My Odd Little Hobby

I still play with dolls, and no, not the ones that Sweetpea has. These are dolls I started collecting and customizing ten years ago. While I don’t get to enjoy my hobby as much now that I have a family, I do like to dust it off and go to meetups from time to time.

Raise your hand if you have heard of Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls… Yeah, I thought so.

Okay, first things first, these dolls aren’t like Barbie or Tonner dolls, although they are collectable. Another key difference is that they have ball-joints and elastic cords on the inside for tension and strength to hold poses.

Asian Ball-Jointed Dolls are highly customizable. Their heads are hollow so you can switch out their eyes, which can be made from acrylic, glass, or urethane. They are also bald, so wigs are a must (and there are more styles and colors made than you can possibly imagine).

If you want to check them out and do some research, I’d recommend starting on the Den of Angeles forums.. You might need to register, so here’s some company sites where you can check them out with ease:

Volks USA
Luts
Fairyland
Soom

There are waaaay more companies than these that make the dolls, but these are some of the larger ones. (When you look at the price tags on some of these dolls, I wonder what you’re going to think.)

I enjoy my little hobby (although I haven’t bought anything in a long time) because I can make the dolls into any character I want them to be. Their faces are blank until you paint them (called a faceup), although I recommend commissioning someone to do it unless you have some awesome eye-hand coordination and good eyesight. The dollheads are fairly small, so there’s not a lot of landscape for artistic endeavors. The dolls also range in various heights, from just a few inches tall to well over two feet tall. My dolls are all the same height, 60 to 62 cm.

I’m primarily drawn to the creativity aspect of the dolls. They were one of the ways I got back into writing. I used to write a lot of stories about the characters they represented (back when I was in my anime-manga phase. I do have a BA in Asian Studies after all.) Hmmm, maybe I should dust those stories off and see if any of them are worth anything. Probably not, but I did have a great time writing them, and it was great practice to get me to where I am today.

Sorry for the odd Friday post, but I did want to share a bit about me, not just my WIP. There’s more to me than just being a stressed out writing with not enough free time. Sometimes I think that all I do is complain about the messy middle of The Dreamless City and worry that it will never see the light of day. Yeah, it keeps me awake at night (and so does the baby).

Hope you didn’t mind the geek post. Any questions or comments, feel free to share. ;). And of course, I’d love to hear what kinds of geeky hobbies other people enjoy that I might not have heard of before.