My Little Ponies – Restoration Project

I visited my mother this weekend, and I came away with a car (thanks, mum!) and also anticipated that I would be roped into dealing with something electrical – last time it was setting up a printer (which turned into a ‘splosion of rage, wherein I informed mother I could not deal with making her ancient Windows XP laptop play with her brand-new Windows 8-compatible printer).

As it turned out she needed a new batter in a smoke alarm (yes, the really old kind) in the loft room. Craig (husband) volunteered to sort this out, went upstairs, and called out, “Wife… your ponies are ganging up on me!”

I went upstairs and found Craig basically surrounded by these:

I then sat down on the floor and explained the nature of the relationships between them. I swear husband’s eyes glazed over, but he later said that I was “the cutest thing ever”.

If you want to know, Strawberry Fair is best friends with Bouquet, and they adopted Snowflake (who has no cutie mark and no official name because she was a gift from the MLP Fanclub in the 80s), and I was pretty convinced that Daddy Apple Delight was in love with Strawberry Fair because Mommy Apple Delight appears a bit clingy. The only other male is Wigwam, but he never wanted to date anyone. Craig asked if he was gay, I thought he might be, but on reflection, I think he’s probably asexual, because he never craved any kind of romantic attachment.

Then we both decided that since Strawberry Fair and Bouquet were so close, and adopted a baby together, they might actually be a couple. They were certainly the leads in all of my stories back in the day.

Anyway I said I wanted to take some home with me. Then I said all of them (because the others can never know that they’re not my favourites). Then Craig asked where they’d live. So then I said none of them. Then I looked at them again. Then I said all of them.

With that decided, I got googling. At first my google searches were a bit general (how to wash doll hair), and then I got more specific, which led me to The My Little Pony Preservation Project.  Also, I used StrawberryReef.com to identify the ponies I couldn’t remember the names of.

And now I’m on a roll. I’m going to post my progress.

And finally, I want to show you Gusty. Gusty is not my original pony. I never owned Gusty back in the day, but when I went to my best friend’s house, she always let me have Gusty as my pony when we played. I loved Gusty. I mentioned this to Carla once.

A couple of weeks later, Gusty arrived in the post as a gift. ♥

So, now I’ve introduced her to Strawberry Fair and Bouquet and Snowflake, and I hope she’ll settle in nicely.

(No pictures of Bouquet, because I haven’t cleaned her yet.)

As you can see, there are some stains on Strawberry Fair – biro marks and felt pen.  Although you can’t see it, Snowflake has the same thing, where I drew a cutie mark on her.  I’m working on ways to get these off the ponies, and I plan to curl their hair once they are fully clean.  If the hair cannot be tamed, I’m going to re-root it, having nipped out to the shops to buy all the necessary to make a tool to do this, although I couldn’t get to the market to buy the synthetic hair needed.  I’m watching a few “bait” ponies on eBay (a pony someone has deemed so unuseable, there’s no point in doing anything than ripping it up for the parts to make a custom pony) to practice re-rooting the hair on.  I’m not touching my precious babies until I’ve got this hair thing down.

Gusty has turned beige, so I need to stick her in a window and sun bleach her back to normal.  Thankfully, Mum had kept my ponies on the floor, right where the sun caught them, so she’s inadvertently done a lot of sun bleaching on my behalf already.

Also, there are two Gen 2 or 3 ponies in the background.  I just bought them about five years ago so I had something cute to put on my desk.  I need to identify them, but they’re low priority because they’re not my childhood ponies

Anyway, I feel a new obsession coming on.