A good bit of the things I've done with/for my dolls, though, has been inspired by her. I just have to find ways to make it sturdier and less complicated. She creates rooms - bedrooms, kitchens, classrooms, even grocery stores - from cardboard boxes and various craft supplies. That's too much like work for me.
Instead of doing all that, I invested in a strong dollhouse. It's meant for American Girl type dolls, which gives me huge rooms for my Barbies. On their scale, we're talking 8 X 16 rooms with eleven or twelve foot ceilings. (A fashion doll house usually gives them 8 by 8 rooms with very little overhead clearance.)
Unlike the interior walls of many dollhouses, these are not printed with pictures of furniture. Just "wallpaper". Wall art in the kitchen consists of dollar-store coasters and stickers. Small decals (human scale) make for large wall art (doll scale). The back of a calendar of old-fashioned pin-up girls - the area that shows all twelve months' pictures - is a poster in the boys' room. Some other things you can find on their walls are logos from Nerf gun packaging, an educational card about a fish called the sarcastic fringehead, and stickers.
The only furniture I've made myself is a pedestal bed made from a storage box. I just covered the lid with fabric and added a colorful head board. Nothing nearly as complex as some of those DIY videos do. Most of the other furniture is Barbie or Monster High brand. Very little of it was purchased new. I love my yard sales!
The dolls themselves I don't do a lot of work on. What I do is usually rebodying. For example, a doll with a very interesting face but a non-articulated body meets an articulated doll with a Vapid Face and a matching skin tone. I pop the heads off and switch them! Very few dolls the size of Skipper or smaller are articulated, so my younger set remains stiff-armed. At least the legs are usually bendy.
I don't try to reroot hair or repaint faces. I have been known to trim hair if the hair is impossible to comb out or if it combs out unevenly, but that's the extent of it. I'm amazed at the work I see in the videos and blogs, but I just do not have those skills or that much patience.
