Melissa's New Hobby.

No, that is NOT a real baby you are looking at!

I have a new hobby to take up some more time in my already busy life. ;) I recently started making Reborns! If you are unfamiliar with the art, just search the term "Reborn Doll" on EBAY and you will get the jist of it pretty quick. In short, the term means that you are taking a real baby doll, or you purchase a mold from an internet store that sells reborn supplies, and you strip all the factory paint off of the doll and then add your own layers of paint to give the "baby" realistic skin tones that mimic that of a real human newborn baby! Some reborn artists even root the hair with quality mohair and a rooting needle that roots only 1 or 2 hairs at a time! And, yes, it takes FOREVER! I recently completed my 1st reborn the other day and, overall, it took me about 25 hours from start to finish over the course of about a week. I was mostly working on the doll after Matthew went to sleep when I had a few hours to myself. It is a very time consuming, and sometimes tedious hobby, but it has been a blast! I think dollmaking is in my blood anyways. As some of you may know, my mom made porcelain dolls for a quite a few years when I was growing up. I am going to keep this reborn but I will try to sell my others. I plan to auction them off on EBAY. They go in price from anywhere to $100 all the way to $25,000!!! Hmmm....maybe one day I will be good enough to sell one of my reborns for that much? Well, a girl can dream, can't she? ;)

Here is what the doll looks like when you first get the mold, unpainted:

Some pictures of the finished product:

I have another mold being shipped to me right now and I cannot WAIT to get started on the next doll! This art is all learned by trial and error so now I know the mistakes I made on the first doll so it will be fun to perfect the next doll even more learning from my first mistakes. This next one though I wont keep. :( I will be putting it on EBAY and selling it. It will be hard to see something that I have put so much work into sold, but I cannot keep a million dolls around my house, you know? That wouldn't be very good for room in my home nor room in the pocketbook. Well, hope you enjoyed pictures of my first doll! :)

***P.S. : As I was making this doll I felt that it looked a lot like Matthew did as a newborn. But I was, in a way, trying to make the doll look like him with the dark hair and all. Take a look at this picture of Becky holding Matthew in the hospital. Doesn't the doll look like him? :)