Total Pageviews

VISITORS MAP

VISITORS FLAGS

free counters

REBORN DOLL KITS ONLINE FACEBOOK PAGE

Wit & Whimzy Reborn Nursery Zazzle.com Store.


View more gifts at Zazzle.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

INSTRUCTIONS - HOW TO CARE FOR A REBORN DOLL

How to care for a Reborn Doll

Reborn Dolls are a special type of collectible doll.  Makers of these dolls  use to take old baby dolls , and remove any paint or hair, then they would be reborned.   Today  in the practice of reborning, a new kit is used, which  some tend  to call  Newborning.  Reborning/Newborning means  to take a  new vinyl doll kit and make  that kit  looks nearly life-like.

The realism that some artist are able to obtain is totally amazing!  Most kit costs  are in the range of  $100.00 each,  which makes this a very expensive art.   Some kits  have been know to sell for for a considerable amount more.

Blushing and  molting painting techniques and mohair give the doll it's realistic look, and  once they are completed and  ready  for  sale they can cost up to $4,000 per doll.  Once you have a doll this attractive and valuable you are going to need to  take care of it to maintain it's delicate beauty.  These  are collectible dolls, and are not intended for  children.


                                            Instructions... Things You'll Need
  • Soft Cloth
  • Comb
  • Soft Infant Brush
  • Non-toxic soap
  • Cotton swabs
1.  Cleaning Your Doll Remove clothing from the doll gently. Take care when moving and cleaning the doll to prevent damage. Wash clothing on the gentle cycle of your washing machine and  Dry clothing  thoroughly before redressing your doll.

2.  Wash the skin carefully with non-toxic soap and cotton swabs. Moisten one end of the cotton swab and use it to gently wipe crevices and behind the ears. Use the dry end of the cotton swab to wipe away any water. Wipe the larger areas with a baby wipe or a soft cloth to clean away any dust and dirt.

3.  Brush hair with the soft infant brush to remove any dust.  Gently comb the hair, then after the doll is properly covered.   you may use a small amount of  leave-in conditioner,  making sure to wipe off any excess conditioner with your soft cloth to prevent seepage into the body or damage to the bare skin of the doll.  Do not pull the hair as it has been hand-rooted and secured by a  sealant on the inside of the head.

4.  Replace clothing once dried, being careful of the joints.  Make sure that the clothing  dyes do not run, as this will cause damage to the vinyl of the doll.  Arrange the cleaned doll in its display area, being careful to not put the joints in stressful positions that can cause damage.   All that is left to do now ...is enjoy!

ARTICLE - REBORNS - HOW ADOLLABLE!

Reborns - How Adollable!

When I say the word reborn, most people raise a brow. They look completely perplexed. According to recent articles such as "Dr. Phil Explores Reborn Dolls, Reborners and Other Obsessions," sales on reborn dolls have gone up drastically since they were first discovered in the early 1990's. However, after asking numerous people if they knew what a reborn doll was, most said they had no idea. So, what is a reborn doll, how does an artist create them, and who buys them?
Certainly these dolls are becoming increasingly popular, but some people still have not heard of them. For those who have not, a reborn is a doll that an artist strips of all its factory paint and then repaints to look as much like a real baby as possible. Many have veins, capillaries, birthmarks, milk bumps, and some even have baby scratches. Most artists will micro-root the doll's hair. This is a long process of inserting one to two hairs into the scalp at a time. The artist then seals the hair on the inside of the doll's head. Once the baby is complete, it will then have its head, body and limbs weighted with glass beads and will finally be assembled finally becoming what most refer to as a reborn doll.
Another technique, usually called newborning but many use interchangeably with reborning, is where the artist takes a blank kit, and then adds several layers of translucent paint in order to make it look as much like a real baby as possible. An artist can find these kits at several websites online. The artist creates this doll in the same way as the doll previously mentioned but without having to prepare the vinyl surface first. This makes it easier to reborn and adds more realism due to the amazing sculpts that are now available.
In addition to the vinyl reborn dolls, there are also silicone reborn dolls. These are far more realistic than their vinyl counter parts. Usually, they are made of platinum baby soft silicone, which feels as close to human skin as you can get artificially. Because silicone babies are made of this soft, high-quality material, they are very flexible. This is far different from vinyl dolls. Silicone dolls have movable fingers, toes, and mouths. However, a vinyl doll is harder to the touch and does not have flexible parts. Most buyers think about price as well as quality and realism when adopting one of these babies and therefore, the vinyl dolls usually have more sales due to their lower cost.
Typically those who purchase these precious dolls are women and for a variety of reasons. Some are doll collectors while others may have emotional problems due to the loss of a child or the inability to conceive. These type of dolls offer comfort and can help these women heal emotionally.
Of the women who buy these babies, most will notice a wide range of prices in the reborn world. These prices vary from $100.00 to over $2,000. Amazingly enough, I had previously seen one go for $22,600.00 on eBay. That is a lot of money for a doll, but if the artist is good enough, it can be worth it to the buyer.
Alas, reborn dolls are wonderful creations, made by very skilled artists who add several layers of paint in order to make these baby dolls come to life, so to speak. Numerous sites offer these life-like dolls and for a wide range of prices. Finally, the purchase of one of these bundles of joy can add to a collection for some people while filling a void in the hearts of others.
http://adollablenursery.yolasite.com/
Beth R. Brookes
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Beth_R_Brookes

Saturday, May 12, 2012

ARTICLE - REBORN DOLL ARTIST CREATES LIFELIKE FIGURINES

May. 12, 2012 1:01 AM ET
'Reborn' doll artist creates lifelike figurines
By JESSICA LARSEN, La Crosse Tribune
La Crosse Tribune


(AP) — Connor Olson knows the tales about storks dropping off babies to loving parents.
But for the 19-year-old La Crosse woman, the postal worker plays the part of the stork.
Her bundles of joy come to her in pieces. She then paints and puts them together. Olson is a reborn doll artist. She's been doing it for five years.
Reborn dolls are life-like figurines tailor made to look so lifelike that many people can't the difference between real babies and the dolls, even from a few feet away.
"The only difference," Olson says, "is they never grow up, or outgrow their clothes or spit up."
Reborns are often collected as art. Sometimes, young women get them if they want a baby but know they can't afford a real one quite yet. What makes them somewhat controversial, though, is that some people use the dolls to fill the void of a lost baby or pretend it's real, talking to it and taking it out in public. It's an unusual subculture, to say the least.
Amber Wall is a Massachusetts collector who owns three of Olson's reborns: two toddlers named Britton and Bradyn and a newborn, Corbin. She bought them through an Internet business Olson runs to market her dolls.
Wall always takes a new reborn out on the town when it arrives in the mail. They don't go everywhere with her, but if she's sitting at home bored, she'll take one out for a walk.
There's just something about them, Wall said. And on a basic level, the dolls are works of art. She was captured by Olson's paint work.
"And it's cool how young she is," Wall said. "She's outgoing and very passionate with what she does. She puts in so much, and how she talks about them, you know she loves it."
For Olson, the hours spent crafting the babies are an artistic process. Forty hours to blush and shade the limbs, paint the lips and add creases and veins to the skin. Thirty hours to root the hair, one strand at a time.
She runs the Internet business, selling the dolls to moms across the world. She orders the body parts online, and can make reborns to look similar to baby photos provided by the customer.
"I enjoy watching the process from start to finish," she said. "It's so special."
Her obsession with reborns sparked at 10 years old when she was searching the Internet for dolls. Up popped a reborn.
Olson was taken with the realism, the detail. She had to have it.
Like many drawn to the dolls, she became consumed with them from that point, researching how to make them and examining photos of real babies for mental note. Even while babysitting, she paid close attention to the veins and skin color of the youngsters.
Olson has been making dolls since she was a girl.
Olson removed the paint from one of her regular dolls at home one night when she was 11, applying her own coloring. She gave it a wig and showed her mom.
"My goodness," Pam Olson remembers saying. "You did it. It turned out fine."
Olson's self-taught skill only grew as she got older.
"I'm just amazed sometimes how much they look like a real baby," she said.
The process of making one is, of course, much different from how real babies are made.
Olson reaches her hand up through the hollow head and pushes in the eyes through the sockets. She adds a magnet on the mouth to hold the pacifier in place and a hair bow for decoration. She fills the body with poly pellets and adds a baby powder scent.
Olson sets up shop at her grandmother's house. Doll parts have taken over the spare bedroom.
A four-drawer cabinet holds an empty body, plastic bags of hair and a measuring tape. A laundry basket keeps the clothes, spare limbs and heads. In the closet, filling for the bodies, spare eyes, a hot-glue gun and extra arms and legs.
Finally, she twists the limbs onto the body, and measures and weighs the reborn.
Next, she picks a name.
The final test comes when Olson takes the baby to a store. If someone ohs and ahs over the doll, it's a success.
She gently wraps it up and tucks the doll into a box to be shipped, adding a blanket, brush and a few outfits.
It's a full-time job for the high school senior. She works on the reborns during the day and takes online classes by night.
"I've always had a passion for babies," Olson said. "They're a priority."
Olson doesn't have any children yet — she's not ready for the real thing — but plans to have up to three later on.
Until then, she'll watch over her four personal reborns, and pass the love of them to others with each doll she makes.
"It's like an art form," Olson said, slowly pulling a tiny brush with blue paint across a doll head to form a vein. "It starts as blank canvas."

ARTICLE - THE COST OF MAKING REBORN DOLLS

ORIGINAL ARTICLE CAN BE FOUND HERE

The cost of making Reborn Dolls

Sunday, May 6, 2012

ARTICLE - MAKING BABIES : 'REBORN' DOLL ARTIST CREATES LIFELIKEDOLLS

Making babies: ‘Reborn’ doll artist creates lifelike dolls


 

Posted: Monday, May 7, 2012


Connor Olson knows the tales about storks dropping off babies to loving parents.
But for the 19-year-old La Crosse woman, the postal worker plays the part of the stork.
Her bundles of joy come to her in pieces. She then paints and puts them together. Olson is a reborn doll artist. She’s been doing it for five years.
Reborn dolls are life-like figurines tailor made to look so lifelike that many people can’t the difference between real babies and the dolls, even from a few feet away.
“The only difference,” Olson says, “is they never grow up, or outgrow their clothes or spit up.”
Reborns are often collected as art. Sometimes, young women get them if they want a baby but know they can’t afford a real one quite yet. What makes them somewhat controversial, though, is that some people use the dolls to fill the void of a lost baby or pretend it’s real, talking to it and taking it out in public. It’s an unusual subculture, to say the least.
Amber Wall is a Massachusetts collector who owns three of Olson’s reborns: two toddlers named Britton and Bradyn and a newborn, Corbin. She bought them through an Internet business Olson runs to market her dolls.
Wall always takes a new reborn out on the town when it arrives in the mail. They don’t go everywhere with her, but if she’s sitting at home bored, she’ll take one out for a walk.
There’s just something about them, Wall said. And on a basic level, the dolls are works of art. She was captured by Olson’s paint work.
“And it’s cool how young she is,” Wall said. “She’s outgoing and very passionate with what she does. She puts in so much, and how she talks about them, you know she loves it.”
For Olson, the hours spent crafting the babies are an artistic process. Forty hours to blush and shade the limbs, paint the lips and add creases and veins to the skin. Thirty hours to root the hair, one strand at a time.
She runs the Internet business, selling the dolls to moms across the world. She orders the body parts online, and can make reborns to look similar to baby photos provided by the customer.
“I enjoy watching the process from start to finish,” she said. “It’s so special.”
Her obsession with reborns sparked at 10 years old when she was searching the Internet for dolls. Up popped a reborn.
Olson was taken with the realism, the detail. She had to have it.
Like many drawn to the dolls, she became consumed with them from that point, researching how to make them and examining photos of real babies for mental note. Even while babysitting, she paid close attention to the veins and skin color of the youngsters.
Olson has been making dolls since she was a girl.
Olson removed the paint from one of her regular dolls at home one night when she was 11, applying her own coloring. She gave it a wig and showed her mom.
“My goodness,” Pam Olson remembers saying. “You did it. It turned out fine.”
Olson’s self-taught skill only grew as she got older.
“I’m just amazed sometimes how much they look like a real baby,” she said.
The process of making one is, of course, much different from how real babies are made.
Olson reaches her hand up through the hollow head and pushes in the eyes through the sockets. She adds a magnet on the mouth to hold the pacifier in place and a hair bow for decoration. She fills the body with poly pellets and adds a baby powder scent.
Olson sets up shop at her grandmother’s house. Doll parts have taken over the spare bedroom.
A four-drawer cabinet holds an empty body, plastic bags of hair and a measuring tape. A laundry basket keeps the clothes, spare limbs and heads. In the closet, filling for the bodies, spare eyes, a hot-glue gun and extra arms and legs.
Finally, she twists the limbs onto the body, and measures and weighs the reborn.
Next, she picks a name.
The final test comes when Olson takes the baby to a store. If someone ohs and ahs over the doll, it’s a success.
She gently wraps it up and tucks the doll into a box to be shipped, adding a blanket, brush and a few outfits.
It’s a full-time job for the high school senior. She works on the reborns during the day and takes online classes by night.
“I’ve always had a passion for babies,” Olson said. “They’re a priority.”
Olson doesn’t have any children yet — she’s not ready for the real thing — but plans to have up to three later on.
Until then, she’ll watch over her four personal reborns, and pass the love of them to others with each doll she makes.
“It’s like an art form,” Olson said, slowly pulling a tiny brush with blue paint across a doll head to form a vein. “It starts as blank canvas.”



Thursday, May 3, 2012

ARTICLE - TOUGH CHILDS PLAY

Tough child’s play

 

04 May, 2012 04:00 AM
A group of students at Duval High School have had their eyes opened to the gritty reality of teenage parenthood through a course featuring lifelike baby dolls. Year 12 student Georgia-May Dunlop was stunned and upset by the stares and negative comments she attracted when she ventured out in public with the robotic doll.
“It’s challenging because I had to change her nappy in a carpark and was getting death stares from people,” she said.
“One woman was walking past me and whispered ‘slut’ as she went past, she didn’t even check to see if it was real.
“It upset me that they didn’t even know and I found it really judgmental, because even if it was a real baby, it’s still not fair.”
Fellow class member Maddie Horneyman said she found it interesting to gain an insight into stigma experienced by teenage parents.
“It’s really good to see the social reactions because when she’s wrapped up and you’re holding her, people don’t know that it’s a school project so you get called these names walking down the street or you get glares from people,” Maddie said.
“I had a few people talk to my parents when I had her. They saw me downtown with her and they went and spoke to my parents and said that I needed to be kept under control, that I had behavioural issues and should see go see counselling and that they’re bad parents and that kind of thing.”
Teacher Jenine Russoniello said students in her community and family studies class each take care of the doll for three nights and also bring it to school or organise babysitting.
“It’s meant to be like a real-life situation,” she said.
The doll, which weighs the same as an average newborn baby, needs regular feeding, nappy changes, burping and general attention.
Georgia-May said she found caring for the doll also provided her with a good educational experience into the practical side of parenting.
“I woke up six times last night, which was not fun and I guess the effect of that on my schoolwork is that I can’t concentrate and I get short with people because I’m tired,” she said.

Tuesday, May 1, 2012

ARTICLE - MOMS NURTURE FAKE BABIES

Moms Nurture Fake Babies

Courtesy of BreakPoint Online
with Charles Colson
 
CBN.comNowadays, calling yourself a “born again Christian” might elicit disapproving looks and maybe even some snide comments.
But there is an area where being “reborn” is a good thing. I’m not talking about Eastern religions—I’m talking about dolls.
The dolls in question are “incredibly life-like baby dolls” known as “reborns” that can cost as much as $4,000. As you have probably guessed, at these prices, the buyers aren’t young girls, but adult women.

For that much money you are not getting a simple piece of plastic. “Their bodies are stuffed and weighted to have the same heft and a similar feel to a live baby.” Mohair strands are individually attached to their heads, and they can even come with a “heartbeat and a device that makes the chest rise and fall to simulate breathing.”
Given the attention to detail, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many owners do not treat “reborns” like other collectibles such as the Precious Moments figurines or dashboard hula dancers.
A recent BBC America documentary called My Fake Baby showed grown women doing more than playing with the dolls—they were, well, mothering them. They walked them in strollers, they secured them in car seats, and they even had “birthday” parties for them.
Sound familiar? It should. In her novel The Children of Men, P.D. James depicted a world in which no children had been born in two decades. The inability to have children had driven many women to treat dolls in exactly the same fashion as these women are treating “reborns.”
Of course, there are differences. While childlessness had driven the women in James’s novel mad, the “reborn” mommies can—and some do—have real children.
The words most commonly used to describe this phenomenon are “creepy” and “delusional.” One liberal blogger wondered whether she was “supposed to play along with your weird delusion?” After all, “you can drop her down a flight of stairs . . . and no one will call children’s services on you.”
Writer Rod Dreher is even less sympathetic. He calls these women “drag mommies” and says that something is “very wrong with them.”
Well, I have no idea what is going on in the hearts and minds of women who purchase reborns. But I will say this: There is indeed something “very wrong” with the culture that produces these dolls. Four years ago, I told you about dolls marketed to lonely Japanese elderly. The Yumel are “healing partners” designed to fill a void created by children that rarely visit and grandchildren they will never have, thanks to Japan’s disappearing birth rate.
Likewise, “reborns” are filling a void created by changes in the family structure. The so-called “freedom” we gained by postponing and even forgoing marriage and child-rearing has come at a price—loneliness and the sense that our lives are incomplete.
This isn’t something that can be overcome by conditioning. We are “wired for connection” as one study put it. If the God-ordained means for this connection is tampered with or blocked, that is, by having no children or fewer children as Americans are doing, we will find ways to act on our “wiring,” no matter how creepy they seem to others.