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Focus on the My Scene Dressing Room Playset - by DeeinNJ
(October 2005)Hello again, all!
Today we are focusing The My Scene Dressing Room Playset. These have been out since late last year and you can find them on ebay or at discount stores such as Big Lots ($12.99 saw ‘em last week). There also may be some lingering on regular toy store shelves that are slow to move merchandise.
As a customerizer and cannibalizer of playsets, I always look for sets that have pieces I can repaint and reuse in different ways. This playset is great for that! It comes with some neat walls with shelves, a round ottoman, a dress form, an oval mirror, a 2-tiered display table and lots of little goodies.
First off, I love the whole “boutique” dressing room concept. Our dolls need a posh place to shop. However, I wanted to make this boutique more in line with my Silkstone collection, so I decided to customize it a bit to change the colors. The first thing I did when I removed it from the box was to set aside the stickers that you are supposed to apply, and used a hairdryer to remove any stickers that had already been applied to the shelving units.
Then, I removed the individual shelves from the walls (just pull them out of the slots). This makes repainting much easier (no masking). Then, I spray painted the shelves gold and the walls white. You, of course, could do whatever colors you want. I also painted the two-tiered table in the same colors. Then I measured the openings that hold the pre-printed cardboard inserts and cut new pieces of gold cardstock to fill the empty spaces on the edge of each shelf unit You could fill these spaces with any patterned paper or print up special “boutique” signage on your computer and insert them into these same spots. I used a gold Galaxy marker to trace around the rims of the beveled edges on the fronts and color the “hardware.”
I then removed the red print curtain at the dressing room doorway and sewed a sheer white curtain instead.
I also repainted some of the litte “sale” signs in gold, along with some plastic hangers I had hanging around (pardon the pun). I used Krylon Fusion spraypaint in white and gold. You can also use Plastikote Gold, but it gives a shinier finish, as opposed to the matte finish of the Kyrlon paint.
I used the ottoman and mirror for a different setting, as I already had those two items in colors to match my Silkstone displays. You could repaint either of these whatever colors you wish and even add some fringe to the bottom of that ottoman!
The nice thing about this is you can use the walls all connected with the dressing room door in between, as I did with the spa setting above, or you can remove the curtain connector and reattach it again later.
Here I separated the walls from the curtain, used a repainted My Scene Party Pad window sitting on a painted block of wood and made a boutique with a window and street scene. This photo is just a quick example of how you could create a little boutique. This is just a bare bones example, but I wanted to shoot a quick shot to give you an idea of what you could do with these pieces. (Note some other repainted pieces adding to the look). Or, instead of the window between the two walls, add a rolling rack with some garments hanging on it, or a couple of dress forms displaying outfits. Or maybe put a mirror in between the shelves with a small podium in front for that wedding salon look.
If you bought two of these dressing room sets, you could separate two shelving walls on the side walls of your display with a check out counter in front, then use the two shelves with the curtains on the back walls of your display. Just an idea.
Try to look at playline furniture with repaint possibilities and think how you can reuse individual pieces. You may discover just what you’ve been looking for!