Here is my second custom project with a "Create A Monster" set and after more than a year of collecting dust it's finally nearing completion!
The materials: The "Create A Monster - Skeleton" set and a regular doll of C.A.Cupid.
The skeleton set contains only a partial doll - a head, lower arms with hands, lower legs, a wig and a dress + shoes and a hair clip to spice her up. This was long before Skelita (a true skeleton doll) came out and I wanted this so badly!
Since there was (and is) no "Create A Monster" set with white skin to complete this I bought a Cupid at regular price.
Exchanging the arms was no problem, since the clothes of Monster High dolls are often so tight that the sleeves won't go over the hands and thus they are designed to to remove the lower arms for dress-up. So it was just a case of "plopping out old arms, plopping in new ones".
So far, so good.
The legs, however, turned out to be a major problem. I thought they were removable too but I was wrong. The original legs have a thick peg which holds them in the thigh. I tried with a scalpel first but it wasn't possible to just open the seam of the leg. My husband had to break the leg open to get the first shank out, and it left some very ugly marks at the back where the material was overstretched.
It was also impossible to simply insert the skeleton leg because it does not have such a peg at all. I wrapped wire around the pin and glued it in place with strong superglue, but that was not thick enough.
Since the thigh looked so bad I gave up on the idea. Instead I cut off the other original leg directly above the knee and did so for the removed leg too. Then I drilled two small holes in each knee and inserted pieces of cut up fixing pins into each hole with superglue. They went ~3mm in and were ~6mm long, so half of the wire stuck out.
I placed the cut off peg of the original leg back in place in the thigh and then drilled two matching holes into both thighs. Then the new skeleton legs were glued in place with two-component superglue. I also used this to close up the thigh again.
It's not perfect but it worked. The doll can not safely move the knee from right to left. Which a normal human knee can't do, anyway, but for some poses it's nice to cheat that way. The bond is strong enough to bend the knees regularly - the knees are VERY stiff out of the box though and they stayed like that although I put a lot of work into making them move more smoothly. Therefore I do not bend the knees when it's not important.
My first try with plastic glue didn't work at all, btw. Usually that stuff is gold when gluing plastic miniatures and model kits since it melts the materials together, but as the plastic of the original legs was clearly different from the plastic of the new legs nothing melted at all and there was zero bond.
Now all that's left to do is to repaint the face. So far I only gave her a regular lipstick, removing that heart-shaped weird look that was seemingly popular in 1920.
She's supposed to get new eyes and other makeup too though and the lipstick isn't detailed yet.
Although there is Skelita now I still love this skeleton doll. Her limbs are made of much stronger material than Skelita's and it's not bad two have two unique skeletons at the school!