After spending over 30 minutes this morning struggling with a Bountiful Baby body, I wondered if everyone else has these issues and if anyone has ever made @bountifulbaby aware? I’ll start by saying I love BB bodies, the shape is fantastic, I love that they come with the nice ultra thin zip ties, but I have 2 major pet peeves!
You can’t tuck the ends of zip ties in! The area you put the zip tie into is so tiny, I can never tuck all the ends in. Sometimes I can get one or 2 in, but never all 5! To me having the heads show looks really unprofessional and it’s a risk. This mornings struggle was for a customer who specifically asked that I made sure they were all tucked in. She bought a $1200 doll last year from someone who used a BB body, they couldn’t be tucked and the zip tie heads scraped paint on her expensive baby, she wanted to make sure this never happens to her again. I could not get the zip tie heads into the cloth, no matter how much I tried to stretch, push and pull, tweezers didn’t help, they are too small! I ended up having to use a Mac’s body I had for another kit.
Silicone kits can’t be used with BB premium bodies! The premium ones with the cloth covering the limb holes was a great idea for vinyl, with small flanges, but they are way too shallow for a silicone flange, and I’ve had a couple vinyl kits who’s flanges were too tall to fit as well. People are cutting the cloth out, which looks pretty ghetto or buying their bodies elsewhere. It seems like a major oversight when they recommend a specific body for a silicone kit and you find it won’t work when you go to assemble and have to order a new one somewhere else!
My biggest frustration! On silicone I have to cut all the cloth from the opening, and you’re right, it looks bad. I also feel when you can’t bury the head of the zip tie, it looks unprofessional, and you have to be really careful there are no sharp edges on the zip tie that could scratch the paint.
$1200 not 120,000 lol. So with a bigger zip tie there’s really no way to get them into the BB bodies, can you even insert them or using bodies not from Bountiful Baby?
I know you can, I just feel like they should be made big enough! That if a reborn supply company sells bodies they should function for normal use with the zip ties they include, without us having to cut or modify. The one time I tried cutting it, it looked damaged, you could tell it was cut. And I feel like customers except everything to look perfect, especially when selling in higher price ranges, if they see that they will complain that the body is damaged
You can also glue a piece of doe suede or felt over the head using this wonderful product. It sets super fast binding cloth to cloth. I have used it for all sorts of cloth repairs too.
well I use the skinny cable ties with the little heads so most of the time I can tuck mine in. Sometimes I do have to stick something up in the channel to stretch it a bit. A handful of times I could not get one in and so I glued a piece of doe suede over the head using the produce I referenced above.
BB’s zip ties are way too big. I will use them if I can tuck, but if I can’t I’ll replace them with one of the ultra thin ones I get from elsewhere. I usually replace the head one regardless because that big lump on the back of the neck is unsightly.
I used to have a little hoard of the string ones and those I was able to tuck the zip ties in. The premium ones though, don’t fit at all for me, I need to find out how Angie gets them to go in, I can never get more than 2-3 in and that’s a really good day! I haven’t been able to get any of the string ones though lately, seems they are never in stock, only the premium ones.
I use tweezers to stretch the hole (keep one side of the tweezers in the hole), scrunch up the “casing” area as much as I can (so I can pull the fabric), then try to push the head through while using the tweezers to pull the fabric over it…
