Having received advice on avoiding further catastrophe, I armed myself with tweezers and scissors, and bravely went forth to put this set together.
Yes, there are stickers.
I succeeded on all the transparent ones. The others? Well, there’s a dog hair under one, and another one is a little crooked – but a couple of strategically placed items, and you’d never know!
This is an untidy fashion designer because there isn’t really a place for all the accessories. The
felt towels pieces of sewing fabric could be rolled up and placed in a little orange box, I guess, but I didn’t want to roll them. Oh, and that white hang-up thing of hooks seems to be an extra, that wasn’t really meant to be included – only one is mentioned in the instructions, and I’ve got two of them. Which I’m pleased about.
Apart from stickers, which I shall always hate, the thing that took me the most time was undoing the sticky tape from the sewing machine foot pedal cable and the shopping bag handles:
I eventually wriggled a toothpick under the sticky tape, and used that to prise the tape apart.
I love the yarn/cat toys now repurposed as sewing thread, though I think they will mostly be found as colour varieties in a pet shop.
Those pink and grey masks are rather cool too. Not sure if they will ever be used outside of a shop, but they look good. They are rubbery, and fit all round the head like a headband.
The entrance to the Design Studio is quite nice, and will probably look better still with other shops either side of it.
Turning the Studio for the above photo, however, did result in a few things falling from the narrow shelves.
Oh, and I must mention this: this is my greatest delight – when one turns the handle of the sewing machine, the needle goes up and down!
I’m also very fond of that tape measure, just behind the sewing machine. I didn’t have a tape measure before.
There are quite a few clothes with this set:
All very plain though. (And, unfortunately, with mould marks on the hard plastic ones. You can see it on the front of the green dress, and especially on the front of the blue skirt.)
There are stickers to decorate the clothes with.
The little ones are supposedly ‘repositionable’, though I think they still might leave glue marks behind. And the top two rows have transparent backgrounds, which could easily end up a mess of fingerprints.
Anyway, I tried applying one sticker to a dress, and I didn’t like it; it looked like a sticker on a dress – so I took it off again. As a child, I might have liked ‘designing clothes’, however. And I think there is a lot in this set for a child to play with, even if
not combined with the Fashion Shop and Children’s Fashion Shop it is intended to go together with.
