marcie pony 🍰🐾

Marble Pie says hello!

I have a G3 Rainbow Flash with TERRIBLE hair (one entire color crumbled….) and she’s a great chance to do a mini tutorial on how to fix up a tail that has a lot of short, broken hairs.

First, grab the combed and smoothed tail in one hand and slide the other hand down the hair from tip to butt to push back shorter hairs.

Cut the shorter hairs about a cm or two from the tail hole.

Shove the whole tail into the body an inch or so.

Pull it back out.

Those shorter hairs are caught inside the body. This is easier and faster than trying to trim them all, and you’re not left with stubbly bits around the tail.

In this case, a LOT of hair had broken and was lost, so it would have looked weird had I tried to trim it instead.

More recently I’ve consistently FAILED to get the rust out of My Little Pony tails, and admittedly I was very sad about this. Why could I suddenly not do it?

I’m kind of slow sometimes, and after a few months of failures realized it started after I’d bought a new batch of OxyClean and dumped it into my tub with the old stuff.

The thing is, the old stuff wasn’t JUST OxyClean, it was Jillee’s home-made laundry soap (the HomeMade Powdered Laundry Detergent minus the scent wax beads… has her site ALWAYS been that annoying…..) which I didn’t like for my laundry. It was boss at getting rust out of pony tails, though.

Two trips to the store ago I saw a big bar of Zote laundry soap and decided to grab it. Jillee’s detergent has Fels Naptha bar soap grated into it, and I figured the reason I suddenly couldn’t get tails clean was either the washing soda, baking soda, borax, or Fels Naptha because OxyClean on it’s own wasn’t able to do it.

So before, I would get the tail very wet, get a toothbrush very wet, dip the brush in the detergent mix, lay the tail on the countertop, and then aggressively brush the powder into the hair until clean.

This time I tried using Zote (which admittedly smells kind of strong and unpleasant, eucalyptus I think?) and OxyClean and…

Oooooh.

OOOOOH!!!

The soap was it! The soap is what was missing! Dish soap didn’t do it, but laundry soap does!

I had already scrubbed that part of the tail with just OxyClean before remembering I had bought the bar of Zote, and it wasn’t clean UNTIL IT WAS.

I’d wet the toothbrush, rubbed it on the soap (I didn’t feel like unwrapping it completely and didn’t want it all wet), dipped THAT into the OxyClean, and then scrubbed like before.

I will use the same toothbrush until it literally falls apart, ok. It’s squished because I use it to scrub out rusty MLP legs.

…

I should cut the bristles short on a brush for that…. That might work. I’ll have to try it if I remember.

ANYWAY.

Today I’m using it to deflock Wind Whistler and Crumpet, using full concentrate in my little slow cooker which I bought specifically for this purpose.

I do this in my basement bathroom which no one uses, with the fan on, and wearing a vapor-rated mask.

I have seen people use Oxy Clean and hot water, but did you know the flocking will fall off with just hot water?

I’m using hot cleanser which not only loosens the glue enough to let the flocking come off easily, but also dissolves the glue a bit.

There’s still a lot of scraping, rubbing, scrubbing, rubbing, scraping, more rubbing….

I find that rubbing with the grip nubs on my kitchen gloves rolls up most of the glue that’s left after the initial scraping.

But the reason I like using T.A. for deflocking so much is that, even kept hot in a slow cooker, it doesn’t affect the G1 MLP paint. I can’t say about other generations, it’s not like I’ve ever had to deflock anything other than G1.

That makes it so much easier to get the flocking and glue off around the eyes and cutie marks than trying to be careful with acetone.

One common sign of a pony having been deflocked is flocking still stuck in the base of the hair, but with T.A., that’s not a problem.