You might wonder why you would even do this, the zip tie holds the head on tight and why would you ever want to remove it? The reason is for maintenance, repair, and customization. You can purchase neckstrings from our shop below for this tutorial.
Why remove the zip tie?
If your doll becomes loose the only way to fix her is going to be to remove the head and do our restringing tutorial also listed in our Forum.
If you want to custom paint your doll either yourself or send it to a doll artist it is much more cost effective to send the head rather than packing up the whole doll as you can save on shipping to and from.
If your doll gets wet and you need to wash her or replace her fluffing
To remove the zip tie take a small pair of scissors and clip the zip tie from the opening on the back of the neck. If there are a couple stitches holding the opening closed, clip a couple stitches so that the zip tie is exposed. Very little needs to be clipped, only a 1/4 area at the very base of the neck. Remove the zip tie by pulling it out of the neck casing. Insert a new neckstring by folding the end of the neck string and inserting a safety pin through the bend. Your safety pin needs to be small enough to feed through the casing, the smaller the better. Feed the pin in through the neck casing and push and pull it until you get it all the way through to the other side. The safety pin is hard so you can use your fingers to find it's progress and inch it along until it comes out the other end. Remove the safety pin and even out the neckstring so that it hangs identically on both sides. You now have a neckstring to remove and put on your head for doll maintenance at any time. Set your doll's head underneath the casing so that the lip of your head is covered and then tighten your neckstrings and tie in a not to keep your head in place.
Get a neckstring pack here on our Doll Accessories Page