| Guh. |
[Wednesday February 8 2:04 pm] |
Still trying to finish up some old commission projects, but hoping to return to my own dolls in my soon-to-maybe-be free time.
I'm still really annoyed at myself that the Dollshe Ingenues have arrived with their owners and I still have to finish Boone. That's shameful!
I'm thinking that, once my commissions are done, I'm going to purge whatever fabric and scraps I have saved up over the years. Get a fresh start and not feel like I have to reuse the same old fabrics for any ideas I come up with. (I will allow myself to keep uncut fabrics I never got around to using though, LOL - watch that start a landslide.)
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| Closing Shop |
[Tuesday January 10 8:21 am] |
I have decided that I am going to allow myself the time to relax and enjoy 2012 and hopefully many years to come provided I pass from this Mayan world into the next.
With that in mind I have decided to cease taking commissions for face-ups and costumes. While I enjoy them on an individual level, I find they really help my to-do list spiral out of control and at that point they aren't fun anymore.
I'll still have an etsy shop, because I intend to repaint and sell (on my own schedule!) Monster High dolls, but I'm going to let my domain name expire this year and stick to socializing on DoA, LJ and flickr. No sense in paying for a domain name if the site will only be a duplication of what I post on these other sites.
So I apologize to those on Flickr, as I'll be moving over my photos to that service before my hosting expires (I think I have a few months anyway).
I'm really looking forward to spending more quality time with my own dolls!
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| Boone Grinding |
[Monday October 24 11:31 am] |
Now that the Rococo dresses are done, am I super excited to finish Boone's seams and see her assembled!
I have just a few small pieces left, which I will try to do tonight and tomorrow. The martial arts classes I attend are being taught by a junior instructor while our Masters are in Korea this month, so they tend to let out on time instead of half an hour late, so I'm hoping I still have time and energy to get back to it before bed tonight.
I set up an Ott Lite that I have so I can see the little flaws from the seams while I work, instead of having to wait to look under daylight the next day. With that I caught a couple seams that could have been smoother on pieces I'd already done, so I didn't make it too much further through the pile of remaining parts. Just the rest of her second head and her thighs.
All the pieces left are significantly smaller than the ones I've done. Hopefully they will be proportionately quicker to finish. I will be on vacation next week and would love to see her finished and assembled before I have to put away my dolls on Sunday!
The weather today is rainy but tomorrow should be nice enough that I can spray sealant, so I may take a break from sanding to paint the blank head.
I've already contact tinybear about a wig but I haven't decided what color to go with yet, exactly. In the meantime I will use the aqua wig that twigling sent me the material for (same color as her Tobie's wig), or maybe the green wig I got for Zooka that doesn't fit a CP head.
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[Wednesday October 12 3:17 pm] |
Got my eyes for Boone and Zooka last night. They look great but I had plans so I couldn't get any play time in. Both eyes look great and fit, though, so my eye woes are over. ;)
Boone already had putty in place, so I got photos of her. Couldn't quite get the photos to show the right color, you get an idea of the light I have to work with when I get home in the evenings, peh.
Hoping to get back to the sanding tonight... I want to take photos of Zooka in her new outfit but first I have to string bubble beads for the background and style her tinybear wig.
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| Boone Phase 1: Preliminary Face up |
[Tuesday October 11 9:31 am] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=89.1) twigling asked me to chronicle my process on working with Boone, as a point of interest and as a possible guide for anyone else who elects to take on the finishing of their own doll.
I was working on my Rococo Cephalopod dress when Boone arrived, and was determined not to set it aside lest I never pick it up again, but I did take a break a week ago, when the weather was nice, to paint my Juri05 head and, while I was at it, paint one of my Ingenue heads that arrived with the finishing work done.
This face-up helped me realize that Volks pastels just were not going to work on this resin color. Every color I laid down showed against her resin as an entirely unexpected shade. I'm used to the browns going to orange, but NOTHING looked right. I was pretty much limited to black and a very 80's pink. So I sorta went with that at first and originally painted the eyeliner in a robin's egg blue, but then she looked like something out of a terrifying night club, so I went over it all with black. It's not awful, but very much not what I envisioned.
I picked up a new pack of pastels, a set of 12 colors and if they all show up the way they look like they ought, I might get the 48 stick box.
So that's phase one of my Ingenue process, up next, seam-finishing!
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| Continuing the caffeinated sleep-deprived ideas... |
[Tuesday October 4 9:20 am] |
Remember when Luts used to sell the plush bodies for people to put their floating heads on? I remember they were always sold out.
I'm wondering if people still want soft bodies as temporary body-doubles... Or have the resin busts for at least displaying them on shelves replaced that? The Luts ones certainly aren't cheap (though they're gorgeous).
I made a body once, well two, actually, and they needed some improvements in the pattern, but they're not difficult, and I could include internal armatures so they'd at least pose a bit, plus elastic and a big wooden bead at the neck to hold a head on..
Just sayin'.
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| Hmm. |
[Tuesday October 4 8:49 am] |
I just glanced through my gallery subforum posts at Den of Angels and I've come to the conclusion that I need to take and share more non-process photos of my dolls.
Am wondering if I would have kept my crazy interesting dolls (Siempre, Yue, Geist...) if I'd done more with them.
Gotta pick up trim at lunch today for the Cephaloporococo dress (I basted it together last night and the tentacles get completely lost against the overdress of the same fabric) so I need to take another look at fat quarters to make something for my Pukis, because I've been looking at them with Marketplace eyes lately... I think Glitch will be getting a Calavera sleeping head in time for Halloween. Not sure what to do with Comrade Pajamas...
OMG I just killed myself. I have a dollhouse in storage waiting to be built. HAUNTED HOUSE. Oh, I want to, but I know it would never be done in time for Halloween...
In case you can't tell, I didn't get enough sleep last night...
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| My imp is nearly complete! |
[Monday October 3 9:15 am] |
Zooka has a face-up, thanks to some strange weather pattern that brought me 48.5 ~ 54% humidity yesterday.
I had tried on Friday but my paint glopped on me while I was adding liner to the eye rims and ruined the eyelashes I'd done. It was the last step but when I tried to clean it off it wouldn't come up without taking up the blushing and everything! By the time I scrubbed the head to start over the humidity had spiked (and seriously.. an hour later it was a torrential downpour.. so bizarre!)
This time I did the eyelashes early one so I wouldn't waste too much time if they messed up again. :P
So she is painted and awaiting her eyes (I found Soom Kiwi eyes from Safrin in 20mm, and though she used to wear 18mm I think I can live with 20mm, judging by the photos in the Juri05 database). This will be the longest I allow glue on eyelashes to dry, LOL, because normally I can't resist putting eyes in and taking photos after a couple hours, but without ANY eyes that'll fit her, I am forced to behave.
I also painted one of my two Ingenue heads last night. I'm not very happy with it, as my Volks pastels did NOT go on in the colors I expected (I always found their browns to be a little yellow, but still.. yikes!) and I wasn't able to create what I had envisioned. So the first pass was translucent and barely visible. Then I went for the only colors that would show up: day-glo! and it was awful, so then I covered the bright blue (:P) with more black and now she has a semi-decent if rather overdone face-up. Good enough for now. I'm not adding eyelashes, though. Those will have to wait for a face-up I'm satisfied with. Shame, I rather like the eyebrows. I may give her a different wig for when I photograph this face-up, as the wig I got for Boone needs a lot of customizing before I think it'll work. It makes her look like Zsa Zsa Gabor when blank, and this too-much-eyeliner version of her will definitely not help that.
I'll put in the only pair of 16mm eyes I have, if I can dig them up, until the Caribbean 16mm from Safrin arrive.
I'm still working on the Rococo Cephalopod dress, and I'm at a point where I think I need to make a run for more trim, but it's hard to tell without seeing how it'll go together. The tentacles look pretty good; I ended up making them the same length as the skirts, and I have a bunch of "bubble" beads I can play with so I don't know how much trim, or what type, I will actually need.
The only thing that bugs me is that the dress is pretty plain in its shape, due to the pattern I started with, so there isn't all the crazy decadent layers of fluff:
But I'm afraid to add too much because the tentacles are the primary feature on the dress. I suppose I really need to just temporarily sew the thing together and see what I think at that point.
Other than that loss of direction, the dress is coming together very well. I am making a second non-octopus dress to list on etsy, and will make trim decisions about that one after I see how this first one looks and what it needs.
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| Here, beautiful and mine. |
[Thursday September 29 8:41 am] |
She's here!
Posted my box opening thread on DoA, click the image above to go view the whole thing! :)
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[Tuesday September 27 11:44 pm] |
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Zooka is here! Looks like the head is yellowed a bit from age (6 years old), so I will probably do a pinkish dye bath to bring her back around before I paint her. 88% humidity meant I was going to be sewing tonight anyway. Got three of the eight tentacles done, could have gotten further but needed to reduce their girth to fit them all. But the dupioni satin did well with my equipment, so I'm gaining courage.
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[Tuesday September 27 6:32 am] |
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Finally some movement on Zooka's head! She's in my state, wonder if she will be delivered today or tomorrow? More sewing tonight (unless she's arrived and the weather is nice...) Posted via LiveJournal app for iPhone.
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| Custom Woes (Woahs) |
[Monday September 26 2:15 pm] |
Zooka's head zipped into the country and then came to a skreeching halt in NY Customs.
My Ingenue arrived in California faster than I anticipated, but hasn't moved since.
I'm trying to give customs the benefit of the doubt (perhaps they were being VERY careful around the 11th and have had a crazy back-up since?) but really I am inpatient and I would like my dolls now, please.
Sticker-shocked myself on the cost of the dress's fabric when I accidentally picked up a dupioni silk that someone put back with the costume fabric (I thought it was 40% off $9/yd polyester...). As it turns out I overestimated (HOW? I was so careful!) the amount I'd need, so I'm making a second, non-octopus dress at the same time, which I'll list on etsy. Maybe that'll help offset the price.
Took all day yesterday to cut out the fabric. Then nearly all of my straight pins to assemble just three tentacles for sewing. I didn't want to leave them for last, though, just in case I miscalculated something. I am slightly concerned they might be too wide.
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| Rococo Cephalopod |
[Thursday September 22 11:50 am] |
In 2006, a customer had approached me about doing a big fancy Rococo Dress for a Pullip costume commission. Between emails, we concocted a very great atrocious thing combining an interest in cephalopods & the Cthulhu mythos and I was really looking forward to working on it.
Unfortunately the commission never came about, but I was thinking about what to sew for Zooka so that I didn't feel like I was throwing her right back in the same old clothes.
I decided to follow through on this concept and concoct the Rococo Cephalopod.
As this will take long enough in the cutting and pinning, I am starting from the MHD pattern "Madame De Pompadour," which I purchased last night, and modifying it from there.
I will do a test run with whatever fabric I have on hand, since the Dollfie Dream II proportions are so very different, and then once I have adjusted the pattern and crafted my own for add-ons, I will finally go buy the yards and yards required for the final pattern.
Starting now in the hopes that it can premiere as a Halloween costume.
(Her head has firmly lodged itself under a desk in customs somewhere, so it's good I've come up with a project to work on this weekend so I don't implode from impatience. Turns out the weather Sunday won't be as nice as previously forecast, so I am not too upset about the delay in shipping.. as long as she doesn't get shipped back to Korea!)
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| Tracking Frenzy |
[Tuesday September 20 9:42 am] |
Ingenue
I have a tracking number for my Ingenue now! I'm trying to prepare myself for that process because the method isn't quite as fast as EMS and tends to be slow to update, so right now I'm waiting for the number to even register as accepted in NSW.
Zooka
She's nearly to JFK! She should land before lunch today but who knows how long she'll sit in customs. If it's a zip, she could be here tomorrow. If they feel like I do on this rainy day, it could be Saturday. :P
It's going to be a nail-biting sequence of days!
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| Resinsoul Gang Commission |
[Monday September 19 8:32 am] |
I was commissioned to paint a Resinsoul Gang that belongs to the same person who purchased my Day of the Dead "Siempre" MNF custom. She wanted another Skull-faced Doll to bring to a Halloween Meet, but left the rest of the details to me.
Click the photo above to view his page on my website with a few more photos, including a detail shot.
Normally this would free up another commission spot, but with two new dolls on the way I'm going to just keep open the two spots that were already available. After Columbus day weekend nice days are few and far between and I don't want to keep people waiting. I am so happy to have had great weather for this commission; Gang arrived on Friday and is shipping out Monday. Huzzah!
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| Inbound! |
[Monday September 19 8:28 am] |
I have a tracking number for Zooka's new head, and my Ingenue will be shipping tomorrow (AUS time).
Exciting week of number stalking ahead! I am hoping for some good weather when the Juri head arrives so I can paint it before the Ingenue arrives, and crummy weather while I work on the Ingenue kit so I am not cursing the skies that I'm not ready to paint yet. ;)
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| Bernie |
[Friday September 16 6:25 pm] |
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