Did you hate dolls?

I've hated dolls when I was young. I think I just hated receiving dolls because I'm a girl (I always wanted boy's toys when I was young)... and I've never been a big fan of the barbie dolls... the same big fake smile on every doll and the weird proportions were so disturbing for me
Then in 2019 I discovered Monster High repaints videos and after customizing a bunch of them, I now love them!
And thanks to my repaint hobby, I then discovered bjds! I just love the sculpt diversity of bjds you can get so many beautiful dolls in different shape and colors
I think being able to make your doll/bjd unique is what attracted me a lot in the hobby

 

I was sort of... doll neutral, at least when I was a really young child. I was sort of a tomboy (or wannabe tomboy, cause I wasn't even that tomboyish lol) and I guess I thought playing with dolls was too icky and girly. But I genuinely preferred my stuffed animals over dolls at the time.
When I got a little bit older I luckily got over the "femininity = bad" mentality and got more interested in dolls. I was always interested in miniatures and stuff and I loved trying to make my own DIY props and miniatures myself. I was briefly really into American Girl dolls when I was about 10-11 but I never had too many cause they were pretty pricey... man, now I look at $100 dolls and go, ugh, I WISH mine were that cheap lol.

 

I’ve never really been one to “play” necessarily, so dolls that weren’t pretty sitting on my shelves with my knickknacks and baubles weren’t of interest to me, and I always ended up preferring stuffed animals. I did have American Girl Dolls but they were treated more like stuffed animals and never breached 4 in number. (Which might sound like a lot of $100 dolls for a 9 year old to have but I also had a collection of sock monkeys that numbered more than a hundred with several large ones costing MORE than an AG {no, my parents weren’t rich; but I was, lol. By kid standards anyhow. Been a Scrooge since day 1})

 

It’s always been dolls for me although I should say not cabbage patch kids or barbies. I loved my American doll, cherry merry muffin, moon dreamers, quints, fuss n giggle triplets, my pretty ballerina, pj sparkles....trust me the list goes on. Ohhhhh I also looooved trolls if those count as dolls. The best part? I still have 90% of them! My purple haired moon dreamer, Celeste, is on the shelf with my BJDs right now. What a throw back!

 

I wasn't a big fan of dolls as a kid, I mostly wanted to play with the doll's horses! In high school, I started making art dolls, and I think I got into bjds around that time after following some bjd artists on Instagram. Now I'm 22 and just got my first doll!

 

Finally the thread for me! I never liked dolls and found many of them scary until I got into realistic artist BJDs at age 35.

 

I can remember having two small dolls when I was very young. Then in 1961when I was four years old I got a doll for Christmas that I immediately christened Joan Elaine. I’ve never been able to find her make but she was similar to a Crolly doll, about two feet tall. I never wanted another doll after that. I “made” clothes for her. She was Batgirl dressed in a babygro with a black plastic cape and mask. A long red cardigan was an elegant gown in my childhood imagination. Her eyes got poked out by my sisters and I made her paper ones. Her lip colour wore off and I drew on her with crayon. She had lots of different adventures. I regret that I don’t have her anymore but thought that I had outgrown dolls in my teens.

It is amazing now to have BJDs and all the variety and customisation they afford. But, with them, I haven’t yet managed to tap into that freewheeling and unselfconscious imaginative energy of my childhood that brought Joan Elaine to life!