Word of the month wrap up. Sundress pictures.

 I now have an armload of dolly sundresses! I had to make one. I ended up making three shirred sundresses, four standard sundresses and four party dresses from the standard sundress pattern! Grand total of ELEVEN dresses! (One was for my 18 inch doll and the pictures of her did NOT turn out so will need to be reshot.)

The dress that started it all. . .

  I'm quite happy with how this one turned out. I couldn't draw up the shirring as tightly as I would have liked to because 1. The printable fabric I used can run when wet so I wasn't brave enough to try steam blasting it with the iron; and 2. The elastic I used is extremely cheap and nasty and melts when ironed. After I'd made all the dresses I discovered that you can draw the shirring up more by just pulling on the ends of the elastic but it was too late by then.

I used pretty much the same design to make this dress for Molly, my Maru Mini Pal. . .

 I didn't realise until after I'd made it that Molly is kind of weirdly shaped in the shoulder area. Her shoulders are more the shape of a bisque doll's shoulder-plate than human shoulders. And so a design this strappy makes her shoulders look very slopey and in general makes her look lopsided and awkward.

  But the same dress also fits my Disney toddlers. . .

Although if I was making this for this doll, I would probably make it a little shorter.
AND it also fits my 14 inch Kish Chrysalis dolls. . .

This is Tabitha, a re-wigged Piper, and I LOVE this dress on her. This combination of doll and dress is definitely my favourite from this project!

  Then there are the procrastination dresses that I designed and sewed while I was putting off learning to do shirring. I made patterns, then had fun designing dresses. I worked with four doll sizes. My 14 inch Kish Chrysalis dolls, my 12 inch Kish Chrysalis dolls, my Maru Mini Pal, and my Wilde Imagination Patience dolls. Each size got a sundress and a party dress. Although in all honesty there were only two sizes because the bigger Helen Kish dolls are the same size as Maru, and the smaller Helen Kish dolls are the same size as Patience, other than a few tweaks of skirt and shoulder strap lengths.

  I really like this dress I made for the 12 inch Chrysalis girls. . .

 Originally I was going to adapt the same design for the 14 inch girls (I wish I had) but instead they got this. . .

Which I don't hate but it's really just not my style either.

 Molly got a cute little flower themed dress. . .

Which looks a lot better on her than the shirred one, I think it's the wider shoulder straps.
And it also looks alright on Ariel. . .

  And I discovered that Patience is a LOT of fun to design for. Because she has a fairly cartoonish face, I feel I can be a bit silly when designing for her and it's o'kay because she can get away with it! Nevertheless her sundress is fairly sweet and restrained. . .

I totally designed that as an excuse to use that fabric!

 While I was still planning those, I saw a flower girl dress in a shop window and thought to myself it looked like it could be made from the same pattern. So I made this for Molly. . .

 Then, of course, I had to make party dresses for the other dolls!

 My bigger Kish dolls got this. . .

This one didn't turn out how I expected and I'm not completely happy with it. But I do have an idea that it made be salvageable with a belt, but I forgot about that when I was taking the pictures and right now (while I don't love it) I'm accepting it as it is. It reminds me of the sort of dresses that people put on their daughters before sending them to a portrait session involving an ornate, vintage tea table that is, for no obvious reason, in the middle of an orchard or wheat field. (And of course all the photos must be printed in sepia tone or some other artistically faded effect.)

  My smaller Kish dolls got this dress which is definitely more fun. . .

 It had been meant to be rainbow coloured. Each tier a completely different colour. But I couldn't find the meshy gauzey stuff in four colours that worked together. It would have had to be three pastel and a fluorescent, or three brights and a pastel, and similar combinations which wouldn't have worked. So I compromised with all pink.

 I had most fun designing Patience's dress. It is definitely inspired by some of the dresses worn by various dolls based on the Tiana character from Princess and the Frog. And whilst Alice's colouring could not be more different to Tiana's, it still looks pretty cute on her. . .

Although I really probably should have styled her hair before I took these pictures.

And of course while I was taking the pictures for this post, I had to take some extra, just pretty pictures. . .

I HAD to share those two pictures of Molly, mostly because I spent an obscene amount of time editing all her flyaway hairs out of the pictures! I have discovered that I do not like her hair. It looks pretty and silky. It feels pretty and silky. But there's a curve to it, that won't go away, that's completely out of scale; and it gets flyaways like you wouldn't believe.

Even if  I don't like the dress, I do like this picture of Amarie. It reminds me of the old promotional photos for Heloise's dolls.

I don't know how I quite got this lighting in the next picture. . .

But I like it.

And of course I had to get a picture of the two littlies in their sundresses together. . .

Although Arden doesn't look like she's enjoying herself anywhere near as much as Lydia!

And then, because I loved her in that dress, I got some more pictures of Tabitha in the poppy sundress. . .

I also set up a "beach" and took some themed pictures. Unfortunately most of those are the photos that did not turn out right and no matter what I did, I couldn't fix the colour and contrast in them but here are the few that I do have. . .

Gwendolen takes a look at Adriel's sketch

Eloise waits for the other girls to come and play horseshoes with her

But they're too busy collecting shells, and complaining about all the broken ones

Arden and Lydia have decided to try to dig through to China!

But it didn't take long for them to get tired out and give up!

I still plan on making PDFs of the patterns to put on the blog but, I haven't gotten around to it yet. It's probably going to be another week depending on how much real life insists on intruding. Also I will be adding "How to make a doll's shirred sundress in any size", so more to come soon!

Everything goes well . . .

The Giant Baby has had all of his hearing tests for the moment and seen all of his specialists and his hearing is steadily improving. Basically whatever fluid was trapped in his ears is slowly draining away. He's going to have to have regular hearing tests to make sure the problem doesn't return but for now he's going to be fine.

And he is picking up new words. "No" is still his favourite but over the last week he's added "mine" and "don't" to his repertoire. And he's finally started actually calling his dad "Dad". His speech therapist (who he loves and keeps trying to drag me back to her office) thinks he'll probably catch up on his own and so he doesn't have to have another appointment with her for another three months.

I delude myself how much easier it would be if he could talk. "Would you like yoghurt or an apple?" "Do you want to watch Toy Story or Frozen?" "Do you want the blue cup or the orange cup?" Even though I know that most two year olds are psychotic little dictators that will specifically ask for one thing and then freak out because they actually wanted the other thing. At least this way I can pretend he's freaking out because I didn't understand and not because he's a mad person.

I'm seriously considering learning Dianna Effner's eye painting techniques. I've always wanted to be able to do more with my dolls and I'm a big fan of her work. But I'm having trouble finding affordable dolls to practice on. I need a doll with painted eyes and molded eye sockets (like Barbie but preferably bigger) but literally all of the dolls available here seem to have inset eyes or flat faces with decal eyes. I'm thinking of resorting to Ebay and getting some second hand Lil Miss or Dolly Surprise dolls. For now I got to practice my fantastic dolly skills at work last week when someone uncovered a naked, headless El Cheapo Barbie in a cupboard.

She's stunningly beautiful now!

Almost every shop near us has posters in the window at the moment advertising an upcoming Stevie Nicks concert at one of the local wineries. This is driving me mental. I haven't listened to her music in years now but from the age of four to about twenty-five, I would have given my right arm to go to that. And for that reason I kind of want to go. But at the same time I know that the winery concerts tend to be a little disappointing. A friend of mine goes to see INXS every year and every year she says the same thing. "It was a great day out, but it wasn't really worth going for the music." Which is pretty much what I hear from everyone that goes to these things. So as someone that doesn't drink alcohol (I know! I could lose my Australian citizenship for admitting that but I'm too much of a control freak to enjoy it) and doesn't like crowds, I'm not sure that I would enjoy it enough to justify spending two hundred dollars on tickets. But I also worry that if I don't go, I'll regret it.

Last weekend I got one of the Our Generation accessory sets thinking the scale would be right for my 14 inch dolls. I chose a beach set, thinking that when I take photos of the sundresses I've made this month, I can use them as props. I don't have a picture of the set yet and haven't checked the scale against my dolls yet but most of it looks like it will work. If it does, there may be more of these in my future. (Especially since I just got a Kmart gift card!) Weirdly it looks more likely that some things are going to be too small for my dolls rather than too big. For example, there's a sandcastle that looks to me more like Barbie scale than 14 or 18 inch doll scale!

I finally ordered a Wellie Wisher doll. I kept talking myself out of it because to make an international order with American Girl, you have to do it by phone. I hate talking on the phone. AND frankly time zones are a pain in the neck to figure out, especially if you're incorporating things like daylight savings time. AND then there are international dialling codes . . . Ugh. Yeah, turns out those things are easy to google and were probably just excuses not to have to talk on the phone. Hopefully she'll get here soon.

Last week I discovered that shirring isn't even vaguely as scary as I've been imagining it to be. I had poured over tutorials online and lots of them said it wasn't scary. None of them pointed out that it is literally just sewing straight lines with your sewing machine! It probably wouldn't even be noticeable if the lines weren't quite straight. Although it's possible that I just lucked out by having a sewing machine that likes shirring. Either way it only took me twenty five minutes to make a coffee, wind a bobbin with elastic, do a test run, shir a dress and finish sewing the remaining seams on the dress! I'm sure I could still play around with different stitch lengths, a better brand of elastic and different tensions to perfect it but I could already do it competently on my first try so it can't be too hard! The biggest issue I had was that nobody local had the Gutterman's shirring elastic in stock so I was using an incredibly cheap brand. (The only one I could find.) And every tutorial ended with ironing the shirring to shrink it up more. I couldn't do that because even using my iron's lowest setting my elastic was melty burning and marking the fabric and smelling like death!

 As for the sundresses, I put on some finishing touches Thursday. Currently I have a pile of ten dresses made from the sundress patterns I made. Hopefully I can get photos taken of them on actual dolls on Tuesday.

I'm also trying to work out the best way to get the finished patterns on here in a printable format that takes into account that the US uses a different paper size to the rest of the world. Where to host the PDF file and what size to make it. If I use US paper sizes, it won't print right anywhere else. If I use the international standard, it won't print right in the US. I'm also avoiding thinking about that because it's confusing. Life was so much easier before I knew not everywhere uses A4 paper! At the moment I'm pretty sure I'm just going to take the smaller length and width measurement from each so it will print as smaller than a full page on either paper size.

And since this post is already all over the place, I'm going to leave it here.

August Update - Beach

 I'm not sure where I was up to when I last posted. But that day I got the fabric for the shirred sundress printed and lined. Then I read instructions for shirring, both by hand and machine. Doing it by hand sounded like I'd have more control over how tight the gathers were. Shirring by machine sounds easy but in a way that makes me cynical, like it can't possibly be that easy and there are probably a million things that will go wrong. Either way, I was completely intimidated.
 I will still finish that dress. I will. But right now I'm procrastinating. But at least I'm procrastinating fairly productively. I drafted a pattern for a simple sundress and I'm using it to make four sundresses and four party dresses. Still not overly beachy but oh well. Six of them are nearly finished. Two more to make, then add press studs and shoulder straps and close the backs and they're done! That probably makes it sound like more work than it is. Hopefully tomorrow I'll either get them finished or work up the courage to finally get this shirring done.
 I don't have any pictures of my work so far, so here's a picture of the helpers I had when I was sewing yesterday.

New word of the month and printer troubles.

  I pulled out a new word of the month from my jar on Tuesday night. It's "Beach". I'm stretching that a tiny bit and making a sundress that might not be particularly beachy, but I've wanted to make it since I was eight years old. It's never been made because the entire design revolved around the fabric print that eight year old me wanted for this dress. A fabric print that doesn't exist. Luckily thirty eight year old me has a printer and printable fabric sheets! So I figured I could make the print myself! So, I dug out an old paper doll copy of the dress (I have no idea when I made it, but certainly not when I was eight!) and made up the printed pattern on photoshop.

  And then I remembered that my printer isn't working. Hasn't been working in over a month. It's copying but not printing or scanning and I haven't had the time to take a proper look to see what was wrong. My first thought when I finished making the pattern was to leave it and work the printer out later, but then I remembered that I had forms I needed to print out for the Giant Baby's  speech therapist and ear specialist, so I decided to take a look right away. (Or else I would forget about it completely.) And it turns out I'm an idiot.

  You see, about six weeks ago there was a box of Lego minifigures on top of the printer. And a certain little boy wanted very much to have a look at them, but he wasn't quite tall enough to reach, and he knocked the box of Lego down behind the printer. Then when I moved the printer to rescue the Lego, I unplugged it from my computer! I've been imagining some kind of enormous problem to do with software updates and an outdated printer. No. It just wasn't plugged in!

  At least I finally got to play with my printable silk, which worked quite well. There was a hiccup, though. I'd drawn up the print, assuming the printable fabric would be A4 in the international standard paper sizes and it turned out not to be. But at 8.5" by 11" it's close and the difference isn't really big enough to matter that much. I'm still waiting for the ink to dry (don't know how long I should wait but it says on the instructions to wait) so I haven't pulled the paper backing off yet, which means I'm not sure how thick the fabric is yet but that's ok, I plan on lining it with white cotton anyway.

1950s Project Conclusion

 I finished Jenny's new dress today. I'm pretty happy with it. It's a tiny bit longer than I meant for it to be (you should be able to just see her knees) but I'm absolutely rubbish at estimating lengths for skirts and dresses.

  The starching and grosgrain ribbon didn't make her skirt stick out quite enough so I used an off-cut of tulle to make her a stiff, tutu-like petticoat. I cheated on her knee socks (or stockings as they look like in this picture) and used a pair of baby socks that I'm pretty sure never actually fitted the Giant Baby. They fit her pretty well though.

  I made the belt buckle from a little dodad I got in a two dollar shop. It's a little plastic ring that's supposed to hold your bra straps together behind you. I covered it with the accent fabric and stuck it down with double sided tape, then added an extra cardboard backing. I'm guessing it would fall apart pretty quickly if it was being done up and undone a lot but since I don't intend on doing that, hopefully it will hold together for a year or two at least. It's not quite as neat as I would like, but it'll do.

  Even though this project is finished, I'm going to keep an eye out for some pale blue ribbon to replace the red ribbons on the ends of her plaits. So far I've not been able to find any though, so I'm just tucking her hair behind her shoulders.

  I'm aware the photos in this post aren't incredibly inspiring but unfortunately her size and lack of articulation make Jenny a nightmare to photograph, so I just found somewhere she fit and got it over and done with.
  Normally I would include the pattern for this dress and instructions for making it but it turns out my scanner is dead. If I can work out what's wrong with it, I'll add the pattern later, if not I'll tell myself nobody that reads this is likely to have the same sized doll anyway.

1950s Project Update

 Jenny's dress is coming along quite well. It has had it's share of hiccups. I can see I'm going to have to do something to force the little dodads on the shoulders to lie flat. I couldn't find quite the fabric I wanted. I would have preferred a crisp cotton or silk with polka dots. Actually now I'm wishing I'd thought to make it from white broderie anglaise with a plain light blue cotton under dress and trim. But I'm still happy with it possibly mostly because I know I would have had a hard time finding broderie anglaise in the middle of Winter.
 It doesn't have the skirt attatched yet. I wanted to starch the underskirt so the dress stuck out properly but apparently real starch (the kind you soak fabric in, not the spray on ironing kind) doesn't exist anymore. At least I can't find anywhere that sells it and nobody seems to remember it ever existing. When I was a kid, my mum used to have to starch my folk-dancing petticoats until they could stand up by themselves. That's kind of how I want the underskirt and you don't get that effect with the spray on stuff.
 Even so my mum suggested spray starching the underskirt as much as I can, then sewing some stiff net or tulle into the hem of the underskirt and covering the top of the hem with a length of grosgrain ribbon. If that works, I'll probably have this finished tomorrow. If not, I'm going to need to make a petticoat and I'd rather not have to do that.

Pedigree Brighton Belle

Cute, but probably going to kill me in my sleep eventually.

  Meet this month's victim, Jenny, a 28 inch Pedigree Brighton Belle. Pedigree dolls were very popular in Australia, England and New Zealand in the 1950s. These hard-plastic dolls fade over the years to look like they've been carved from bleached bone. They have flirty eyes and a walking mechanism and a "Mama" voice box. They look a lot like the American Saucy Walker dolls. Perhaps they were made from the same moulds?


 Mine originally belonged to a family friend who got her for her birthday in about 1956. She held onto her for years, planning to pass her down to her daughters, except she only had sons. So when I was four, she passed her down to me. At that point she still had her original dress, shoes and petticoat, (although I don't remember her ever having socks or underpants) and she was wrapped in a dry cleaning bag and put away on the top shelf of our bedroom wardrobe, to keep her nice. Her original outfit was a simple, sleeveless frock of pale blue lace over a bone-coloured, nylon, taffeta petticoat.


 A few years later my mother decided that I was old enough to have her on display in my room and washed her clothes. Her dress did not survive the washing machine. Her petticoat fared better but the press stud that did it up came off and was lost. Since then her hair's gotten a little thin from being brushed and my sister cut her fringe. At some point she lost her eyebrows and eyelashes, but I don't know whether that was before I got her or not. Her eyes are a little funny and cloudy these days, she has a chip in the back of her neck because when I was ten her head fell off. The rubber band that held it on had rotted through. My Dad replaced the rubber band but her neck got chipped in the process. Her lip paint chipped off, and my Mum repainted her lips with nail polish. Her talking box was removed so it could be taken to the doll hospital to get a replacement but for some reason it never actually got replced.

This dress probably wouldn't look so frumpy if

I gave the poor kid a petticoat.

  Over the years she's had a lot of clothes. Mostly re-purposed baby clothes but my sister and I also made her clothes. Some stuff we actually sewed. Some stuff was us adding lace or puff paint to tops our brother had outgrown. All of those clothes were lost in a house fire and for a few years she just wore her petticoat. I tried making her clothes as an adult but nothing I made suited her. The cut was wrong or the colour was wrong. And then one day, by chance, I found the dress she's wearing now in an op shop. And it fits like it was made for her. . . but I hate it. The pattern looks like old sheets, the bib is too dark, the lace is too big, the bow is too bright and the little pink appliques make no sense. So when I drew 1950s for this month's theme, I decided to make her a new dress. A proper dress. Hopefully a dress that I don't hate. So far I've drafted a basic bodice pattern but haven't fitted it yet and done some research into 1950s clothes. That has surprised me. Because of the big skirts, I always think of the 1950s as being like a romanticised version of the mid-victorian period or "Gone with the Wind" but with shorter skirts. All fluffy and frothy and pretty. To my surprise, I'm finding that despite the big skirts, the fashions of the 1950s actually tended to be cut and trimmed in very structured, masculine designs.

Jenny is terrified because Petra Wobbly Legs keeps falling over on her

  I really love this doll in a way I can't really explain, possibly because I've had her forever. And she is really well made. I have a second Pedigree doll, Petra, that's about ten years younger than Jenny. Petra is 30 inches tall and she still has her original dress and shoes and a working walker mechanism but nowhere for a voice box and the quality is just not the same. Jenny is smooth hard-plastic of the kind that's almost like bakelite. Petra is mostly hard vinyl with a hard plastic torso but it's not the same hard plastic. Petra's torso is a thinner, brittle plastic with an uneven surface that feels cheap. Jenny's hair is wigged and while it has suffered in the last sixty year, it's still nice. Petra's hair is a lovely colour butit's poorly rooted and really the fact that it's a nice colour is probably the only nice thing you can say about it. Jenny's face is adorable and lifelike with an open mouth with little teeth and a tongue inside. Petra's face is pretty generic and her eyes are weirdly squished over to one side of her face. Even Petra's shoes, which are the same size and design as Jenny's, aren't as nice. The plastic feels cheaper, the moulding isn't as crisp and they use a different kind of press stud to do up which is threatening to tear through the plastic.

Poor wobbly, wonky Petra

  So I'm going to take advantage of drawing 1950s to clean Jenny up a little (nothing drastic, just a wipe down and possibly scrub her shoes because they're filthy) and make her a new dress. Something blue and faded that hopefully won't make her look washed out.

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?

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.

A Strange Christmas Story (sort of)

Somehow I seem to end up doing weird things at work.
 Most of the weird stuff started with this guy

We all started making snowmen out of left over blu-tack. I have no idea why but we did. One day the manager saw that day's snowman and tried to be cross about it. The girl that was working tried to distract him by pointing out what a great snowman it was. He replied that he wasn't impressed by a snowman. He would be impressed by a full nativity scene made from blu-tack.
Challenge accepted.

Even though it was July, I spent the next week making a nativity scene out of blu-tack. Some of it was the standard stuff, some of the coloured stuff, some was a different brand that made it in white. Most of it was dyed with markers. It changed as I made it. Initially it was planned as something far more ambitious looking like cast resin figures but blu-tack doesn't work like that. (Although I suspect if I'd made blocks, chilled them and carved them it could almost have but I'm probably kidding myself) The figures ended up being far more naive in style and were going to have details added with markers when I was finished. Except by the time I had finished shaping them, I was so sick of the whole idea, I didn't bother.

It's changed since then. The characters all wore costumes for Halloween (although I don't have pictures of that) and this little guy joined them

They all changed back for Christmas and the ghost disappeared. Since then they've been joined by a Littlest Petshop cat and several different Kinder Surprise toys have come and gone. There's also a cake now that I made when two of the girls at work had birthdays

And an ice cream sundae from another work mate's birthday. Baby Jesus went missing and was replaced with a new, rather unhealthy looking baby made from normal blu-tack, who apparently laid an egg for some reason.

My current project is weird. One of the girls at work is named Tam and one day we joked that her My Little Pony name was Tamponia. So now because I have a mental image of this and the maturity level of a fifteen year old boy, I've got a little blind bag My Little Pony figure that I'm repainting to be Tamponia. It's not going to be overtly gross because frankly my brain couldn't deal with that, but it's definitely not going to be tasteful either so it will probably never make an appearance here.