It all started when Mom ordered a CYO pale Addy-mold doll in September (knowing that she wanted to remove the wig and use a non-American Girl wig that we had here). We looked at the available options and decided to order the "black, medium curly with bangs" wig on the CYO doll, because that was a style we all liked, and we wanted to have some options in black. Elizabeth was thinking of trying it on a Jess-mold doll that she's been working on for over a year, and if it didn't work for her it could always go on a number of other medium and dark dolls sitting here waiting for new hair.
The CYO doll arrived, and it wasn't twenty-four hours before I had the wig off and ready for some customizing. It was a cute wig (but not particularly great on the Addy-mold as it had been glued very high on the forehead). We brought down several dolls to try the wig on and planned on taking some photos for the Customizing with Wigs page. Elizabeth brought down her bald Jess-mold doll -- and the wig looked cute on her. Then, we tried it on a pale Sonali (also really cute). Next, we decided to try it on Mom's doll, Toni (a customized Nanea). Wow. It was adorable! In fact, it was amazing. It looked exactly like January Lotus, and Nanea had been sort of wishing for a "trim" for a little while. (She gets dragged around a lot and photographed, and her long hair did get in the way sometimes.) Still, I wasn't ready to actually remove Nanea's wig -- but seeing Toni in this new one was pretty tempting.
The final straw came the next day, because I'd stared at Toni in the wig for hours and really liked it. And it helped that Mom and I had been working on the really fun idea of picking up a pair of the Asian Bitty Baby Twins to use for photo shoots as baby Benny and Nanea (for some flashback entries into their family album). Well, we'd finally gotten Baby Nanea, and she has the black hair with bangs. Seeing Toni in this CYO wig, I realized that Nanea would look like she had grown up from the little Bitty Twin. That clinched it. I actually couldn't believe how quickly I took Nanea's wig off (thinking that it was no big loss -- I'd just save the wig and could always glue it on again if she needed to go back to the original look).
In our house, not many wigs get glued on ("finalized" the dolls call it). We keep the wigs unglued, because that allows us to photograph all the different face molds and combinations in various wigs for the photo albums. Well, there was no way that Nanea was going to have her hair falling off. I actually glued it on just two days after removing her original wig!
An interesting tidbit here, for anyone else customizing with used wigs . . .
This wig came off of a brand-new CYO Addy-mold doll. Addy heads are very large (in the realm of American Girl head molds). In fact, I'd rate Addy and AGOT #4 as the two largest heads when trying on a wig. Josefina and Jess molds run a close second there. The smallest are definitely Marie Grace and Nanea (with Sonali right in with them). Anyway, that meant that I took a wig off of a big head to put it onto a small head. This worked out rather well for Nanea, because it gave her head some extra body and filled her out to give her less of the "small head" look. Gluing the wig on was a bit of a challenge, because it was shaped to the Addy mold and still stiff in places from glue residue. In the end, though, it worked quite well, because I used that to give the hair the appearance of body.