In early December I received an Ever After Doll and learned about glue seepage.

In some dolls there’s some sort of chemical reaction between the hair/head/glue used (often excessively used) and the doll continues to sweat greasy glue runoff out of her hair plugs. This all happens in the manufacturing process. There are online discussions about what dolls seem to be more affected by it, theories about if a specific factory in Indonesia is to blame for a portion of it, and a lot of tips for fixing it…none of which worked for me so I removed all the glue and hair from my doll.

Since then I’ve seen some baggie dolls at Hobby Off in Kashiwa that have stickers warning customers that the hair of the doll within has “styling wax” in its hair. Nope, Hobby Off, them dolls have seepage. Styling wax is something you can wash away. I know the dolls have seepage because I bought one knowing full well I’d be removing all the hair. I was not wrong.

And, hey, Hobby Off, why didn’t you mention that the Living Dead Doll I bought was infused with nicotine stank?

Back to Wednesday, who has taken more time than I anticipated.

My first mistake, as seen above, is that I forgot to paint the area of the doll the hair was being put into. I caught it midway up and painted the rest  and then tried to stain the rooted area with permanent marker…more on that later.

My second mistake was to not worry about how tight together the holes on the hair part were. All the squeezing and contorting of the doll to get all the hair and glue out weakened this already vulnerable area. When I started rooting in the area,  5mm of head/part ripped clear in two. Had I taken a few days to fortify the inside and outside of the holes with Liquid Fusion this probably wouldn’t have happened. As it was I had to do that in mid-rooting. I probably didn’t apply enough in thin layers on top…for fear of getting the Liquid Fusion in the rooted hair…so I had some additional rips later I had to stop and tend to.

I thought I was finished so I glued the inside of the head and let it dry…only to learn my third mistake.

Wednesday has two braids.

To get her part correct, the tight partline needs to continue to the nape of her neck. The picture above and on the right sort of shows that the hairline ends at where the paint ends and then the hair beyond that just hangs straight down. That’s fine if your doll has her hair parted up top only.

I had to fix that with more rooting…and permenant marker because ALL gaps in the black near the hair root SHOWED at the partline.

This is where I am right now. I’ll leave it a few days to make sure the glue has fully cured.

I also regret mixing a little bit of dark brown in the black hair. It wasn’t a bad idea but I didn’t work hard enough mixing it to prevent brown streaks. I wanted more color depth and just got…Meh.

However, I was looking for a deep purple/black hair for a different project, the sort of hair you see in comics where it’s mostly black but highlighted areas show color. I couldn’t find any in Japan and Etsy shipping is costly so I hand mixed pre-existing black/ the leftover purple/red from Starfire 1, and some newly purchased blue.

And that’s the hair rooting update. I hope you’ve gained from it.

Goodness knows my Roomba has gained much from the process.