 as they both have wavy dark brown hair. The advantage to 55 would have been her freckles, but I decided that 69’s brown eyes were more important.

She arrived in mostly great shape. Her legs are on the loose side and her tag was cut off, so I might send her to the hospital for a limb and torso replacement.

I’m not 100% settled on a name yet, but am leaning towards Pearl. My name is Meghan which is derived from Margaret, and Margaret comes from the Greek word for Pearl. As a June baby, it is also my birthstone. Finally, one of my great-grandmothers was named Edna Pearl.

[smallerplaces]

2023 in review 1: the great decluttering of Mom's collection

These are the survivors of the early-year decluttering of Mom's vast, vast, vast doll collection, plus culling from my own much smaller collection. If you've watched my photos of new acquisitions, you know that since getting the place decluttered, I've been buying for myself at an unsustainable rate -- but I've lucked into like 90% of my wish list, and the other 10% may never show up.

That's a story for another day. This part of 2023 in Review is about decluttering. A couple of preliminary notes:

My own collection has varied in size since it started in 2012, reaching about 100 at its peak. My interests have also changed a lot over that time. When I moved to California to live with Dad and declutter the family home, I brought maybe 30 dolls at the outside.

Mom loved dolls, inundated me with dolls when I was a kid, and bought more dolls as an adult, and the brakes really came off in her sixties. I see nothing at all wrong with having whatever size collection you want! She enjoyed her collection, and then I got to deal with it because everyone else in the family stared in awe, muttered about how it must be worth a fortune, and then sloped off to do more important things than identify and sell dolls.

Let me tell you what confronted me here in California.

Sewing room lined with shelves (including small shelves two deep!) filled with dolls. This room was heavily My Twinn and "collector" dolls. I do not consider dolls creepy, but I maintain it's creepy af to have My Twinn dolls that look exactly like daughters one has gone NC with.

Extra bedroom completely filled with dolls and dollhouses, to the point that most things were on rolling shelving units like a library. When I first sorted dollhouses, I'd tentatively kept about six that had been on my wish list.

Guest room (now my room) with two cabinets full of Vogue Ginny and Madame Alexander Dolls of the World, floating shelves loaded with stuffed animals, and every piece of furniture stuffed with doll clothes. (There was space to unpack solely because one of my sisters had cleaned out half the guest room closet by chucking it all into the extra bedroom. This was the only way she could have done it!)

Linen cupboard "folding counter" completely covered with dolls and bears.

Additional doll clothes in boxes in Mom's bedroom closet and in trays in all the furniture there. Also additional dollhouses.

Small cabinet of dolls in the dining room (plus multiple large dollhouses!).

Dad's count had been that Mom had 834 dolls (not counting dollhouse residents), and with things I found in cupboards, I'd make it a round 1000.

Here's where you say, "This must have been an incredible collection!"

One big lesson from working my way through all this is that, if a doll was a bargain on eBay when Mom bought it, it's probably not worth that much now. This includes most things made in the name of Ginny or Effanbee after 1980, as well as anything pitched to "collectors."

Never collect collector's items.

A second one was that Mom loved dolls with strung limbs but had so many bajillions of them that nobody kept track of whether the string was still strung. If it were a couple of dolls needing restringing, Dad would have done if for me. But when I pulled Ginny dolls off their shelves and dozens of them explode in random limbs... it's too much.

At the beginning of the process, I spent hours on identifying dolls and trying to figure out how to eke out money from every single doll. By the end, I knew at a glance what wouldn't sell and was shoveling entire cabinets of dolls into the donate bag.

Yes, I know thrift stores don't sell all donations. But (a) I've literally seen dolls I donated in the store; and (b) this is honestly not a loss to the doll world if they don't. No matter how pretty a 1980s Effanbee in a fancy dress, with loose limbs, is, her value on the market is close to zero. Dolls in good enough condition to donate got a chance at finding an appreciative thrifter. Some got sold or given away on FBM in large lots instead.

The number of dolls individually sold on eBay was a small fraction of the total -- after the first couple months, it was dolls I found fun to pose, photograph, and list, or else they had to be worth more than $30. The ones I remember most fondly as selling projects were the Kelly dolls (at least 100) and the Madame Alexander Travel Friends (who are adorable, and I had some when they were new, but they never fit well with my fashion dolls).

All stuffed animals got donated. Life is too short to figure out what drugstore bear is what.

Didn't you want to keep dolls because they were Mom's?

Yes and no.

On that size of collection, sentimentality ultimately doesn't mean much. If it's all Mom's Treasures, none of it is terribly meaningful. If I'd been 100% sure that certain dolls were ones from her childhood that I remembered, I might have kept them -- but I wasn't.

Mom's tastes were also mostly different from mine. She was highly influenced by Toy Box Philosopher, in a sort of hate-buying way. She'd inevitably buy whatever Emily was touting, while complaining about Emily's tastes, buying level, etc. I don't know! So a lot of dolls in the 18" to 24" range showed up, and I have no interest in those sizes.

She also went whole hog for sulky 8" collector dolls (Madame Alexander and Ginny), which I can't stand. Again, if I'd been 100% sure I'd found my Ginny from when I was a kid, I might have kept it. But when there are five dolls that could be that doll... eh. (The experience also unearthed for me how much I resented having been pushed, as an impressionable child, to pretend to like older-style dolls better than Barbie. There was literally a lot to unpack here.)

That all said, in dealing with fashion dolls in the Barbie-Bratz size range, I'd been setting aside dolls I thought I might want to keep, so my one bin under the bed expanded temporarily to two.

I sold most of the tin litho dollhouses as a lot to a collector.

Was there a process for decluttering?

Grab a thread and pull.

Seriously, every organized method i tried fell apart on volume and identification. I did my best work in fits of spite, where I could get through an entire section of shelves without deluding myself that if Mom had liked a doll, it must be worth cash money.

I set myself the goal of finishing within a year of when I'd moved in here (May 2022) and I beat it by a full month.

Did you enjoy any of this experience?

In selling the dollhouses and some of the Playmobil, I consistently met delightful buyers who were so excited to get a bargain. One of my happiest afternoons was sitting with two buyers and a box of furniture and accessories that I was letting them have free or cheap, listening to them be delighted over items I'd ceased to care about. This whole process has surely done something to boost dollhouse love among a younger generation. I met a number of lovely people as repeat buyers or freebie takers, too. And the son of one of Dad's friends is now the Playmobil Tycoon of his kindergarten.

Photographing vintage playsets was fun, and those buyers were nice enough.

The Kelly collectors are adorable.

One My Twinn buyer told me about how she chose that doll because it reminded her of a childhood friend. There was also a buyer of over 100 vintage dollhouse dolls who was charming and saved me so much listing and shipping time.

All this stuff is out in the world, giving more joy than it could possibly have given to me alone, even if I'd liked more of it.

How did you get from two bins under the bed to the four dolls and three pets in the photo?

So I got to the end of the big room-clearing. I could, at that point, have called it done, left the dolls under the bed for later, and moved on with life.

However, I decided I needed to tackle whether I was even going to do dolls any more. So I pulled out the bins and asked myself what I'd consider a comfortable, non-stressful amount to keep. The number 20 popped into my head. I don't recall whether that total was meant to include 4" dolls or not -- I've gone back and forth on that -- but 20 was a good number.

I culled down to 20 with surprisingly little difficulty. For the most part, I don't remember what I got rid of, so I guess I wasn't all that committed to my own collection by then!

The deal was that those 20 went on shelves for display. If I didn't engage with a doll over a reasonable period of time, it would leave. If I wanted to buy something new, something old had to leave.

Within a couple months of my buying Simply Fresh Kylie, virtually all of the retained 20 had left, in favor of dolls I was finding more interesting to acquire, restore, or customize.

The survivors are:

Fashionista Teresa, who I'd found at a thrift store and given to Mom for a birthday.

Manbun Ken, my grail doll from the TRU going-out-of-business sale.

Articulated Kelly, who was a long-time grail doll from Mom's collection and makes a good body comparison doll. I'd originally intended to trade her in for a different doll from the same line, but she grew on me.

Scarlet the Sparkle Girlz Mini, who I bought in Connecticut.

Vinyl dog and white tiger from Mom's collection, because they're cute.

Felted dog from Target because I was totally taken with those when I bought it.

What I learned was that I'm happiest with a leaner, more focused collection, where I have space and time to make clothes and furniture for them.

A later recap will discuss the dolls I've bought this year, which was definitely a pace I won't be keeping up in future years!

[desertdollranch]

Grannie brought her rabbits out to the garden for some fresh air and bunshine. They agreed that the dandelions were delicious, but the lilacs were only good to look at. Grannie is so proud of her garden--look at the lilac bush overflowing with flowers!

[queen-scribbles]

7, 21, and 29 for the weird asks!

7. hair-ties or scrunchies?

When I had longer hair, I usually went for scrunchies, bc it's really thick and hairbands were too tight, made my up-dos give me headaches. Now it's too short for anything like that.

21. something you’ve kept since childhood?

I still have several toys from when I was a kid, including a v ragged baby doll, three stuffed bears, one of those [Name]'s Critter toys(missing her ears, the dog got her T_T), some of my Barbies, and two of my American Girl dolls date back to when I was was 8 or 9 (Josefina and Felicity. I was obsessed with Colonial Williamsburg™ as a kid and I thought Josefina was so pretty when they added her) My AG Samantha is also still around, but I gave her to my sister, so she's not "mine" anymore. Depending on what's considered childhood, I have a My Twinn doll I got when I was 11-12, I still have her too.

29. how do you like your shower water?

Make-Me-A-Lobster hot, most of the time, though on occasion I will do just warm enough to be tolerable

Weirder Asks

[isfjmel-phleg]

It's fun for me to see this one come around again because this chart originally comes from the order form of the My Twinn doll catalog, circa 1998!

Natural Eye Color Chart

[treecakes]

ONLY $39.88 for a haunted american girl my twinn doll?

[blackdollenthusiast]

My Twinn Dolls

Name: My Twinn Made by and When: My Twinn, copyright 1994-2003 Material: Vinyl heads, lower arms and legs from the knees down, and vinyl feet; stuffed cloth bodies with armature for posing and jointed ankles Marks: Note that some of the heads have a copyright year, but the body tag (if present) is a better indicator of the year made and whether it is a Denver-made or China-made My Twinn doll.…

[sugarbear2001]

[littleberrybat]

I saw some questions in the notes about whether the color chart is scientific and some concers about it being based of off a white supremacy graphic ranking eye color so I did some research, and it's just a doll's eye color chart lmao. Still a fun poll question imo, but yeah don't take it too seriously.

The chart is from My Twinn doll. Pictures from the 1996, 1998, and 1999 catalogs for reference

Anon said: This one may be stupid but mine color change so I never know

Feel free to tag your eye colour!