First step was painting the eyelids on the new eyes. The difference is subtle but it does look closer to her skin tone (left eye is painted, right eye is not).
I did two coats. While that was drying, the next step was removing her old wig. I’ve got my trusty Wig Removing Spoon here.
I use the pointy end to find a loose spot in the adhesive, and work that back and forth until I can get the wider end in. From there, I was able to just pull the wig off the rest of the way. If you’ve never done re-wigging before, it’s surprisingly easy to remove the old wig once you get it started.
Here she is trying her new wig on! I haven’t attached it yet, but it looks pretty good.
Next step is removing the head to get the eyes out. Her head is attached with a zip tie, which I’m going to replace with a neck string. First you use a seam ripper to take out the stitches right at the back of the neck:
Cut the zip tie with a sharp pair of scissors, and that’s it!
Now…removing the eyes. I’ve done this once before, on a Pleasant Co Felicity, and it was relatively easy. Today…I struggled. I rage-quit, came back to it an hour later, finally managed to get one of the eyes out, and rage-quit again because my hands were hurting too badly to keep going.
I thought the problem was just because the Jess mold has smaller eye sockets, but when I got the first one out, there was stick-on adhesive behind it??
I’m guessing there’s more behind the other eye, because I can’t even get it to budge a little. If anyone has advice for getting eyes out, I’d really appreciate it!
And that’s where we need to leave things for today, unfortunately. I will come back to it tomorrow and we’ll see if I have any more success.
Nahji is my 14-inch Hearts for Hearts Girls doll. She was a thrift store rescue that my sister gifted to me earlier this month, and arrived looking very well loved, with messy hair and dirt in all her joints. Her eyes had turned from brown to purple, a defect that seems to be common in dolls with inset acrylic eyes when poor-quality materials are used. At first I thought her purple eyes were indeed quite pretty, but ultimately after looking at other Nahji dolls with original eyes, decided I wanted brown eyes for her after all.
Swapping them for the new eyes was easy and inexpensive; I paid $3.50 for this pair of eyes on an Etsy shop called Felicity Garden. These were sold as Wellie Wisher eyes, but luckily they share the same eye size (16 millimeters) as Hearts for Hearts Girls. Taking out the old ones and putting in the new ones was a far easier process than removing and replacing sleep eyes commonly used in 18 inch dolls. This is also a method that can be used with Wellie Wishers, who also have inset acrylic eyes and can in rare cases also develop purple eyes.
Behind the cut, I’ll explain how I did it.
A quick note about Wellie Wishers: while you CAN use this method for them, if your doll’s eyes have turned purple, you don’t NEED to replace the eyes yourself if you don’t want to. American Girl considers this a defect and will replace your entire doll for you at no cost. I know this because my mother bought a secondhand Kendall doll who had eyes turning purple, and customer service was happy to provide her with a new one. They even paid for the shipping to send the defective one back. Just give the doll hospital a call and explain the situation.
But if you want to eye swap your Wellie Wisher to give it a new eye color, or are particularly attached to your specific Wellie and don’t want to trade them in for a different doll, then I recommend the shop I linked above for new eyes. Or you can search Etsy for other sellers of Wellie eyes; but remember that they must be 16 millimeters in length. If you have another brand of doll and you’re not sure of the eye size, measure from corner to corner of the eye socket for the correct length.
On Friday, the eyes arrived.
Jeepers creepers!
And I immediately began the process by first removing all of Nahji’s clothes and jewelry, and then heating up a pot of water on the stove. As soon as it was boiling, I prepared her.
Not to worry, she’s fine. This will protect her from the hot water.
Then I inverted her into the hot water, making sure that her face was completely covered, and held her there for about a minute. Just long enough to get the vinyl heated up so that it would be soft and flexible.
It’s really important that the water is hot enough! If it’s not, the vinyl won’t stretch enough to get the eyes out. I experimented with heat levels during the process, going from lower to higher; I found that only water at boiling temperatures made the vinyl stretchy enough. If you wait too long and let it cool, you won’t be able to remove the eyes. So what you can do is let the water come to a full boil, then turn off the heat and immediately insert the doll into the pot.
Once her head was warm and pliable, I was able to squeeze her head and make her eye sockets open up until her eyes could be carefully plucked out.
This might be easy, and it might be challenging. I struggled with the first eye but the second one came right out without help.
I made sure the insides of her eye sockets were completely dry.
Then I reheated my water and dunked her in again with the bag over her head to reheat the vinyl.
The eyes went in. This takes a bit of careful maneuvering; be patient and keep trying, reheating the vinyl if necessary.
You might notice that I filed the pointy sides down a bit; this isn’t something that HAS to be done, but it made things a tad bit easier pushing them into the sockets.
And that was it!
At some angles the eyes look slightly uneven, but this seems to be an issue with her eye sockets themselves, as her original eyes were also slightly unbalanced. It doesn’t bother me, though. I think she looks lovely.
