Bratzseline: Too much of a good thing?

I love Bratz cameras. I love them so much, I own three of them. The first one came bundled with a Bratz doll--as I understand it, the 35mm trashcam came with some Bratz dolls as a promo for the Bratz movie. Problem was, I had to buy and then find something to do with the Bratz doll. I didn't want that. Just the camera. I got lucky with the other two cameras as I found them in the toy aisle at a local thrift store and paid 80 cents each for them. Two of my Bratz are unmodified (and imho take fantastic photos--see image above). The other one I modified by flipping the lens. Depending on the subject matter, the flipped lens version can also make some pretty cool images. [As an aside: The wind-on process with the Bratz is kinda funky and if I don't use them for some time, it takes me awhile to remember how to do it correctly. In contrast to a traditional 35mm loading process (where the film is inserted in the left/supply chamber and is brought to the right/take-up side of the camera and wound on, this particular camera requires you to place the film cartridge in the right side of the camera and then, using the film rewind, you must wind all the film into the left side of the camera. --You do this with the camera closed, of course. What this means that that when you advance each shot, you are pulling the film back into the cartridge. With the last shot, well, there's no need to rewind the film as you'd need to with a traditional load.]

Anyhoot. Having established how much I love this camera, my thought is that I could only love the Bratz more if I could make it do something it's not necessarily designed to do--like taking Lensbaby-esque shots. Vaseline smeared on the fake plastic lens mounted in front of the camera's "real" plastic lens seemed to me the best way of achieving this effect. Problem was, I didn't think to research this and/or to experiment with different amounts, distributions or thicknesses of Vaseline. What I got was, well, kind of a mess.



Case in point: Here is one of the better shots. And by this I mean that I could figure out where it was taken and what it was an image of. For the sake of comparison I've placed the color "Bratzseline" version of The Grace & Hope Mission sign next to a b/w version of it. Hmmm. No bueno.

A sampling of other recognizable shots (i.e., I only took pictures of one red thing that day--a boat) appear below: