Chelsea's Collector Cottage exclusive Avantguard doll "Attention!" arrived yesterday. She looks exactly like the promotional pictures. The dress is cute.
Her facial screening is immaculate and I love the colors.
The shoes are cute.
The feather hat sheds on everything. (She reminds me of the Statue of Liberty in this picture.)
The wig is not made properly and the stockings had defects in them from where she was tied to the box.
I don't feel the WOW factor with this doll. Something is missing. I think this dress should have been an individually available fashion, not something for a $250. exclusive doll. It's not enough. The earrings are such a waste of time I didn't even bother. Every pair of earrings one inserts into an Avantguard head has to be snipped shorter and after I struggled to get the wig on (sort of) I wasn't about to knock it off to put two little studs into her ears.
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Every now and then I'll be playing with a doll or photographing one and I begin to wonder why I am collecting dolls. It happened today. It wasn't just about one doll, it was the cumulative effect of poor engineering and/or design of certain aspects of three of my new dolls. Why do I continue to spend hundreds of dollars on dolls whose stands don't support? In two cases, the stand didn't even fit between the doll's legs because the dress was slim-fitting. You can't tell me that this fact is not known by the designers. What do they do, shrug it off? While it's true that I don't use stands when I am photographing my dolls, I do use them to display my dolls.Tonner's saddle stand and Integrity's Avantguard stand add a good amount of thickness to that area of the doll supported by the stand, namely the crotch and the butt. It used to be that one could hide the ugly plastic of a stand when the doll was wearing a gown or a skirt. Now that many of the styles have become short and tight that doesn't work anymore.
Robert Tonner may have been on the right track with the stand that inserted into the crotch area - at least for some dolls.
