Tiny Tuesday - Chelsea Cheeseburger. Shopkins get really creepy.

 I haven't mentioned my Shopkins Happy Places house in a while. I've been waiting until I get my hands on all the new furniture sets, so I can get it done all at once. Unfortunately there is still one set I haven't been able to find anywhere and I'm still not quite desperate enough to spend forty dollars for it on ebay. Part of the problem seems to be every shop seems to still have a million of the bathroom sets from the first season, so they're not restocking. That's a slight exaggeration but we were recently at a Target that had three of last season's bedroom set, one of last season's kitchen set and FORTY-FIVE of last season's bathroom! When I first got the bathroom set, I did not like the doll that came with it. She was wearing a robe and had yellow bubbles in her hair. Why yellow? I don't know. The yellow bubbles really bug me. But now seeing how many of that set, with that doll are still in shops, probably never to be sold, I feel bad for that doll instead. My husband says that's weird.

Anyway, I couldn't wait to show this little doll. Chelsea Cheeseburger. She's one of the individually packaged dolls that comes with two accessories and she's super cute.

There is nothing to not like here! It's all wins! Brightly coloured, burger themed, sailorish dress - cute! Adorable hamburger hair accessory - cute! Screaming, red hair - cute! Pigtails - cute! Bright, red shoes - cute! The cold, dead eyes of a killer - Wait! What!? Ah, it seems Chelsea isn't so cute after all. Let's take a look at the back of her packaging . . .

It seems Chelsea Cheeseburger is off to the Puppy Parlour (aka loungeroom) to smile as she shares some tasty grilled treats with her Petkins (sentient furniture) friends! And what tasty treat is she sharing with her demonic coffee table and couch? Why that perky little cheeseburger that's smiling at her so trustingly in the photo above! Yay! Cannibalism!

Not quite so cute now!
Don't get me wrong, I still think these are absolutely adorable but there are so many details that just make me shake my head and wonder how they happened. Like how did anyone make up the story of Chelsea bringing a new friend along as a sacrifice to be eaten alive by her and her friends wasn't just disturbing?
It is funny though.

Finally, we get some good news!

The Giant Baby has been on the waiting list for an Early Intervention Test. That's a test where experts run tests disguised as games in order to diagnose children who may have developmental issues, and decide what services are appropriate for them.

I've had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I've been 99.9% sure that there's absolutely nothing wrong with him, except that he can't talk. On the other hand, I'm not a doctologist, and so I have wondered if maybe I've been in denial. At the end of the day, I've figured that if there's nothing wrong, we don't lose anything by having him take the test, but if we are in denial, it's probably better that he takes the test sooner rather than later. But I've also looked at the whole thing as a massive bother, and a pain in the neck.

Part of the issue, was the preliminary test he had to do to see if he qualified for the big test. Half of the test, you can't pass if you can't talk. And the lady that did it, did that bit first. By the time she was halfway through, the Giant Baby had decided he didn't like her, and had his hands over his ears. By the time she moved onto other things, she was getting pretty impatient, and  he really didn't like her, so he insisted on not only ignoring her, but also standing with his back to her. He did not do well on that test. Part of me wanted to say the result wasn't fair. Another part of me felt that doing that would make me sound like one of those parents that blame all of their kids issues on their teacher.

They got back to us about the next test today. He won't be taking it. The people that do the test have reveiwed the application, and his earlier test results, and spoken to his daycare centre, and they've rejected the entire application. From the information they have, they've decided that clearly the only issue is that he can't speak, and since he's only just turned two, they don't find that overly concerning, so the test isn't necessary. Instead, they've referred us to a speech therapist.

This is the result that I was expecting to have, but after he took the test. To have this result already, feels like a huge relief and a small victory. He still has to have a hearing test next week, but I really don't think there's anything wrong with his hearing. Sure, he often appears not to hear me when I say something he doesn't want to hear, but he can hear a fridge doir opening, or an offer of juice, from three streets away.

 It's really unsettling to hear, that there may be something wrong with your child. But, it's really nice to hear proper experts saying he's absolutely normal and basically backing up what I've been saying all along!

Tiny Tuesday - Phoenix Models Tea Caddy and Cruet set

 This week for Tiny Tuesday I have two dollhouse items by Warwick Miniatures. Warwick Miniatures are made by Phoenix Model Developments who specialise in white metal miniatures. Some of their stuff is amazing in it's detail and historical accuracy. Much of it comes as kits of cast pewter pieces that require painting and assembly. The two items I have today are polished white metal that look rather like silver (but are probably pewter) so they didn't require painting.

 First is this tea caddy. It's TINY! The engraving looks a little crude in this picture but in real life it looks extremely delicate because it's so very small.

The lid is removable and has further engraving. The only fault I can find with this is that I wish the interior was enamelled white. In all honesty, I have no idea if tea caddies were commonly enamelled white on the inside, I just remember that my grandmother's was. I need to look that up and if it turns out that that was indeed how they were made, paint the inside white.

Next is this cruet set. I was determined that my dollhouse family needed a cruet set. Realistically while not every house has a special fancy matching cruet set, it's probably fair to say that a selection of condiments for the dinner table is something you would expect to see in most houses in most eras. And once upon a time (long before I was born) one of my family members always gave people cruet sets as wedding presents, so as a child whenever we visited our older relatives, they always had beautiful cruet sets on their dining tables. Some were used, some were purely decorative, all made excellent makeshift dolls if the adults were being boring. When I wanted one for my dollhouse I discovered they were pretty thin on the ground in dollhouse land but this one is so beautiful, it makes up for all the ones that don't exist.

 There's a decorative stand and six tiny bottles. The bottles are made in pairs, two of each shape. Tall, thin oil bottles, medium sized salt and pepper shaker, and two little pots for pickle or mustard. These are so tiny that when I dropped them on the floor by accident, while taking pictures, I actually found them by closing my eyes and running my hand over the carpet rather than looking for them!

To me it's the little touches like this, that real people would actually have had in their houses, that are often overlooked because they're such a part of day to day life, that take a dollhouse from being a toy or plaything to actually being a miniature representation of life at a moment in time.

And here's another picture of the cruet set with a Lego minifigure for scale.

Adventures in Deconstructing Barbie

 Wow. I did a lot of research into removing Barbie's head and it scared me. Article after article, blog post after blog post pointed out how hard it is to remove her head. How fragile her neck is. How careful you have to be if you don't want to break her. How doing it successfully is a matter of luck not skill. In the end I was nearly too scared to try.

 But I did try and honestly I have no idea what all the fuss is about. It's not hard. They can't break that easily since I pulled off eight heads without being gentle at all and not one body broke.

 I filled a plastic container with hot tap water and left the dolls heads soaking in it for about five minutes then with the help of a mini screwdriver from an eyeglass repair kit, the heads came right off. A couple were more difficult, but I found by putting them back in the hot water for another minute or two, the vinyl softened up enough to make it a piece of cake.

 On the other hand the neck pegs were all gross with globs of glue and the mini screwdriver I used is now absolutely disgusting from the horrible glue their heads are filled with. (Actually at the moment it's soaking in white vinegar to hopefully melt the glue.) I am already filled with hatred for that glue! It got everywhere! It's disgusting and spreading and too bloody awful for words!

 After I'd done some decapitating I decided to rip the hair out of one of the Barbies that I'm thinking of rerooting. That particular game has changed. My old method for that was to cut the hair short, pull as much as I could out from the outside of the head using tweezers, then pull the rest out from the inside. It took a while but it wasn't at all taxing. Now! I found I couldn't pull ANY hair out from the outside because the inside was so chunky with glue and to pull it out from the inside I was having to soften the glue in hot water and then almost gouge at the hair plugs inside the head! The glue would go soft and runny whenever it was warm, then resolidify as soon as it cooled. As I said before it got EVERYWHERE! I feel weird about the idea of kids playing with these dolls if their heads are going to be leaking sticky, gross, glue whenever they get warm.

 Only one of the Barbies has her new head so far. I ran out of time. But this was the doll that inspired the whole project. I loved her face but her weird transparent pink and glittery body, with flesh coloured knees for some ungodly reason, made her unusable in my eyes. Now she has a tall body and even though the colour match isn't perfect, she still looks a million times better.

I just wish Mattel would stop ruining perfectly good toys. Finally they stop woth the gross sticky plastisizer leaking legs on everything and immediately introduce heads filled with super gross, hopefully not extremely toxic, glue. What is wrong with them?

Barbies, Maru and other distractions

I've missed two Tiny Tuesday posts now because I'm a terrible human being . . . or because I'm incredibly, easily distracted.

 The week before last, I actually had something all planned but then on my way home from taking the Giant Baby to daycare, I decided to stop by the local op-shops and see what dolls they had. Unfortunately the answer to that was very few. One shop had a bunch of Bratz with no feet, another had a handful of Barbies that were frankly beyond rescue and the others had nothing. On the other hand I found a copy of the works of Shakespeare for the Giant Husband and a big ride-on Thomas the Tank Engine for the Giant Baby for two dollars!
Once I got it home I immediately took off again to buy nail polish to patch up Thomas's paintwork. Nail polish is probably not ideal for plastics but since Thomas is hard plastic it won't wreck him outright and as we can't keep it inside, we needed something hard wearing. Any wheeled toys that come inside, the baby immediately hauls on top of our television cabinet to drive them back and forth. The last thing I need is a Giant Thomas the Tank Engine chugging through my TV! Most of last week was devoted to cleaning Thomas up and repainting him. It was worth it though. He looks great and the kid loves him!

This week I was busy running up some simple dancing skirts for daycare's dress up box. Nothing fancy, just a rectangle of tulle, folded double with a casing for an elastic waistband along the fold. I think I did twelve altogether.
Both days I fully intended to post something when I was done but ran out of time.

What else has been distracting me?
One of my obsessions is genealogy and lately I've been putting some effort into my family tree. Two weeks ago, I discovered that the state of Victoria have their historical birth, marriage and death indexes online for free now. I haven't looked at their site for years, so don't know how long it's been like that. Last time I looked you had to pay a dollar for every page of results you viewed and they had less information in them than they do now. You still have to pay for certificates but the indexes still offer quite a lot of info. But I know that kind of thing bores most people to tears so I won't yammer on about it.

 A few weeks ago I realised I finally had enough money in my "Doll Savings" to buy something! This is the first time this has happened since the baby was born, I kept dipping into it to buy clothes and toys for him. Now he's got more clothes and toys than he'll ever need. Anyway, I knew I was either going to get Willa from the Wellie Wishers or a Maru mini pal from Maru and friends. If you'd asked me ahead of time, I would have said I would choose Willa. Except I didn't. When I was actually given the choice my sensible brain made one of it's rare appearances to point out that since Willa looks like a toy, I would probably get tired of her pretty quickly and so I ordered Maru instead. I picked her up from the post office this morning. Interestingly she has taken longer to get to my house from Melbourne airport, than she took to get to Melbourne from Miami! I chose Maru over the other characters because of her shoes. I wasn't sure if I would have any shoes to fit her and if I wanted to redress her, Maru's black Mary-Janes were going to be more versatile than the other characters shoes. I've only had a quick look with one pair in each size so far but MSD shoes are going to be way too big. The pair of YOSD shoes I tried fit her but they were quite snug so hopefully largish YOSD shoes should be ok.  I find it weird that she came wearing a white t-shirt under her dress and with tissue paper around her arms and neck. I realise this is so her dress doesn't stain her but surely if she has to be wrapped in tissue to wear the dress, that's a sign that that may not be the best dress for her to be wearing? Oh, well. I love her anyway, so much that I'm already making nefarious plans to find a way to get the other dolls. I really like Jamie. Her colouring reminds me of the Giant Baby, but she's not available as a mini doll yet.

I also finally found a signature Maddie Hatter doll. Years ago I had a collection of Monster High and Ever After High dolls. During a clean out, I had a fit of generosity and gave them all to one of our nieces. Later I got a seventeen inch Frankie Stein and Maddie Hatter. Then I got a standard Frankie to go with the big one. But I couldn't find a Maddie anywhere! This one is a reissue with no earrings or ring and I'm pretty sure the first release had a different handbag, but it's good enough for me. I wish I could get the 28 inch Maddie as well but no toy shops here seem to have even heard of it and international postage on something that size would be too much to be worth it.

I got Barbies for mother's day. A curvy one, a tall one and a petite one. Then today our supermarket was selling off their old toy stock and the Fashionistas were six dollars, so I got two more. Now I need to find time for body swapping! I haven't bought a Barbie in about ten years and I swear the packages were easier to open then! These ones couldn't have been harder if they were welded into sheet metal tubes! I was happy to see there seems to be less product in their hair now but a few of them have hair that feels weirdly greasy and sticky at the same time, that left weird wet patches on their boxes. I'm guessing that I'm finally encountering glue-head syndrome. I'd be more upset if I wasn't already planning to rip their heads off.

Being an old cynic, I had assumed that the curvy Barbie was just going to be the Happy Family Grandma body with a Barbie head. One of the first things I did was compare them and I'm pleased to see that it's not.

I'm also working on a (probably hopeless) plan to bully myself into doing more stuff, rather than just planning to do stuff. Hopefully it works once I've finished planning it out but not really ready to decide how likely it is to work yet. For now, it's time for me to stop procrastinating and pull the heads off some Barbies.

What have I been doing?

We had the Giant Baby's birthday recently. We got him a Thomas the Tank Engine train set and some extra trains. If I were to do this again, I would get even more trains and forget about the actual train tracks for a while because he doesn't really care about them yet. I ended up getting most of the trains second hand from ebay because those things are expensive!

Here's a fun game - guess which item cost more. . .

Surprisingly both were fifteen dollars! Even more surprisingly both of them were reduced from eighteen dollars!

 I finished the pony that I was making for my work friend. At the last minute, I decided it wasn't impressive enough, so I made miniature packaging for it too. Complete with cartoon horse pictures that I changed to look like this one and a blurb on the back of the box. Unfortunately I never thought to take a photograph of the back of the box, which was the best part.

 I also finished Not-Glinda's dress a while ago. Since last time I showed it here, I finished the back opening and added fastenings and a belt. Also I put the petticoat she came in, under the skirt which really helped with the overall look. Originally I planned on giving her an elaborate hairstyle but as I was making the dress I kept thinking of it as a little girl's first "grown-up" dress, and I think the natural hairstyle fits in with that pretty well. I've been putting off taking photos of it, thinking I would get a light tent made to take the photos in. (I've made a small one, but she won't fit in it.) But this week I decided to just get the photos over and done with before I completely forgot. They're not anything to write home about but they're done. I also named her. Instead of being weirdly referred to as "Not-Glinda", her name is Charlotte now.

 I know it's more usual for dresses of this period to have the bolero effect come together at the centre front, instead of meeting with the side seams but my starting point was this portrait of Alexandra and Elena Pavlovna, and then other portraits of the same two sisters, perhaps this was the fashionable style of court dress in Russia at the time?

 Ordinarily I would write this dress up properly and share the pattern but because I started this so long ago, I have absolutely no idea where the pattern is now. I'm pretty sure it was thrown out but it may turn up one day.

 I've made a small photography light tent (which I've used in a few of my recent posts) as a test, to see if it worked before making one large enough to photograph dolls in. So far, I've found it more useful to eliminate glare in brightly lit areas than with lamps. BUT the one time I've attempted to use it with lamps, I got it all set up before discovering that one of the lamps didn't work so that really wasn't a fair test. I wanted to get the large box made today and written up over the weekend but with the amount of housework and boring household sewing I have to do, I can already see I won't get time.

 My two Baby So Beautiful dolls are still unfinished. One needs a dress and I just can't settle on what I want to make her. The other really needs a new wig but I'm resisting replacing her original wig even though it's hopelessly dry. Strangely, the driest part is the fringe, which is the only part I have never heated or boiled.

 At the moment, I'm working on making underwear for my Dollmore Zihu. She's supposed to be the character Claudia from Interview with the Vampire. If you don't know the story, Claudia is a child (about five in the book, about ten in the film) that is turned into a vampire in roughly the 1790's, gets hopelessly spoiled, has a bunch of psychological problems because her mind is maturing but her body is not and dies tragically in the 1880's. Cheerful stuff. But her clothes in the movie are magnificent. I plan on making her random regency era garments but also recreating the dresses from the movie. Especially this one which is absolutely glorious! I copied that one years ago, as a dress for a "When I read I dream" Stacie size doll, but it's kind of embarrassingly bad to look at it now. The hardest part in recreating the movie costume will be finding fabrics in the right fibres and colours for a decent price. But I have a fabric that will do beautifully for the bustle dress, when I'm feeling brave enough to make it. Right now I'm making simple drawers and a petticoat, then a regency style dress, aiming for midway between boringly simple and too hard to make with all of them. I'm doing the underwear first because it's the part I'm least interested in, so if I didn't make it first, I'd probably come up with an excuse to skip it all together.

 I also have two Barbie projects underway. Firstly, I was recently reading about conservation of plastics and it seems plastic's biggest enemy is humidity. It's recommended that plastics never be stored wrapped in plastic or synthetic fabrics or in sealed plastic containers. Instead, they should be wrapped in natural fibres (so cotton, unless you really want to wrap them in finest shantung silk), or paper towel, or (randomly) coffee filters. And stored in cardboard or wooden boxes. So I dug out these ladies. . .

And on the right near the bottom is my old Claudia doll. I couldn't work out how to get her

dress off, so she's been packed away wearing it.

And have been sorting them by doll and head mold, and cataloguing them, wrapping them in paper towel, tagging them so I can see what they are without unwrapping them and repacking them in cardboard boxes. It's way more tedious and time consuming than I expected when I came up with the idea. (It also explains why I was so skinny when I first moved out of home. Clearly, I was spending all my money on dolls instead of food!)

That project gave me the idea of getting a Made to Move Barbie and switch her head with another Barbie. I've also arranged to get one of each of the new body type Barbies (one tall, one short, one curvy) for Mother's day (which is Sunday week in Australia) and plan on doing the same with them. I still need to research head swap techniques that can be done just with hot water though, because I'm not buying a hair drier just to swap a Barbie head or two.

 Hopefully I'll have a more interesting report soon.

Tiny Tuesday - Reutter Porzellan kitchen items

 This week I have a selection of kitchen items by Reutter. I absolutely love Reutter's miniatures and would probably have a lot more of them if it weren't for two things. Firstly they can be quite expensive and secondly a lot of them are just too fancy. For example they have sets that are a handful of crockery sitting in a dish drainer, like they've just been washed. Except all of the dish racks are gold. Unless your dollhouse is the Palace of Versailles, that's just going to look weird! The one other thing to note about Reutter's miniatures is that whilst they're 1:12 scale, they're very delicately made and consequently can look undersized compared to some other 1:12 scale items. They have a lot of teeny tiny minatures made of metal and porcelain. But they also have larger pieces of furniture, sometimes with miniatures displayed with or on them, that have been stuck down. I'm never as impressed by their larger furniture pieces as I am by their delicate miniatures. I have heard that at least their wooden furniture pieces are actually made by a dollhouse company called Aztec (who I don't associate with high quality products, they're not awful but they are fairly ordinary) which would explain why they're not as high quality as the other pieces. Unfortunately I don't know if this is true or not.

This first item is a lovely old world wood burning oven. It's all metal, so even in the scenario above, I have no idea which company would actually make this. There are two little doors and a drawer (an ash drawer maybe?) in the front that open, and all the little hotplate covers on top lift off. The two on the right even have a sort of metal mesh underneath them.

 My favourite thing about this set is that whilst most dollhouse stoves that have chimneys, the chimneys are designed to extend to the roof. This means you either have to find a stove the exact right height for your kitchen, or cut the flue to size. This one has a curved flue that connects to the wall. The small issue with this, is that my kitchen has wooden beading on the lower wall, which means the flue isn't quite long enough to reach the wall, but I've fixed this by painting a small piece of balsa wood to go between the flue and the wall. If I was smarter, I probably would have realised that it's highly unlikely someone would have put wooden beading behind an extremely hot, wood burning stove.
My only gripe with this item is that the oven door (the big door on the left) falls open constantly.

 Next is this adorable little honey pot. This kind of showcases the slight weirdness of Reutter's scale. The honey dipper thing (I don't know what they're called) is in the scale of most dollhouse scale items, while the tiny honey pot is in Reutter's slightly smaller scale. This is extra weird, since they came packaged together.
 The honey pot is porcelain and so small that, looking at it in real life, it's clear that it's supposed to be a beehive with bees on it. Looking at it magnified in pictures, that isn't as obvious. The lid comes off and there's a small indent in it, theoretically so that the lid can close with the dipper in place. Except if you try that this happens . . .

The indent is nowhere near big enough!

Here's a closer look at the decorations

It just looks like a blob here, but it's actually a bee with three-dimensional wings. . . 

and possibly two heads?

  

  This pot set is one of my absolute favourite Reutter items. The pot lids are "painted" with Reutter's "Blue Onion" design, which I love. I also desperately love the little string of garlic! When I was a child, my Grandmother had two plaited ropes in her kitchen. One hung either side of the door. One had bows of floral fabric and whole garlic cloves at intervals, the other had little bags of floral fabric filled with herbs at the same intervals. The herbs were supposed to make the kitchen smell pretty. They only ever smelt of dust to me and I don't know if the garlic was even real, since it would have been about twenty years old, I'm guessing it wasn't. But I was adamant that I wanted a string of garlic hanging in my dollhouse. And this one is lovely.

  I think the pots are solid copper, although it's possible they're plated. They're surprisingly heavy. The handles are painted black and have holes in them so they can be hung up. Unfortunately I suspect any hook small enough to go through the hole, wouldn't be strong enough to support the weight of the pot. Luckily I don't intend on hanging them anyway.

Until I saw this photo, I never even noticed that the hole in the handle isn't perfect!

  The lids are porcelain and beautifully decorated but frankly they could fit better. The painting is actually decals but that's only to be expected. Nobody could paint that neatly, that small! Reutter have about a dozen different designs that they paint on things. This one is definitely my favourite.

This is the best picture I could get.

  The other thing I love about Reutter is their packaging. The large items (like the stove) come in boring white boxes with the Reutter logo in black. But the little sets (like the pots) come in great little perspex display boxes, stuck down with little dots of double-sided foam tape.

A collection of miniatures, displayed in these boxes would look great

  The newer "singles" line (like the honey pot) only include one or two items and come in cute little clamshells

I don't like these as much as the boxes. They don't stand up on their own without leaning forward and a few of the things I have that came in these, detatched from the base before I got them, which looked untidy, and one thing even broke! But they're still a lot nicer than the little plastic bags most dollhouse accessories come in.

  If I had all the money in the world, I would probably fill my entire house with Reutter miniatures. But I don't. And what items I do have are among my most treasured dollhouse pieces.