tsubasahome

I finished rerooting my Ghoulia and set her hair today. Her hair's not dry, but here are my latest comments on the Restoredoll Nylatex hair.

Pros:
It's pretty.
It comes in a variety of colors not available in saran(dark pine green, aqua, eggplant purple, etc)
It's easier to work with than nylon using the needle-knot method, ie: it doesn't try to untie itself unless you make the plugs very big.
It's really, really, really cheap. Alarmingly cheap. One $5 package was more than enough to reroot my Ghoulia.
Doesn't stain as far as I can see.

Cons:
It's not as easy to style as nylon. If you use water that's too hot(as in boiling) it will damage the coating on the hair. I had to boil water, let it sit for several minutes, and pour it over the head to set it. If you treat it like saran you will ruin it. It's best treated as kanekalon.
It looks better than it feels, the texture is a bit stiff. However, it does feel nicer than most MH dolls' default hair, and it feels nicer than the drier colors of saran, like Pinky Pinky and Nitro Lime.
It's slightly prone to tangling in the package, and the hank of hair is a little big for the package, so it's kind of messy to take out and put back.

Would I use it instead of saran? Not if I had a choice. However, it's a great buy and I don't regret having tried it. At least not yet. ^^;;

I've thrown my hands up and given up on using a rooting thread. It's too much of a pain. I wonder if the problem I've been having with glue coming out of the rooting holes when I have no choice but to glue my knots(like when I'm using nylon) would be remedied if I used a glue not soluble in water, as it seeps out during the setting process.

I've started rerooting a formerly junk Ghoulia with the Nylatex Fantasy Forest Green hair. The hair seems colorfast, it's a little stiff out of the package but oddly seems to soften up as you work with it. I still think it feels like Pullip hair. It's not bad hair. Costs half as much as saran and it comes in dark green. I think the hair itself is prettier than DH nylon--the luster is more subdued than the super shiny fake luster the DH nylon has. Fantasy Forest Green is not a matte color, I wonder if any of the colors are matte(I generally don't care for matte/milky colors).

I was reading some patent information on a "new" type of doll hair(I think the patent was abandoned) and it's interesting what the industry refers to as "bad" qualities of certain fibers. Too fine, too shiny, doesn't flow together on the head, bad curl memory...I had always preferred doll hair that wasn't super shiny like nylon because I think it looks more natural and apparently excessive amounts of shine is caused by the hair only reflecting light in one direction and is considered a flaw. And apparently, none of the existing types of hair pass the curl memory test!

It also cast some light on why saran is/was used on so many dolls. I read somewhere that it's because it's cheap, in reality saran is widely used because of its superior fire resistance, making it safer for children's toys. Of course, it will burn, but the idea is that removing the source of fire will cause the hair to stop burning. They have saran listed with a flame resistance similar to that of wool. Nylon, on the other hand, is allegedly as flammable as cotton. I've never tried burning either, but it's interesting to read. I read all this in various patent documentation, searching for the fiber composition of the mysterious Pilot hair(the answer is "none of the above")

I think Nylatex is nylon coated with another material(probably latex) to make it waterproof.

I wonder if the safety standards for kids' toys has been lowered these days?

In the wake of all my commissions, I decided to take the plunge and order myself a package of Restoredoll Nylatex hair in Fantasy Forest Green. I had asked Kathy about how it is to work with compared to saran, and she said it can't withstand heat as much, so I guess I will be steam setting it as well as boiling it... The hair costs about $5 an order, and each order is one XL skein. So it costs around half as much as saran...? It does look like a lot of hair.

Naturally, as soon as it arrived, I had to cut it open and have a look. It's...pretty. Sparkly as opposed to shiny like DH nylon(which I am not using anymore, as Black Magick turned a commissioned doll head chartreuse in spite of its supposed colorfastness and I hate working with it as it is) The texture is a bit stiff but this is good for us needle/knotters out there...it's easier to work with than nylon as it doesn't untie itself when you knot it if you keep the plugs a reasonable size. It feels like it would probably burn so I will be careful when I set the hair. I can't see it replacing saran as my mainstay but it comes in dark green and saran doesn't.

Oddly enough, Nylatex feels a lot like the hair used on Pullips, at least the ones I used to have(Xiao Fan, Nero, and Principessa).

I've been finishing up a lot of commissions lately, and I recently put the finishing touches on a Roller Maze Ghoulia I rerooted with hair in all shades of pink, purple and white. I'm waiting for some more commissions to show up, but in the meantime I'm rerooting a Dead Tired Ghoulia I had originally planned on customizing and selling on Etsy with black hair in the first step of her transformation into Marceline from Adventure Time. ^^;;;;; Obviously, in the show Marceline just has black dots for eyes, but I'm going to give her red eyes like the original artist's more realistic drawing of Marceline. I was originally going to give her silver lips but I think I will have them done in red instead, as the drawing had red lips and red eyeliner in addition to red eyes. 0_0

I've been watching a lot of streaming anime these days. I can't believe I actually sat through all of Guilty Crown. That show is complete garbage! After a while Lauren and I were just watching it to make fun of it. The only character I even remotely found interesting was only in the show for about ten minutes, and then was unceremoniously dispatched in the last episode. The rest of the show was garbage, and the lead couple made me sick. They could have at least had Inori's dubbed singing voice sound remotely like her speaking voice. Like we're supposed to believe this girl with her brain-dead baby voice has this husky singing voice...I don't even know why she was a singer, anyway. Nothing in the show made any sense.

I also watched all of Tiger and Bunny, which I enjoyed quite a bit in spite of my intense dislike of Barnaby. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but hey, I just watched Guilty Crown!

Just in case anybody needed to contact me for any reason(not that I can really think of any) I just wanted to let you all know that due to Hurricane Sandy, I'm likely to be missing from LJ, and the internet in general, for the foreseeable future. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I will not lose any piece of my house, or be without power for longer than with that October blizzard last year, but who knows? According to pretty much every media outlet, we're going to die.

I'm busy trying to cobble together an Etsy Shop. I'll post the link once I get my first item ready. Stay tuned!

...of opening up an Etsy shop to sell some rerooted Monster High dolls.

At this point, I have a 1.0 Abbey, 1.0 Spectra, and possibly Classrooms Lagoona and Skull Shores Frankie at my disposal. I don't have hair for any of them, so this is something that's going to have to be in the future...but I wonder if I would have better luck trying Etsy than eBay.

After all, a lot of people sell custom MH dolls, but I'm not seeing a lot of reroots.

Well, yesterday was...interesting. With the MOD risk and 10% tornado from the SPC. I haven't seen anything that awful around here for at least two years, and I hadn't even seen it coming. ...we didn't get much of anything, while just to the west of us in Fairfield County got like five tornado warnings. =_=;;;;; The storms passed just to the north of us and we just got some showers and the dying remnants of a squall line that didn't even produce any lightning.

Every time I think I've seen everything, something like this comes up. They'll MOD risk us for just about anything now! This was almost as bad as last July where they said they'd put us under HIGH risk for what amounted to sub-severe storms! The only result is us having a lot more gray hair!