“What’s This? What’s This?” Ken the Pumpkin King

Our girls are OBSESSED with “The Nightmare Before Christmas“. They will watch it on our “movie nights” (held each Friday night at our house where much candy and popcorn are consumed). Since they really don’t watch movies other than Friday nights, except maybe on a Saturday, it surprises us that they continually choose this movie.

Our daughters practically have the entire movie memorized. Rob and I watch our movie in another room (an episode of “The Walking Dead”, or the latest Netflix DVD), we will come out to get a beverage refill or more popcorn, and the girls will be in the middle of the living room acting out the movie. They each have a character or characters that they play. It’s quite fascinating.

Something else that the girls are obsessed with is Monster High. These dolls are designed very intricately and Mattel does a pretty good job, so much so that my girls have gotten rid of all their Barbies (they’ve moved into Grandma’s house). The concept of the dolls are a bit edgy, their style is perfect, and I just think they’re a breath of fresh air in the toy aisle.

We have an unbelievable amount of these dolls because we have four girls who all happen to be smitten with them. The girls save up their money to buy them and also ask for the dolls for birthdays and Christmas.

Something problematic about the Monster High dolls is that the male characters are hard to find in stores, at least where we live, and are very expensive if purchased on Amazon. Because variety is the spice of life, our girls actually like having boy dolls in the repertoire, but they are so difficult to find and because we will not allow them to spend their money on a male Monster High doll that’s $125 (as of this post). They’ve been reduced to using a boring, old, non-monster Ken doll.

They were recently using one of the Monster High dolls (Frankie Stein) as the character, Sally, from The Nightmare Before Christmas. She actually makes a pretty good Sally! They needed a Jack Skellington for her. Jack Skellington is the main character in the movie and he and Sally are sorta sweethearts by the end of the movie. They asked me to make them a “Jack” using their Ken.

I did what any artsy mother would do. I took the Ken, got out my paints, and got to work.

The process to create Jack was pretty basic; I just painted him completely white and then added the black accents. The thought of shaving his head did cross my mind, but I don’t think it would have looked very good. As a little girl, I shaved a Barbie’s head before and it didn’t turn out very well.

Before

After

I’ve done this sort of thing before with the girls’ toys; maybe I’ll share those with you fine folks in a future post. It’s nice to be able to exercise my creativity to customize our girls’ toys and I absolutely love doing stuff like this.