Most of my ball-joint dolls are standard resin, hooks, and string ball joint dolls. They’re made of an almost indestructible resin, and, if any piece falls off or if the string gets too loose, you can just take them apart and restring them. You can even take a head and put it on another body, if something catastrophic happens.
However, I have a few BJDs that are handmade and produced from non-resin material.
Daisy’s little dog, for example, is not a regular BJD at all. It’s handcrafted out of clay and then strung together.
Daisy tries to make sense of her memory. [I use liquify in photoshop to make Daisy’s eternal smile a little more neutral.]
But, I have one starring cast member who is not a regular resin BJD, and that’s Rat from Underfoot.
Rat scours the house for a nest to sleep in.
He’s made of very thin 3D-printed material, and he’s put together in a way that I doubt I could replicate if the need arose.
Well, today the need arose. I’d been fiddling with his hand for one shot, and realizing that I couldn’t just keep twirling it around to get it in the right position because I was starting to hit resistance. So, I stopped twirling the hand, got him set up for another shot and, when I lifted him up, his foot had dropped off.
I have zero idea how I might restring him – he’s really terribly fragile, and I worry that I’ll do him damage by trying to fish the hook out of his thigh. Fortunately, he’s done almost everything he needs to do for this episode. All that’s left for him to do is to climb into his bed. But, for the next episode . . . I expect there will be some storyline where Rat returns to the wild.
Which is really very sad, because we all loved Rat, especially Cosette. But, wild things are wild, and they will go where they will go.