Missy Diggs

It started like this: the Vivid Girl used her allowance to buy a Barbie at the thrift store, and when she got her home she realized that some other kid had already given Barbie a haircut, and she didn’t like it.

Or maybe it started like this: I got diagnosed with cancer, and when I started chemo I decided that, rather than wait for my hair to start falling out I would just shave it all off right away, and the Vivid Girl very bravely helped with the shaving. We kept my hair in a plastic bowl, just knowing it would come in handy some day.

Well, anyway, no matter how it got started, when these two events combined in my brain I knew there was only one thing to do. So I turned to the Internet, of course, and within 20 minutes I knew almost everything I needed to know about how to get Barbie’s bad hair off her head and put my good hair onto it.

The first thing you have to do is crop Barbie’s head close to the scalp, taking care not to nip or scar the vinyl while you’re doing it.

Here’s what Barbie looked like at that point:

Oops, but I forgot to mention, after you cut the hair really short you have to take the head off. Now, with today’s Barbies, who have swivelly necks, this is not as easy as it used to be. Also, even in the old days Barbie’s head would sometimes tear a bit if you popped it off too often or with too much force. But I learned this handy trick on the Internet: submerge Barbie, head first, into boiling water. This will soften up the vinyl and make the head pop right off.

All right, so once the hair is short and the head is off, there are a few way to proceed. I chose to use a teeny tiny crochet hook to scrape the inside of Barbie’s head to get all the hair out. It came out in clumps of red fuzzy knots.

Once the hair was all out, I followed the instructions in this amazing animated how-to to put the new hair in:

http://www.modcolors.com/modbarbiecare/reroot3.htm

I am under the impression that this may not be the “best” way to re-root Barbie hair, but it was definitely the best how-to I found, and I decided to follow the directions I could actually understand. Here is Barbie with her first lock of my old hair:

It took a couple of weeks (and many episodes of Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix) but Barbie finally has a whole new (to her) head of hair:

I put Barbie’s head back on for pictures, but now I have to plunge her back into the boiling water so I can take her head off again so I can apply glue inside to make sure the hair stays where I so painstakingly put it. According to the Internet, the best glue to use is Gem-Tac, but second choice is E6000, and I actually have that (I think) so that’s what I’m planning to use. We’ll see what a dunk in hot water does to her crazy hairstyle. I actually think the hair is so big and bushy because I put too much hair in each hole. I’m going to try to do some styling, and possibly cutting, to see if I can get it to look more like regular Barbie hair. There may be a trip to Sally Beauty Supply for “setting lotion” and other old school styling aids in my future.

I’ll keep you posted.

But now you know what I’ve been doing with myself during my most recent down time. I was working on Barbie’s head when the Vivid Girl did her play therapy last week, and the counselor thought it would be a great idea to make dolls using the hair of kids who have to cut off their hair during cancer treatment. I definitely have to think about the best way to do it. I think it might have to be a mail-order service, because I would hate to think of parents having to spend their time working on such a tedious project. But maybe something where the family sends in the kid’s hair and specifies some preferences on the type of doll, and then crafty volunteers use the kid’s hair to re-root the doll’s head? I would have to get better at it before I would be comfortable offering my services, but it’s worth thinking about. As my Internet research shows, there are plenty of people out there who know how to do this. I certainly never thought I would be one of them!

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 10:26 am and is filed under Day to Day, Living With Cancer, My Crafty Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.