Let's Talk About Marta: Part One

This blog is mostly meant to be a record of my doll collection. So today I want to talk about my first ever custom doll and I want to do it now while the details are still pretty fresh in my brain. If you can call almost a year later "fresh." Anyway, if you click on my AG Dolls button up at the top of my blog you will see Marta a little bit past half way down the page. She started out life as a Felicity but before we can talk anymore about Marta and how she came to be, we have to talk about MY Felicity. The doll I've had since I was in second grade and that is why this is going to be a multi-parter!


I was introduced to awesome that is American Girl in Mrs. White's second grade classroom. I'm not sure how it happened but I remember spending lots of time looking at AG catalogs with my friend. I wanted one SO bad but we couldn't afford it. Back then the dolls were a little over 80 dollars which is very doable now but then it was far more than we could spend on any toy! BUT my grandma made a deal with me! If I could save up half then she would pay the other half and I could get my doll. Of course everyone threw extra chores and change at me and I saved up all those pennies and dollars in my Big Bird bank and about a year later (give or take) we ordered Felicity and her accessories.

How I picked her is ridiculous to me now! She had the earliest time period therefore, in my little brain, I had to get her her first but Samantha was a close second. The day I got her is still one of my very best memories and she was without a doubt my favorite childhood companion. She slept in her box, which I turned into a bed, right next to my bed for years. She was my most prized possession, but by my late teens she was in storage and it wasn't until almost two years ago when I got married and my best friend bought me Addy that I decided to go and get her.

Felicity fresh out of the storage unit in the picture I took to show my best-friend!

I still had her original rose garden dress but that was it! Everything else had long ago been lost in various moves. She was a little dirty but still in really good shape. Except for her hair which, thanks to my total ignorance as a child, was pretty frizzy at the ends! So I took her home and gave her a good brushing with a proper wig brush and she started slowly looking more like her old self!

I still love the AG cape!

I did my research and I decided to see how much restoration I could do on her hair! She got the full treatment!

A downy dunk:

And some very careful flat-ironing and she came out looking much much better!

I was pretty pleased! So she got new outfits!

Yay giant lot of stuff won from ebay!!

And she and Addy hung out with me in the basement!

notice my hubby's computer guts in the background!

And our AG family grew and grew and grew!

It was after I sent Josefina and Kirsten to the doll hospital that I really became unhappy with Felicity's hair. All my other dolls had beautiful hair and Felicity's was still not that great!

She lost all of the body in her hair due to the flat-ironing she needed to take care of the frizz

No body!

Over the years she lost a lot of hair so it was pretty thin.

Down in the lower right-hand corner (circled in black) you can see that there were actually places where she was missing almost all the hair!

But the thing that bothered me the most was that her pin curls were hopelessly frizzy!

so much frizz!!

I tried everything but I just couldn't tame them! I thought that my Felicity deserved much MUCH better.

So I decided that I would do a wig transplant! And after a few weeks of looking I found the right age Felicity for the right price and here is where the doll that would eventually become my Marta comes in!

That girl was a mess!

Now that we're all done with back story, I'm going to be mean and leave you hanging! Next time we'll continue Marta's story. Till then!