Argh! Plague!

 I have made almost no progress on my crinoline petticoat. By almost no progress, I mean I have found a shop that sells corset boning and is getting in hoop wire (which is apparently an actual type of wire designed for petticoats), but I'm waiting for them to get hoop wire in before I order anything.

I haven't done any sewing. The day of my last post, I came down with a virus. I had a sore throat in the morning, by the end of the day, I could barely stand up. It was unpleasant.  Then, a week later, as I started to feel better, Tiny came down with the same thing. She had a fever of 40-41° (about 105 in farenheit) for days! It probably didn't help that at least one of those days the weather matched her fever. We got to spend most of one night in the most post apocalyptic emergency room I've ever seen. And then the baby insisted on keeping her hospital bracelet on for days. She's still under the weather even now and most of my time is comforting her.

 The Giant Baby started kindergarten this week. Because the baby's been sick, I haven't really been able to take full advantage of the break but he really seems to be enjoying himself and he looks adorable in his big sun hat, so that's good at least.

And I haven't really been just sitting on my bum while all this has been happening. I've been trying to sort out my fabric stash. My fabric stash WAS three huge plastic tubs and some old pillowcases, stuffed with fabric, in absolutely no order whatsoever. There were actual lengths of fabric, off cuts and remnants from various sources  and old and secondhand clothes all balled up together in a huge mound of chaos.

I've been trying to put all the bits of the same fabric together, unpicking the clothes, removing trims to save for later, throwing out any scraps that are smaller than my palm, folding everything neatly and putting it in zip lock bags.

 I'm about two thirds of the way done now. I'm just not sure how to divide it all up once I'm done. Whether to use my three big tubs or smaller boxes. Whether to divide it by colour or print or fabric or what. All I've decided for sure, is that it NEEDS to be divided somehow.

Hopefully I can update with something more productive and interesting soon.

Projects and the return of Paige and Zihu

  I have finally worked out what I'm doing with my bjds! It's only taken me over five years! In December I ordered two new Iplehouse kids. Celina in white skin, to take over Zihu's old role of Claudia from Interview with the vampire. She hasn't arrived yet but I'm already working on clothes for her. That's what my fabric painting in the last post was from. (By the way, washing the paper off went terribly. The printed lines stayed stuck to the fabric and when I finally got them off, they took the paint with them. But I had a redo with plastic backing and it worked, so no big drama.) I've been studying the movie to do costume sketches and I kind of plan on rereading the book and writing down any clothing descriptions. I'm putting it off though because I'm pretty sure the clothing descriptions are mostly just a colour followed by the word silk. Ugh. Silk is too vague a word. It can mean anything - velvet, satin, organdy, shantung, ugh, ugh, ugh. It's like the word Victorian. It covers too much to be helpful by itself.

The other kid I've ordered is Daisy in peach gold skin. I spent weeks agonising over whether to get her in peach gold or special real skin. I didn't want another normal skin doll, because they're a bit too pale. At the end of the day, the decision came down to the fact that Iplehouse's real skin looks a tad sallow to me. Then when you consider that resin yellows with age, in a few years that's going to look like she's got cholera or liver disease. So even though it's a tiny bit too pink for my liking, I chose peach gold on the assumption that it might mellow to a nicer colour than jaundice.

My original plan for Paige, Zihu and Daisy was to make them sisters in the 1920s and 30s. But that idea sucks. I'd feel the need to make three dresses, every time I made one, and they would all be from a very narrow time period. I hadn't even lifted a needle and I was already bored. Idea number two was to assign each doll a year, like American girl. After a few days, that idea sucked too. It would mean there would be lots of stuff I couldn't make. And that would make me want to buy a lot more dolls! In the end, I have decided to assign each doll a fifty year period for her clothes to come from. Zihu can wear anything from 1800 to 1850. Daisy (when she gets here) has been given 1850 to 1900. And Paige has been given 1900 to 1950.

 When I was painting Paige, now to be named Lily, I was trying to focus on making her look both delicate and clever, rather than beautiful. I'm not sure if I succeeded but I'm not unhappy with her, so she'll probably stay as she is for now. I had a couple of issues with her. I really wanted her to keep her hazel eyes. BUT because her eye sockets are so small, she doesn't really work with dark eyes. Unless I shone a lamp directly in her face, cold war interrogation style, her entire eyes looked demonic black, which was not the look I was going for. The other issue with Paige is her head shape. Her head is very narrow at the bottom but quite wide at the top, once you add a wig the effect is amplified, and with the wrong wig she ends up looking like Megamind or some giant brained creature from a 1960s sci fi show! I'm not a hundred percent happy with her current wig, but I'm going to see if I can style it better.

 Zihu, whoe has changed her name to Eleanore. . . or possibly Elizabeth, on the other hand was a delight to work with. Her face up, pretty much painted itself. The only issue I have is that even though she's a doll from Dollmore's Narsha line, and she's wearing a Dollmore Narsha wig, it keeps falling off! I know, I have a silicone head cap for her somewhere, I think I'l have to dig it out for her.

Now to the clothes I've made.
These are not my own patterns. I was too lazy in the end to draft my own, so these have all been made from Antique Lilac's easy kid dress pattern, with lots of changes because I can never leave things alone.

This first dress was originally made for Eleanore (Elizabeth?) but unfortunately the Narsha body has gigantic man hands that didn't fit through the sleeves, so ultimately it will probably be given to Claudia. For now, Lily is wearing it.

 It's muslin over cotton sheeting, with machine stitch decoration in white. I chose the machine stitch because I thought it looked like a reasonable alternative to featherstitching, which I did not want to do by hand.

This second outfit was my redo of Eleanore or Elizabeth's dress. It didn't take much to make the pattern work with the Narsha body. It was a simple case of replacing the sleevebands with elastic casing, which I suppose isn't historically accurate but I guess if I really wanted to I could thread ribbon through the casing instead and tie them closed. I don't want to though. The pantaloons are made from an adaptation of Antique Lilac's boy's bathers pattern. And the shawl was adapted from the collar of the easy kid dress.

The shawl has the same fake featherstitching as the other dress. And interesting thing this dress taught me. . . It's made out of a men's dress shirt that was made of a linen like cotton and I discovered that if I turn my iron up to the cotton setting, it scorches my ironing board cover! Who the hell makes an ironing board cover that isn't heatproof?! The shawl isn't quite long enough. I measured carefully to make sure the ends could cross over the chest and meet behind her back. And that's how long I made it. Except it's supposed to tie behind! I'm either going to have to put press studs on the ends or stitch some baby ribbon to the ends that is long enough to tie, if I want this to work.

And random sewing terminology lesson. The tucks on her dress are tucks. The tucks on her pants are pintucks. I see these terms used interchangeably a lot lately. Even on sewing websites. But they're not the same thing at all. A tuck is a pleat in the fabric that is sewn in place. This was usually done so clothes could be let out later as someone grew or gained weight. Or they would be put into hand me down garments to resize them for their new owner. Tucks are functional. Pintucks on the other hand are purely decorative. A pintuck is much narrower, as wide as a pin. Effectively it's as if someone has placed a pin along the fabric, sewn around it, and pulled it out. They stick straight up and there would be no point whatsoever to taking them out.

Finally Lily's 1920s dress.

I don't have much to say about this dress. It's ok. I'm not in love with it. I'm don't dislike it. I don't like the way the skirt hangs in these pictures and other than that I feel very whatever about it.

Now next things. I need more socks and stockings for these girls. Eleanore Elizabeth needs more period appropriate shoes. I'm thinking black ballet flats to start with. Lily just needs ANY shoes that fit! Poor barefoot urchin. Which means Celina and Daisy will need shoes too. I also need to see if I can make Lily's wig look better, less like she has water on the brain.  And when Daisy gets here, if she's doing the second half of the 1800s she's going to need a crinoline and a bustle. I haven't bothered with underwear to much. Eleanore or Elizabeth has her pantaloons. Lily has some french knicker sort of shorts. But I haven't given them period appropriate stays or petticoats, mostly because there is no point to a corset on a doll that doesn't have a soft body. It won't reshape her, it will just add bulk. But the crinoline will be necessary for certain skirt shapes.

I'm planning the crinoline at the minute. I'm not sure what to use for the hoops, I have some ideas but I'm not sure which ones will work or if I'm going to want it to be washable. I also want to avoid my two gigantic pet hates with crinolines. I don't want the bones to show through the dresses and I don't want that too short effect where the dress is longer than the petticoat and so follows a graceful curve to the edge, then drops straight down. So I'm thinking it will have to be multi layer. A cage layer with hoops, a ruffled layer over that to hide the bones and a flannelette layer on top to make it lie smooth. But attatch all three layers to a yoke so it doesn't add too much bulk to the doll.

I also want to make at least two basic guimpes.  Don't ask me how to pronounce that. I've only ever seen the word in print. But from the mid 1800s to the first world war, dress pattern catalogues talk a lot about guimpes. Which is a basic blouse to wear under dresses and pinafores. Some were very simple, like a peasant blouse, some were more elaborate. I want to make one out of lawn and one out of muslin, just so they're there if I need them. Very plain ones though, so they can stand in as needed for anything from the 1850s to the 1910s.

If anyone has any idea on making a crinoline, whether it be what to use for boning or construction ideas, please help! Also is Eleanore or Elizabeth a better name for Zihu? At the moment, I'm calling her Eleanore Elizabeth because I can't decide. I would just name her that but it's too long.

I survived!

Yay! We moved house this weekend and while it was incredibly stressful, I survived! Yay again.
There's still way too much unpacking to do, so t he stress isn't over yet but it's better.

The Giant Baby and I took a couple of quick walks today and even though I miss mountains already, where we are now is so flat, I feel like I could walk for twelve hours without complaining  . . . Not today though, since it was 38 degrees!*
By comparison, Lilydale, where we used to live is so steep there's stairs in the footpath on the Main Street at one point! Which meant even in Winter it was unpleasant to walk places.
One thing I will miss is this

That was taken from our old balcony. I'm going to miss being able to look out at the mountains. And I'm going to miss being that close to shops.

We had to drive through the Dandenong a million times to get here and I kept having two conflicting thoughts. "Wow! This is so beautiful!I wish I lived here!" On the one hand. But "Wow! This is so flammable! I am so glad I don't live here!" On the other.
I kept meaning to take some pictures of the scenery to share here but kept putting it off.

I did get this picture of some Queen Anne's Lace when we passed through Cockatoo.

And I got this impressive bruise when I accidentally hit myself with a 300m roll of cling wrap

Other than that, I am so exhausted that the best I can say is I survived.

*In the interest of honesty I have to admit that it was so hot that once we found the shops, we called the Giant Husband to come get us with the car because we were fried.

Update

 I don't really have anything doll or craft related to post about, right now. All that stuff has been packed away because we're moving in two weeks. To a bigger place with A DOLL ROOM AND A PANTRY! I'm very stressed and a little depressed about the move. The Giant Husband and I both grew up in this area, and we had never planned on leaving. But we've finally had to accept that the Yarra Valley is just too fashionable right now and if we actually wanted to buy a house here, it would cost three quarters of a million dollars for any house at all, much less a nice one. And frankly, anyone who'd be willing to lend us that much money, is not someone we should be borrowing from. We like our kneecaps too much.
 I'm also pretty excited about having a whole house. Especially the doll room and the pantry. I have this fantasy that having a bigger place means I won't have two kids and the Giant Husband hanging off me twenty four seven. But I know that's wishful thinking. We could live in Buckingham Palace and they'd still all find a reason to be within three feet of me, all the time.
 Tiny finally gets a bedroom that's larger than a closet. So I get the fun of decorating her room all over again. As well as planning stuff like new towels, a new dinner set, and that kind of stuff. And I'm getting a new computer desk, because my current one is so small that I can't fit my keyboard and mouse pad on it at the same time.

 Christmas was brutal. We have a habit of forgetting to tell the Giant Baby important things. For instance we told him he was getting a baby sister, but didn't think to tell him it meant I'd have to go to hospital for a couple of days. That's something he still holds a grudge about. At Christmas, everyone had told him that he would get Christmas presents. Nobody thought to tell him that everybody else would get presents too. This is his face when he discovered that the presents under Nanny's Christmas tree weren't all for him.

Then he hid in the kitchen to cry.

 Tiny got to wear one of the dresses that I made for her. I originally planned on making most of her clothes. But then we got a ridiculous amount of hand me downs. She ended up with SEVENTY FIVE onesies in size 0-3months! Which meant I could focus on making frivolous dresses like this one.

It's not a good picture but it's the best one I have. The front has a tucky-pleaty treatment that I found on a sundress on Pinterest and copied. But since Christmas day was hot, she actually spent most of the day in just her nappy anyway. (And her brother spent most of the day in his underwear in a kiddie pool.)

I know this post is kind of disjointed. It's been written over three days in two minute bursts. So I'm going to leave it here before it completely stops making sense.

The Great Azone Headache.

 I have always wanted an Azone Pure Neemo doll. They're not so expensive as to be completely unaffordable and they're very cute. But I never knew how to get one. Azone themselves only sell within Japan. Other online shops do sell them but their pre-orders usually sell out in minutes. You can buy them on Ebay but the prices there are completely unreasonable. And then I stumbled across Mandarake.

  If you haven't heard of Mandarake, they're a chain of shops in Japan that sell second hand (mostly) collectables. Even better, they have an online shop that ships internationally. And they generally have Azone dolls. The prices are a bit all over the place. Some things are way more expensive than they were originally. Some things are way cheaper than they were originally. But almost all of their prices are a lot more reasonable than Ebay.

 Possibly my favourite thing about Mandarake, and machine translated websites in general, is the translation mistakes. One line of Pure Neemo dolls is called Ex-Cute, except it never translates as that. Ex translates as basically any word starting with E. Effort, ecstacy, example, except, extreme. And frequently Cute is replaced with a random C word as well. So far my favourite mistranslation is when Ex-Cute was written as Escort Crouton! (This isn't specific to Mandarake. It happens on Hobby Link Japan, Hobby Search Japan, Ami Ami, and even Azone's own website.)

 I got to thinking. Pure Neemo dolls, I decided would be a lot more fun to buy if you had characters in mind for them. Since a lot of their dolls are based on anime and manga characters the work is kind of already done for you there. But I'm more difficult than that. I wanted mine to represent my own characters. I've spent most of my life making up characters and stories for them. Browsing through the dolls and thinking about this, I realised that my characters usually fell into a few archetypes and I decided to make up new characters, which are really just composites of old characters to be represented by these dolls.

  I've already ordered one. If I get money for Christmas, I plan on combining that with my dolly savings to buy two more. The one I've ordered is Little Witch of the Snow Railli (or Rilei, or Riley, or Raili, or Reili - clearly it sounds like Reilly and the spelling isn't important.) She's my Ghost Girl. Currently I'm seesawing between Marcella and Celestine for her name. The next two I want are to be a little Goth Girl and a little Bubbly Girl. Their names will be Tristessa and Piccolina. (In case you're concerned, I wouldn't name an actual human something like that. But since these dolls are so cartoonish, I feel I can be quite silly with their names. I plan on eventually naming one Butterscotch McMustardface.)

 This is pretty much where the problems started. Pure Neemos come in a variety of sizes. And I want Piccolina and Tristessa to be the same size. But Mandarake don't list the sizes of their dolls and because they're selling them secondary market, they're generally from a variety of years. I decided I wanted these two girls to be small or medium. I researched what doll's clothes fit small and medium Pure Neemos. I made lists of which dolls would be good fits for the characters almost like I was casting a movie or something. I felt very confident and very clever and like I was an expert.

 And then something happened. I stumbled across several different pieces of information that changed everything. You see Pure Neemo's have had different bodies over the years. Advance, Flexion, Full Flection. And it seems they haven't all been the same size. There's also just been a new body released (some places call it the Emotion body, some places call it Pure Neemo 2) which doesn't fit the previous body's clothes. One source said that after 2013 what was originally considered a small, was relabelled as a medium. One source said the sizes changed again before that. Another source said the sizes have changed again since then. Another source claimed the sizes have never changed and people are just getting confused.

 At this point, I was so confused (and annoyed that all my research was useless since I didn't know which sizes the sizes I'd read about referred to) I felt like I was having a stroke. I had a brilliant idea. Look up the different sizes in doll shops and see what heights they list for the dolls, if they list heights at all. I was so hopeful. I was sure this would fix everything in my brain. It did not. Yes, some shops do list the dolls heights. But it seems when deciding their heights they don't do anything silly like measure them with a ruler. Oh no. Instead, it seems, they hand them to whoever is closest, that person looks at it and says "Ah, I'd say that's about 25 centimetres." and that number is what they put on the website. At least that's my theory since I saw five different dolls with the same body type, from the same year, all in different sizes all listed as 25cm, and I also saw the small body (in the same body type) variously listed as 23, 24, 25, 26 and 27 centimetres!

 I have never been so confused in my life. It's possible that dolls released as a small prior to 2013 would have been labelled medium after that date. It's possible that dolls released as a small on the flexion body are the same size as the medium full-flexion body. It's possible that that information only applies to certain special release dolls. It's possible that the sizes have changed many more times than that. It's possible that absolutely no size change has ever happened. But right now - I have a migraine from thinking about it and can only blindly hope that if worst comes to worst, I can buy Piccolina and Tristessa replacement bodies that are the same size and switch their heads around.

 It probably would've been easier to just magic up more money (it would require magic), go to Japan, and compare them myself.

So much to talk about!

 I've been having a massively dolly few weeks. I've ordered a Wellie Wishers doll and she should arrive soon. I can't wait to play around with her and she'll probably turn up here at some point.
  I finally went over to the dark side and bought an 18 inch doll which is something I've been thinking about for a while but it took my ages to decide on which one. I want to talk about that, I also want to get another one soon.
  I got a chance yesterday to take photos of my dolls in the sundresses I made. I'm not 100% happy with the pictures though. My camera tends to oversaturate reds and brighter colours. So half the photos look (to me) annoyingly high contrast. The others (that aren't brightly coloured) look washed out but I'm not sure if that's just by comparison to the others. I'm going to have another look tomorrow and see if I was just being insane when I looked at them last night and either post them tomorrow or reshoot and post them later.
  I also spent a gift voucher I won at work on Our Generation accessories. I finally got to play with these yesterday and discovered that (as I suspected) most of the items are beautifully in scale with my 14 inch dolls. Weirdly there seem to be more things that are too small for them than too big!
  And while I was taking photos, I finally took the opportunity to play with my bjds and find out if any of the dolls clothes I have fit them. I'd just discovered that my 14 inch Kish Chrysalis dolls, my Maru mini pal and Disney princess toddler dolls (the ones with the freaky reflections eyes) could all share clothes. I've read that Wellie Wishers are the same size as the Disney princesses, so hopefully they can join in too. Unfortunately it turns out that my two bjds (a Dollmore Zihu and an Iplehouse kid) don't fit any of the clothes I have. They're too thin for the 14 inch doll clothes. They're too tall (and probably too fat, I didn't check) for the twelve inch Kish doll clothes. And Patience's clothes are far too tight and won't even button. But I still took some photos of them, because that's really what I bought them for and I've never gotten around to it. So here's Claudia, my Zihu, wearing a Chrysalis dress that's been cinched in with a clothespeg and hopefully I'll get time to write more 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.

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.

Winter, work and plans

It's Winter with a vengance. Our last two Winters have been so mild that any overnight frost has melted by the time the sun has risen.
  But this weekend when I took the dog outside in the morning, everything in the backyard was coated in a layer of ice. Puddles were frozen and there were weird little patches of ice here and there. At seven am this wasn't weird but the ice didn't melt until after ten! Which may have meant there was a lot of time when I was wandering around poking all of the frozen things like a five year old. I can't remember ever seeing a frost so heavy that took so long to melt but that doesn't mean it hasn't happened before. My memory is rubbish.
  It made me worry that we were in for an insanely cold Winter, some people were even talking about snow! But this morning we're back to no frost at all which was reassuring.

  I survived my nightmare run at work, without biting anybody. But (as you can probably tell by how cranky my Baby Secrets review was) I did get fairly grumpy. The boys weren't doing their share at home, the baby wasn't sleeping through the night, we all got sick and to top off all the fun, my nearly nineteen year old cat had a seizure. That's his second one now. The vet says this means he probably has a brain tumour but other than that he's ridiculously healthy. In the middle of all this Early Childhood Intervention started calling about the Giant Baby again, despite having been told he wasn't eligible for their assistance. Ultimately they rejected his application for testing again. One thing I've discovered from talking to them and making appointments for hearing tests and speech therapy and so forth, is that a remarkable number of people can't read the Giant Baby's name. I would totally understand if we'd given him a made up name but he has a completely traditional name with the traditional spelling and the number of people that look at his name and react like it's the most bizarre thing they've ever seen, blows my mind.

  The new season of Shopkins Happy Places is out. I don't know if I'm going to buy them or not. I still don't have one set from the last season. Every shop nearby is still overstocked with Bubbleisha, the bathroom girl from season one. And if it's going to be nightmarishly hard to get my hands on all of them again, I just can't be bothered. But that doesn't mean I won't change my mind and buy them anyway.

  I have trouble getting stuff done. Part of the issue is that I over-plan things. I put off starting things until I've planned them to death. By then, I'm starting to get bored with whatever the thing is and as soon as I start making whatever I've been planning, I start planning the next thing. Which firstly makes it hard to concentrate on what I'm actually doing and secondly ensures I'm going to be bored with the second thing before I even start it.
  So I've come up with a plan to hopefully combat this. I bought a little ceramic jar. I wrote prompt words on small scraps of paper and folded them and put them in the jar. Some of the words are date periods, some are words like "sparkle" or "play" where I could make anything this word makes me think of. For example if I pulled out the word "Movie", I could dress a doll as a movie character, in a replica of a dress from a movie, as an actress or actor, in an outfit to go to the movies in or simply in an outfit that has a print that is somehow reminiscent of movies etc.
  On the first of each month, I plan on pulling one of these slips of paper from the jar and using it as inspiration to design and make something for one of my dolls. This way I don't have time to overplan and I can't start planning ahead because I won't know what the next prompt will be. I can't guarantee this will make me more productive but I'm hoping it will.
  So I couldn't influence what word was chosen, I had the Giant Husband pick out my word for the month last night. (I also figured that doing it this way would make me ashamed to demand a redraw if I didn't like the word I picked.) He pulled out 1950s. So this month, I have to make something 1950s inspired. So far, I know which doll it will be for, but that's it.

  If anyone reading this can think of a word suggestion for my jar, please leave a comment. The more words I have, the better.

And now the bad news . . .

The Giant Baby had his hearing test. Leading up to it, I didn't think about it too much. I kept thinking back to a year ago when he discovered that he could see trains from our backyard if someone picked him up. As soon as the boom gates started making noise, he would ask to be picked up, even though half the time I couldn't even hear them. I didn't realise he hasn't done that in a very long time or that now he only asks to watch the trains if one toots.

 He did not do well on the hearing test at all. But they couldn't draw any conclusions from it either, because it turned out he had an ear infection when they did the test. He has to do a second test but not until the end of July.
 I finally looked up some information on hearing problems in toddlers and now I feel terrible. So many things we just took for granted as being cute or even clever are actually more likely signs he hasn't been hearing properly for a while now.
 For the last few months he's been developing his own sign language. Nothing ridiculously sophisticated. In fact it's pretty basic stuff. If he's thirsty, he'll bring me a book open to a picture of a drink and point to it, then point to the kitchen. If he wants to watch something on television, he will bring me a toy or book from the show he wants and then point to the dvd player. That kind of thing.
 We thought he was so very clever because he could tell us what he wanted without even trying to verbalise it. (Unless we say no, he verbalises his displeasure with that pretty darn effectively.) It didn't even occur to us that the fact that he wasn't even trying out new words was probably a bad sign.
 I also feel particularly terrible because after seeing the audiologist, we went tothe doctor and it turns out his ear infection is so bad, he has blisters on his ear drum! That sounds incredibly painful to me, but I didn't even know that he had an ear infection. Although in all fairness, I've been watching him like a hawk since then and I swear that he has shown absolutely no sign of having an ear infection.
 So, he's on the waiting list for speech therapy, and he has another hearing test booked. At this point we're fairly certain there is going to be an issue with his hearing and are praying that it's something that can be solved with ear tubes or grommets. Yes, that will require surgery but it's also temporary and fixable so definitely preferable to something permanent or unfixable.

Because of all this, I've been having far too much fun making various appointments and beating myself up about this to do anything doll related this last week. And on top of that, one of the ladies that I work with had emergency surgery on Monday and now I'm covering a lot of her shifts. So for the forseeable future, I am working every night until I have a complete breakdown, then probably sobbing in a corner for a few days at least, before I can even think about doing anything worth posting about.

 To make things even more fun, I also messed up the other day and the baby finally got his Shirley Temple curls cut off. Basically, since the weather has turned cold  (so very bloody cold!) his curls have been fairly limp and frizzy and tangly and his fringe has been in his eyes most of the time. I decided to trim his fringe which I've done heaps of times. Except he wouldn't sit still and it was uneven and looked funny. So he finally got the haircut his dad has been begging for. Now he looks like a little blonde Ginnifer Goodwin. I'm hoping I'll be able to talk his dad into letting his curls grow back for next Summer but that may be beyond my powers.

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!

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.

Searching for dolls

This year, I've been pretty disappointed in dolls. Tonner and Wilde Imagination are no more. Kish and Company swear they still exist but they don't seem to be making dolls anymore. I don't have the patience required to get one of Dianna Effner's Little Darlings. I'm not designed to wait twelveteen thousand years for things. Meanwhile I've gotten increasingly disappointed with the selection of dolls available in big stores at the moment. But I've also insisted on investigating exactly what's available.

I found a small toy store with a great range of Our Generation accessories and mini dolls. I'm not a fan of their 18 inch dolls. Their noses look weirdly adult and their lips generally look like they're about to go into anaphylaxis but I rather like the mini dolls. (Kmart has Our Generation too, but the range is usually very limited and they don't have the mini dolls.) I'm considering getting some of the accessories as props for my 14 inch dolls. I figure they're generally kind of small in scale to the dolls they're meant for so they may work with a smaller doll. I'm also finding that the two big dolls carried by our local Kmart (April and May Lee) are actually growing on me.

I also rediscovered a relatively local toy shop that I loved as a kid because they had heaps of Playmobil and Sylvanian Families and all the european dolls like Corolle and Gotz. They don't have that stuff anymore but they do still have My Scene dolls (including the creepy ones that "grow up") and original Bratz and Hannah Montana and all sorts of extremely outdated stuff in stock. It's not stuff I want (although I was tempted to spend a LOT of money just because "You can't get these anymore!") but it was fun to see.

Almost a toy museum!

We also went to ToysRUs. Usually I find ToysRUs disappointing. I imagine it as a wonderland of toys then find they have the exact same stock as everywhere else. Just more of it. This time I was actually impressed. They had a lot more range than the other places we've been. They had the Disney Princess and Me dolls (Ariel anyway), they had Lalaloopsies, and a whole bunch of dolls I've read about but never seen. I nearly bought one of the Lalaloopsy minis with changeable clothes and wigs, except they only had them in playsets with a styling table or a sewing table and they were fifty dollars which just seemed silly.

They also had this Sylvanian Family furhiture set that made me laugh.

Somehow I think this company and I have different opinions

on what counts as a "working fireplace"

I also discovered a line of Australian 18 inch dolls called Florrie, that I'm really impressed by. (On the other hand, don't even ask my opinion of Australian Girl dolls.) I don't know that I want one but their concept store sounds really amazing and I would like to check it out. 

I've looked into getting a Wellie Wishers doll. I COULD get one through the American Girl website BUT the shipping would be sixty us dollars, effectively doubling the cost of the doll. I'm not sure I can make peace with that.

I'm also finding myself drawn to the Maru and Friends mini pals. They'd fit in well to my doll collection but I still have to find out if they ship internationally.

I ended up spending my birthday money on an Emma Wiggle doll and a Made to Move Barbie. I'm considering doing a mysterious something to Emma (not entirely sure what yet) and switching out the Barbie's head for a more interesting one. (They only had boring, blonde, blue eyed ones with candy pink make-up) Just have to work out how. We don't have heat guns or heat pads and we don't even own a hair dryer, so I'm going to have to do some research and see if it can be done using hot water somehow.

But right now our big thing is the Giant Baby. (As ot should be) We've had a few issues over the last few months with strangers mistaking him for a three or four year old and then openly discussing his behaviour and why he's not talking. Asking if he's deaf or autistic. If we've had him tested. If we've heard about this or that early intervention program.

We know he's behind in talking. But he shows no sign of being autistic or deaf (that I'm aware of) though, and he has only just turned two, so he's not as behind as people think he is. Except the nurse at his two year check up wasn't happy with it so now I'm running around, calling various places and waiting for call backs to arrange hearing and developmental tests and of course freaking out that maybe something is wrong after all. I'm confident that there's not anything wrong but I'm also aware that denial can be pretty powerful in these cases.

He has his first set of tests tomorrow, it'll be great to just get that out of the way.

Weird or not, he's still pretty!

There's something weird going on with the font sizes in this post. I keep changing them to "Normal" but for some reason bits keep showing as "Smallest" no matter how many times I try to change it.

Not Tiny Tuesday

I don't have this week's Tiny Tuesday post ready. My birthday was last Tuesday and I was planning to use one of my presents as this week's Tiny Tuesday. Except I can only really take photos on Thursdays (unless I want all of my pictures to include a screaming two year old trying to steal the dolls) and my present didn't actually arrive until Friday. On the upside next Tuesday should be a big one!

Meanwhile over the last week I have had a horrible can't think, sinuses exploding, coughing until I throw up cold, on top of that a bird flew into my head, the baby threw my birthday cake on the floor, the dog broke my favourite coffee cup and when I went to Big W (like Target or Kmart) thinking I would cheer myself up by spending the gift card I'd gotten for my birthday on a doll - their range was so depressing that I came away empty handed and nearly in tears.

The range of toys available in Australia is never as big as anywhere else. A lot of stuff that's available in Europe never makes it's way here and the American companies tend to only send us their most popular lines. As a child I would always ask my Dad to get me whichever Barbie in each range came with brown hair but up until about 2000 the only ones that were ever sold here were the blonde ones. (With the exception of Barbie and the Rockers in about 1986 and the California Barbie range from about 1988.)

But at the moment the doll selection at our local shop is particularly uninspired. Two feet of Barbies (Barbies that look like 40 year old women that don't know how to have fun), one foot of Monster High (mostly the new ones with blank faces and painted on clothes), roughly half a dozen Ever After High dolls (four new ones with painted on clothes, a Way too Wonderland playset and one single Pied Piper's daughter), three of the Project Mc dolls (I want to like these but I don't), big Lalaloopsies (there were 3 there but they're all the same doll), a few Shibajuku girls, My Little Ponies (give them freaky human bodies if you like but they're still not dolls) and twelveteen million Disney Princesses. They also had fifty gazillion Shopkins but somehow the one Happy Places set I still need wasn't there.

I had thought of buying one of the mini Disney princess dolls. The ones like Polly Pocket or a small Shopkins doll, with the rubbery vinyl clothes. But the current range all have dresses that look like they've been carved from an eraser with a butter knife. Ugh.

I also thought about buying one of each of the new body types in the Barbie Fashionista range. They're only ten dollars each and I'm curious about them. But they're clothes were ugly and none of the ones in stock looked fun at all. They all looked like they made flat lay photographs of organic, colourless clothes with minimalist, wite porcelain ornaments and chunky, birchwood sculptures on an oatmeal background with a sprig of sage for colour. I didn't want to take one home because if it ever came to life it would bore me to death talking about gluten free paleo muffins. I'm not tempting fate like that.

At the end of the day, Australia needs more dolls!

On the upside, I've always had trouble dislaying tiny things. If you just put them on a shelf, they get lost and look messy.

Worst photograph ever!

 For a while I've been using Twosies shadowboxes for display. But I don't have enough of these to display everything and to get enough, I would have to buy a lot more Twosies and I don't really want to. Then I found some bamboo cutlery trays at Kmart for twelve dollars which I think will make an excellent shelf for tiny things!

Better photograph but I had to stand on the couch (and fell off twice) to take it!

 Now if only I could get the time to dig out my box of tiny things and put them on the tiny shelf. . .

Adventures of a Giant Baby

The Giant Baby and I have had an exciting week. . . and not all in a good way.
 Last week he started daycare. He's only going to be going one day a week and it's mostly for the social aspect. He gets to get used to spending time with adults that he's not related to and he gets to play with other kids without me having to socialise. That possibly sounds horrible but I'm just not a social person. When I get the chance, and I don't very often, I'd much rather invest in some alone time. So far he seems to love it and I'm actually really impressed with the centre and he's already trying to talk more so I feel like I've done the right thing.
 Then on Thursday night we were outside running around and he tripped. He had a dummy in his mouth and he landed on it. It cut up the inside of his mouth and pushed his two front teeth back up into his gum. There was screaming and crying (and not all from him) and a LOT of blood and a rushed visit to the doctors before they closed. The doctor's attitude was "Ack, he'll be fine, stop freaking out." which was equally comforting and insulting.
 I also discovered that even though I know first aid and know from experience that I'm great in an emergency, the sight of a single drop of blood from the Giant Baby turns me into a puddle.
 Saturday night the baby had a fever of forty degrees. We tried to find a doctor, but the only one we could find that was open was already overbooked and told us to go to the emergency room. We were there until a million o'clock when he was given the all clear.
 But Saturday and Sunday he cried all night. We gave him ibuprofen before bed and even still he spent half the night crying. Except it was this terrible crying where he would try to get up or get away but he wasn't actually awake. He couldn't even open his eyes. It's not easy comforting a child that isn't even aware you're there.
 Because he'd been so miserable, he went to the dentist yesterday, just to check that everything is fine and that his baby teeth getting pushed back didn't damage his adult teeth. Luckily his adult teeth are fine and while not everything is quite where it should be, nothing is actually where it REALLY shouldn't be. It's just a case of waiting another week and a half for it to heal. I had mixed feelings when I heard this. On the one hand Yay! It's all ok! On the other hand it may be another week and a half before I get to sleep through the night again. Not so yay.
 But actually he did sleep through last night although he's still clearly not a hundred percent (he just spent five minutes crying over a puddle.) At least things are looking up.

Meanwhile in doll related news, I've decided to start a weekly series of posts called Tiny Tuesday, showcasing the little toys (up to four inches) and dollhouse miniatures in my collection. Hopefully I can get the first one up by tonight, otherwise I'm going to cheat and post it tomorrow on the grounds it's still Tuesday in America.