Introducing Ethnic Reborn Baby Girl:
Aisha
Reborn Birth Date : 21 August 2008
Length : 21 Inches
Doll Kit : Bi racial Ember by Tasha Edenholm
Links:
Completed Reborn Dolls looking for homes
I have started a Reborn Baby Doll Project and its a work in progress.
I will be adding more details as I go through the process of reborning this baby.
You are more than welcome to follow along as I update the page and everything needed can be bought from us.
Follow updates by subscribing to our RSS feed.
I am currently reborning :
The Ember reborn baby will be available to buy from 18th August.
RDK has just released the dates for the Pre Orders.
RDK are expecting them in this week and hopefully we should have them before the end of the month.
Orders waiting on these pre orders will be emailed for the balance once we have them ready to be shipped.
Links:
Completed Reborn Dolls looking for homes
We have a shipment of RDK doll kits just arrive and they range from 10" – 14" kits.
These kits are a limited edition series and once they are gone they are gone.
Some include cloth bodies and are ready to be reborned.
So grab these tiny little bundles while you can.
ABC News has reported an article on Reborning.
I found some points in this story true, I have many elderly customers who have had look alike reborn baby dolls made of their grandchildren just to have the memory of them portrayed in a 3D form.
This Art form is very Niche and I look forward to more Media stories on the art.
I have been reborning now for 4 years now and I am forever extending my techniques.
These dolls are not and could never be mass produced.
Quote " British department store Harrods – whose motto is "Everything for Everybody Everywhere" – describes them as "a bit too life-like" to stock,……"
Each baby is painted by hand and many many hours spent creating every fine detail like veins and milk pimples, its kind of like baking a cake and we all love cake but we all cant cook, so we appreciate a good homemade cake when we get it.
I just hope more people take the time to learn about the art and really look into how these babies can reall help some people through life.
Attract, repel: lifelike dolls are collector cult
Their chests rise and fall and you can hear a tiny heartbeat, but these babies for sale over the internet are not alive.
"Reborn babies" are disconcertingly life-like baby dolls carefully crafted in vinyl, which have become swiftly popular mainly with collectors, but also with nostalgic grandparents and grieving parents.
Earlier this week police in Gympie, Queensland, reportedly broke into a car to rescue what they thought was a dying baby, only to discover it was a "reborn".
Made and collected by an online community of enthusiasts, they are painted several times to create the mottled colour of newborn skin, have mohair hair and eyelashes, and are weighted to make them feel as heavy as human babies.
Fans of the hobby, who call it "reborning", are mostly women and increasingly guarded about discussing it since media reports highlighted their purchase by bereaved parents, prompting some to portray the hobby as macabre.
"Cuddle therapy" is what one reborning website calls the hobby – the dolls’ bodies can be fitted with electronic devices that mimic a heartbeat and breathing.
British department store Harrods – whose motto is "Everything for Everybody Everywhere" – describes them as "a bit too life-like" to stock, and collectors themselves say the dolls can cause feelings of intense unease, even disgust.
"I pick them up and I change them and I do hold them like a baby now and again – it’s relaxing," said doll-owner Gill, a 50-year-old grandmother who asked to remain anonymous because of the way reborning has been portrayed in the media.
Reborners say their hobby began in the United States in the early 1990s, with dolls becoming more and more realistic over time. Media coverage helped spread the idea to other countries, mainly Britain and Australia.
Cathy Newcombe, who makes the dolls and runs reborning Website Reborn Babies UK, said counsellors were increasingly looking into the therapeutic benefits of holding reborn babies.
"The act of holding the doll may have a role in releasing a ‘feel-good’ hormone," Ms Newcombe said.
But not all react in this way.
"You get this repulsion from some because it looks so life-like and they just see a dead baby," said Sue, 56, who bought her first doll in June.
"Looking at my reborn I’ve never seen a dead baby – she has too much colour in order to be dead."
Too niche
The term "reborn" is used to distinguish custom-made baby dolls from those mass-produced in a factory, says Deborah King, who took up doll-making as a hobby three years ago and now sells dolls via Reborn Baby.
"My daughter wanted a sibling and I didn’t want to have any more children, so I made her a doll instead," said the 32-year-old mother of two.
Ms King’s website features lists of baby dolls photographed in cots and dressed in frocks, some of which are described as "premature". Most have girls’ names and are described as waiting for "adoption".
She sells the dolls for between 250 pounds to 1,600 pounds ($514-$3,290) and receives 10 to 15 requests a week.
The reborning community says most buyers are collectors.
"To me it’s a work of art… I’m not into pushing it around in a pram," said collector Gill.
Newcombe of Reborn Babies UK said most of her customers want to collect the dolls as art: "Between 10 and 15 per cent are for ladies who have lost a child."
Others have emotional reasons of a different kind for their purchase: Ms King recalls one client who decided to buy a doll for her mother, an Alzheimer’s sufferer, after noticing she spent most of her time looking at baby photos.
Ian James, a doctor at the Centre for the Health of the Elderly at Newcastle General Hospital said the use of dolls in care homes for the elderly can help reduce disruptive behaviour.
"There are a number of reasons for the powerful effect of the doll in reducing some of the challenging behaviour," he said.
"People are comforted and are so much calmer and quieter – you just have to be there to witness that."
"It’s a familiar role from time when they were busy and happy," his co-researcher Lorna Mackenzie said.
But Dr James said it made no great difference how life-like they were.
"In our studies we have used 10-pound dolls from a toy shop – if you buy three, you get one for free," he said.
Most of Ms King’s customers are collectors and grandparents who miss their grandchildren’s younger selves, while others just enjoy holding the pretend babies.
But while there are hundreds of reborns for sale on Internet auction site eBay, their mainstream appeal seems to be limited by how realistic they are.
"Everything we sell is with a view to a child owning it or being interested in it, but these dolls are a bit too life-like for our toy department to stock them," a spokeswoman for Harrods said.
"The more realistic a doll is, the more niche the market is."
Source : www.abc.net.au/news
We now have a full range of colours.
The mohair has been delayed due to the weather and after a long wait we now have many shades available.
I was reading through this article and thought it was a great idea.
The idea of having them in the same place is great but more credit should be shown towards each artist.
How To Find The Best African American Reborn Dolls -Article By Ray Baker
My website was founded because of the lack of information and
availability of ethnic Reborn Dolls. I started the site to help fellow
reborn enthusiasts track down the best African American Reborn Dolls
available on the Internet today.Not everyone understands reborning, to the uninitiated it’s a world
of strange obsession, to the folks that do understand, it provides
endless hours of irreplaceable pleasure. That pleasure is derived from
beauty, artistry, and uniqueness of each doll, because just like human
babies, reborn dolls come in every conceivable shape size and color –
nowadays there are Caucasian, Asian, and African American Reborn Dolls.The African American Reborn Dolls are particularly difficult to
find, as the majority of artist that make the dolls concentrate on
Caucasian babies. I started my website dedicated to finding new African
American Reborn Dolls because even now, with the vast power of the
Internet, African American Reborn Dolls are very difficult to track
down as there are only a very limited number of artists who specialize
in these African American Reborn Dolls.Reborn dolls are exactly as they sound, they are dolls that have
been stripped of their factory finishes and been “reborn” and
transformed in to realistic looking babies. After having undergone a
number of processes including repainting, re weighting, and the
addition of realistic hair, special effects such as tears, a heartbeat,
and tiny imperfections are created to make them appear even more
lifelike. While this may not sound particularly difficult to do, it is
a very challenging art form and the most respected artists can command
several thousand Dollars for each doll.Reborn doll artists use very careful processes to make an ordinary cloth and vinyl doll look
exactly
like a real baby. The dolls are custom colored using multiple layers of
specialist paints to give the ‘babies’ their skin tone to make them
appear as closely related to their own ethnic groups as is possible,
like the African American Reborn Dolls for example. Whilst all kinds of
different dolls can be used to make reborns – these dolls are not made
for play, they are collector dolls made to be cherished and admired.The demand for the dolls at the high-end of the market is always
extremely strong, but probably the fastest growing category is with the
African American Reborn Dolls, albeit from a much smaller base. This is
partly due to the fact there are fewer artist making African American
Reborn Dolls, but also because the rarity makes them a very good
investment – having said that, I must stress that the vast majority of
collectors collect for the love of their hobby (many would never
consider selling any of their dolls) and have little interest in making
profits.Collectors and enthusiasts from all over the world are constantly
adding to their assortment of beautiful babies. The world of reborns is
a friendly close-knit community and you will always find helpful and
friendly advice – you’ll just need to ask. I have been collecting
unique dolls all my life, and I have always enjoyed artistic and
creative pursuits, but when I first discovered reborn babies my passion
was truly ignited. These delightful little babies are so beautiful
which is testament in large part to the talented artists who share
their art with the reborning community. You may have already guessed,
that my particular passion at the moment are the African American
Reborn Dolls.!
Article Source : http://www.discoveryarticles.com/articles/120461/1/How-To-Find-The-Best-African-American-Reborn-Dolls/Page1.html
We have been flat out on the website this afternoon and when I was reading through the news, I came across this article.
Frantic rescue effort saves doll, not baby
“FRANTIC police smashed a window to rescue a seemingly unconscious baby
from a locked vehicle in Queensland last week only to find it was
an extremely lifelike doll.
The embarrassing mistake, made in regional Gympie, is not an
isolated incident and passionate creator of the “reborn” baby dolls
Vynette Cernik knows just how easily they can be mistaken for the real
thing.”
Reference news.com.au
I was reading through one of the Reborn Forums I am a member of and came across this great tutorial on how to paint eyebrows.
I learnt a thing or two and wanted to share it with other reborn artists.
Painting Eyebrows and Eyelashes…..by Paula
