Blog Challenge 24: Would you mod a doll?

Its been a while since I responded to one of the blog challenges. But here I am again, ready to blog. (For other breaking news, Vesna has been shipped.)

Question 24: Would you mod a doll?

I have nothing against mods. It is a bit of a given if you want a Vampire Elf (VE) from CP (Cerberus Project). All of CPs VEs are sleeping heads and given the popularity of Vampire dolls, to only do them in sleeping means that it becomes harder and hard to have one of these dolls in its original sleeping state. There are a few CP dolls who are vampires but are not sleeping - these are all older Delfs who don't have a sleeping head in that size. The ones I know for sure are just dreaming are the Lishe, the El and the Shiwoo. Lishe and El have particularly narrow dreaming eyes.

I have one doll who I have modded from sleeping to OE who is a VE and that is my VE Chloe, Pax. I don't particularly like sleeping dolls as a person in themselves, I can't quite see how a character would work sleeping all the time. I have been frequently tempted to mod my VE Lishe, Nemain, as I am not a fan of those slitted dreaming eyes, but I want to keep her original.

I also have a couple of dolls who were modded before they came to me - one for a good reason and one which seems silly. Sirona is my modded Dreaming Lishe and her eyes now look as if they are half open, which makes her character look good. The other is a Juri 2005 Limited edition who had her eyes opened further - which I don't think was a good idea. I'm not keeping her, but more people are looking for unmodded Juris rather than the modded ones.

The other doll that I am planning to mod is my SOOM Arkose, Rasmus. He hasn't been paid off yet and I am waiting until I have him in hand, but I am so far (based on production and owner images) going to open his eyes. For me they just look too narrow and I want them a touch wider - but I am being good and waiting until I get him in my hot little hands before I decide.

I would not, ever, pick up the dremel myself to mod them - I always use the experience of others to mod my dolls - I am not paritcularly artist and don't feel that I have the skills to successfully mod the dolls myself.

Doll Mags

I quite enjoy reading magazines and when I was a fresh new collector I was able to read HauteDoll. I somewhat enjoyed this, HauteDoll would have at least one article on my particular style of BJDs and it was usually fairly substantial and interesting.

I didn't like having to flip through all the pages of pictures of Tonners and Sybraties and at the time I wasn't particularly interested in articles on Blythes, although now I would probably like the inclusion more.

A while ago, HauteDoll shut down and merged with Doll Reader. It shrunk to a couple of pages at the back of the magazine and BJDs were shunted to perhaps once every second magazine, sometimes it was limited to a single page or a couple of words. Sometimes there was nothing on our style of BJDs.
Doll Reader itself was about bigger dolls and the more "European/American" BJDs - artist dolls and the like. Late last year after struggling to find Doll Reader in shops, I bought a digital membership.

Today I read that Doll Reader is closing and merging with another magazine called DOLLS. so I searched and found their website and had a look at their current issue... not a thing about BJDs and modern styled dolls such as Blythes (which didn't particularly get a look in with Doll Reader) were no where to be seen. All the BJDs that were covered were the big limbed, large faced young child type or the artist dolls (which I am not a fan of).

So in like two years the ability to read any articles of any sort on Asian BJDs has dried up.

Some might then point out the online offerings - I know of two which are BJD related, BJD Collectasy, whose articles are rarely updated and often simply don't interest me. The other was BJD Magazine, which has simply stopped being updated - it was mostly doing interviews of BJD artist doll makers, which I'm not massively interested in.

The other magazine that I was reading was TinyFeet - which has just announced a sabbatical and was mostly a photography magazine and had no real articles.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying any of these online offerings are terrible or anything like that, they're just not meeting my want of articles as well as nice photos.

One of the girls at work suggested that I write a magazine myself - which stuck in my mind and I was thinking about articles that I could write, things like 'Aesthetic v posability' or on a topic like the the growth of more realistic dolls - Iplehouse, SOOM, the Fairyland F65s. But I don't know, I don't honestly know if people are interested in that sort of thing and even I can't think up enough for a full magazine.

But I am sick of the LACK of stuff for collectors of our particular version of BJDs. So if you know of any good magazines which give BJDs more than a single page every so often and actually do an article or similar, please tell me, I really want to know!