Packing up the dolls

 

As you readers know, my dollhouse is in a shed. This means that weather plays a HUGE factor in when I get to play with my dolls. There's no heat or air conditioning so I can't leave the dolls in the dollhouse over the winter. Surprisingly, I didn't have any problems in the summer and I attribute this to covering the windows. 

But winter is another story, so I have to bring all of the dolls inside. All 108 of them. My main concern is that their eyes will freeze and crack or that their vinyl will get brittle. Either way, they get stored for the winter.

This is both a curse and a blessing. It's a lot of work to wrap them up, but it really makes cleaning the dollhouse so much easier when there's no dolls in it.

First, I bought new totes this year. I wanted to get tall ones so that the dolls can stand up in them. I also needed cheap ones because I need several. I know that the picture above is of the dolls just tossed into a tote, but that's just the way I carried them from the shed to the house.

Here are the totes I bought:

They're perfect, but I could only afford 4 of them. Plus I still had totes from last year and even though last years totes aren't tall, they do fit dolls laying down. (Yes, I know that that is not the ideal way to store dolls, but you do what you have to with the space you have.)

These were my totes from last year and inside I keep all of my fabric. I have TONS of fabric because all of my family members were once into sewing and when they stopped they donated their fabric to me. I have every intention of using this fabric someday, but until then it works great for wrapping the dolls.

These new totes worked perfectly! Each one holds 15 dolls. Ultimately I'll need 7 totes (since the 2 dolls dressed as Santa and Mrs Clause go under the Christmas tree and don't have to be packed up). But I'll buy more later.

So if you need to pack up some dolls, I highly recommend these totes from Walmart.com.