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.

New Year, New Adventures!

We are having a pretty meh time of it here, you know, with the whole bloody country being on fire and everything. I can't let the kids outside most of the time, or I may as well be giving them cigarettes. The Giant Baby's daycare didn't even let the kids outside today because of it. I have to carry a ventolin inhaler with me, even though I haven't needed one in years. And being stuck inside wheezing, with two bored kids is not as much fun as performing surgery on yourself without anaesthesia.

 This is the view from our front door, yesterday morning

Terrible gardening (or complete neglect of the garden) aside, that's not cloud in the sky. That's smoke.
The goldy quality to the light, that's not sunset (it was about 10 am), that's smoke.
I actually took this picture to show my husband how bad the smoke was, but most of the smoke didn't show in the photo. Everything across the street was slightly grey and hazy. And this is not the worst day we've had.

And yet, I'm pretty sure the closest fires are at Mt Buffalo (which is  a weird name for a mountain in a country that doesn't have buffalos) which is about a hundred miles away.
But I feel stupid complaining about it when it's so much worse for so many people, so let's move on.

I thought about making new year's resolutions but decided against it. I figure if I'm serious about changing my behaviour, which is what resolutions are, I'll do it any time I think of it, not wait for a special day. So instead, I've come up with a list of things I want to achieve.

1. I want to get face ups done on my bjds. Including settling on eyes and wigs for them. Including two I ordered in Iplehouse's Christmas event.

2. I want to make two full outfits (except maybe underwear) for each of my bjds.

3. I want to experiment more with printing my own fabric. Not just what I can print out from my computer, because that's pretty limiting. But I want to try different ways of fabric painting and block printing and eventually hopefully screen printing except screen printing kit looks crazy expensive so that's on the hopefully list and not the DO IT NOW list.

I've already done a bit of work on Paige and Zihu's face ups. But I'm not ready to show them yet. Zihu looks very pretty but I'm not sure how she'll photograph and she's still naked. Paige, got away from me a bit. She didn't turn out at all like I had planned or imagined and right now I'm not sure if I dislike her look or if I'm just confused and maybe disappointed that she looks nothing like I was thinking. So I've put her back in her box for the moment. I'll have a look in a few days and see what I think. I'm pretty sure both of their eyebrows are rubbish though.

I also had a little play with fabric paint yesterday. But I'm an idiot.

So that, is sheer, blue organza, stretched over a sheet of masonite with a paper template stuck to it. I used the template to show where to paint on the fabric. Yay. Fantastic. Except, as you're probably aware, I'm an idiot. I meant to cover the paper template with either plastic or packing tape. Yeah, I forgot. So when I removed the fabric from the template, heaps of bits of paper stuck to the back of the fabric. Like I said, I'm an idiot. Now I have to wait 72 hours for the paint to cure before I can even try to wash the paper off! Fingers crossed.

I never know how to end these posts, but I can't think of much else to say right now. Sometime in the next few weeks, I'll rearrange my dolls, then I'm actually planning on showing ALL OF THEM to you. Even if you've seen them before.

Christmassy Update

If you haven't noticed, it's s nearly Christmas! We're hard at work doing Christmassy stuff. I've arranged for Santa Claus to bring our kids a play kitchen this year. They already have one made of old moving boxes but 1. It's enormous, so we can't have it out all the time, 2. The Giant Husband made the fridge/pantry and it's awful, but he's proud of it so I can't replace it, and 3. The Giant Baby constantly freaks out that Tiny is going to break it. So I figured, if we get a proper one, I know they're going to use it. I want to make some felt pasta to go with it, but I don't really know if I'm going to get around to it.

Our current play kitchen

The Giant Baby is changing his mind constantly about what he wants. First it was Lego, then Grossery Gang toys, Enchantimals, Shopkins, cars, Ghostbusters toys etc. The first time he changed his mind, I'd just bought Lego for his present, and I panicked. But now he's changed his mind so many times that I'm pretty sure he'll be happy with whatever he gets.

Tiny, meanwhile, has her first dance concert next week. Yeah, you read that right, and yes, it is bizarre but I don't really have a choice. I did not enrol her in dance classes. There are, on the other hand, dance classes in our back room on Mondays. And Tiny has decided she's taking tiny ballet. Nobody else has a say. (Actually she wants to join in the big kids ballet and hip hop too but usually gets kicked out of those.)

My doll collection has had a massive cull. Anything that I don't care about or have no plans of getting out of storage, has gone.

I've also removed Zihu and Paige's face ups. They'll have new identities soon. I want to try doing their face ups with water colours. I don't know how well that will work but I'm better at water colours than pastels, so it's worth a try.

Once the Christmas crazies are over, I will probably take you on a tour of my remaining doll collection. Or at least I plan to. We're on the countdown to the Giant Baby starting kindergarten (Australian kindergarten is the equivalent of US preschool) so I should have more free time to post stuff and do stuff next year. (FORTY-ONE DAYS TO GO! YAY!)

An update on my post office story. They gave me the run around but then agreed to a partial refund. It's not enough to get enough ink to reprint the dolls myself but it IS enough to get them professionally reprinted. Which is ridiculous and proves what I've always said, home printers are a waste of money. (But convenient, if they work, and have ink in them . . . Ugh, ok, they're awful but these days they're pretty much the only way to buy a scanner.)

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas, or whatever they feel like celebrating.

What the actual fluff!

 So, I think my last post was the paper dolls I made. They took a YEAR! Between researching, sketching, painting, scanning, editing, layout, printing and collating, that's an actual year!

As I had planned from the beginning, once they were ready I bought all new ink cartridges for my printer, and as anyone that's ever had a printer knows, that stuff is expensive.

Then I printed. And printed. I got eight complete copies before I started getting out of ink warnings. Then I bought card to paste the actual dolls to. I ended up getting more ink and reprinting the dolls, straight onto the card.

I spent two days collating them into individual sets, and cutting the doll sheets so each doll was on it's own little piece of card.

I bought two packages of blu-tack to make stands for the dolls. Packaged the whole thing up, with a letter of explanation of course, and mailed it to the children's hospital.

AND AUSTRALIA POST LOST THEM!

I have never been so angry in my entire life!

Special Paper Dolls

 About a year ago I posted some old paper dolls that I made. Over the next few weeks, completely by coincidence, I was part of about five different conversations that touched on the topic of how difficult it is to keep younger kids entertained while they're in hospital. One lady, actually mentioned that her daughters had had paper dolls thirty years ago, and that she'd wanted some for her granddaughter while she was in hospital, but hadn't been able to find any.

 And so followed a year long project. It didn't actually take a year, there were long breaks, and I forgot about it for months after we moved. Researching, drawing, painting, tidying it all up in Photoshop, and now I have a whole book of paper dolls. Not a real book. A PDF book that only exists on my computer but whatever. I also accidentally discovered that you can make multi page PDFs in Photoshop Elements, which is something I've always wanted to be able to do and will come in pretty handy!

 Anyway, I've printed out a bunch this week and I'm going to send them to the Royal Children's Hospital. I just need to buy some white card to glue the dolls themselves to. I thought our regular shops would sell white card somewhere but the closest I could find  were blank greeting cards in "Make your own card" kits. I nearly bought them but I wasn't sure if they'd be big enough, so it will have to wait until we can get to Officeworks. Hopefully this afternoon.

There is way too much content to upload all the individual files here. But if you're interested, you can see the whole lot here.

And now I need to set to work, talking the Giant Baby into walking to Officeworks with me!

Happy Halloween

I'm late with this, as usual. Oh, well.

This year I got a little pack of doll sized trick or treating pails at the supermarket. I was going to make some costumes for some of my dolls and do a halloween picture but time got away from me.

We did a pumpkin again. I had planned on trying to make a Jack Skellington one but at the last second the Giant Husband volunteered to do it and then didn't listen to anything anyone said about it. It only got done last Sunday and it's already . . . disgusting! We need to throw it out but nobody wants to touch it.

We did trick or treating, and had trick or treaters for the first time! It was fun but also over 30 degrees. The Giant Baby only wore part of his costume because he was too warm. He had a dress shirt and a pair of dress pants to wear under the bits he's wearing, but he insisted on wearing shorts and a t-shirt. He also said it was too hot for me to paint his face white. He was the rosiest vampire I've ever seen.

As we were hiking twelve million miles looking for lollies, I couldn't help but think, "Surely we could just put on costumes, walk to the shops, and buy our favourite candies?! That'd make more sense!" But no, it doesn't work like that, and now I'm sunburnt. I also discovered that I do not approve of people not giving out candy but still sending their kids out. That's not fair.

I'm going to leave this here because the kids are being so noisy, I can't remember what I was going to say.

Playing With BJDs

I've been thinking a fair bit about my ball jointed dolls lately and I don't think I've ever discussed them in much detail here.

(By the way, if anyone (maybe Xanadu) feels bad because her bjds don't have shoes, take comfort in the fact that none of mine have clothes yet! And I've had at least one of them for over five years!)

I may have used this picture before.

I like it too much to feel bad about it.

My first bjd was a Dollmore Zihu. She was bought to be Claudia from Interview with a Vampire. If you don't know the book, or movie, Claudia is a child vampire who continues to age mentally but not physically, which ends up making her all kinds of crazy.

I wanted a Claudia doll because I wanted to make Claudia type clothes. In the book she has an elaborate recency wardrobe and in the movies her clothes are . . . Well, to me, her clothes are the best part of the movie. I especially wanted a doll worthy of a GOOD recreation (I've made several bad ones, for various dolls) of this dress.

Sorry, it's not a great picture but it's the best I can find right now. I am in LOVE with this dress. Frankly, I would probably kill a dozen people (more if I didn't like them) for this gown in my size.

Anyway, I chose Zihu to be Claudia. The only drawback was that she was only available in "Normal" colour.

I did her face up myself. My main concern was to make her not look like all the other Zihus I had seen. Back then (early 2014) if you google image searched "Dollmore Zihu" almost every result had very faded lips, almost no other shading or blushing on the face, especially around the eyes, freckles, and a very light coloured, maybe slightly gingerish wig. It might not have been EVERY one, but I remember it irked me. To me the point of Bjds is how customisable they are. If you're making it identical to everyone else's, you may as well buy a Barbie. So, I actively tried to make her look different. I thought the sculpt itself was beautiful and I wanted her face up to reflect that.

And here she is today. Wigless.

Her eyebrows and lower eyelashes could be better. Her upper eyelashes are frankly awful. I ruined my one set of doll eyelashes and didn't want to wait for another set to arrive by post. So her eyelashes are cheap human falsies from the chemist, cut down to size. And they are fantastically uneven.

But she has never looked vampiric enough to me. Claudia needs to be paler. So currently, I'm saving up, to hopefully buy an Iplehouse KID Celina in white skin. Although in the link, you may not see any resemblance, the sculpt when blank, is quite similar to Zihu's, so hopefully will give me the effect I was going for.

And if it starts to look like I'll be able to get Celina, I can make Zihu over to be someone else.

In the middle I have a weird doll group of kiddelfs by Luts. I thought they'd be comparable to Zihu in size but Zihu is smaller than a MSD sized doll and bigger than a tiny BJD. So no.

Why is it a "weird doll group"? Well, I bought one doll body and three heads. Ok, onesone of the heads was a free gift for spending over a certain amount. I thought I could practice face ups on them, then decide which face I liked best.

If you're wondering which faces, they're Bory, Buzzi and the Summer 2014 Event head and they look like this

Over the years I've had a few insane ideas of what to do with these. One idea that stuck around longer than most, was make the heads over to represent fire, earth and water and make an elaborate costume for each. Then switch them out when I felt like it. But I never got around to doing anything. Now I really want to do something with them. Just not sure what. They've barely been out of their box, but at least now they've had a coat of MSC.



My newest BJD is Paige. A KID sized doll by Iplehouse. She's a similar size to Zihu. Their torsos are nearly identical in size but Paige has longer, slimmer arms and legs. Her hands are smaller too. I did not think to compare their feet.

My Paige has a factory face up. It's very pretty. But very generic. This face should be filled with intelligence and curiosity and cheekiness. Instead, it's pretty. I think it's the lips. She should have a thin lipped, mischevious smile but they've put too much colour on. I want to repaint her but she's so pretty (Which is also WHY I want to repaint her!) and I like pretty things. My brain is a weird place.

Anyway, here's Paige's unnecessarily convoluted story. When I made my dollhouse (Wow! That's some tangent!) I discovered there was a ridiculous amount of dollhouse stuff available. In order to reign in my "I want"s and my spending, I decided I needed to know when my dollhouse was and who lived there. I chose May of 1885 for the date. Specific, I know. I like the 1880s and I happened to have a Bloomingdales (I think) catalogue for May 1885. Since one of my interests is family history, I chose some of my ancestors to live there. . . Actually, I killed off most of their kids (including my great great grandfather) because I couldn't afford that many dolls and didn't think there'd be room for them. So my Great-great-great grandparents and their oldest daughter live in my dollhouse. (Except it's 1885 in the dollhouse and they're the ages they would have been in more like 1865.)

What's this got to do with Paige? My original plan was to also get another dollhouse to represent my nana's family in the early 1930s. This was obviously when I lived alone and had two spare bedrooms. But then the dollhouse I wanted was discontinued, my brother moved in, then the Giant Husband, then the Giant Baby and I realised I would never have room for another dollhouse. But I felt bad. Like I had somehow let Nana down.

I had been eyeing Iplehouse's dolls for a while when they released Paige. And she caught my attention. My Dad used to have a picture of Nana when she was about ten and she looked a LOT like Paige. So, I decided, if I couldn't have a Nana dollhouse, I would have Nana doll.

 My Paige is named Lily. Nana's sisters called her Lily or Tigerlily, because she had yellowish-hazel eyes like a cat. When she finally gets clothes, she will be dressed in late 1920s and early 1930s styles. I'm trying to decide whether to make Zihu one of her sisters, or some other ancestor. Maybe Nana's mum or nana's nana. Not sure yet. I think another ancestor would be more fun as it would give me more time periods to choose clothes from, instead of always the 20s and 30s.

                 

I played around with different wigs on them today, and so I've included some more photos. Neither of them have clothes. For these pictures they shared a Simba dolls blouse that didn't fit either of them well and at one point Zihu was wrapped in the tucked fabric that Tiny bled all over the other week. Being a vampire she didn't mind. I took these in a hurry and it was my first time using my actual camera in over a year so they aren't great. I also cannot work out how to get the pictures to show up side by side. It would be cooler if they did.

This first wig had no hope of fitting either doll. It was bought for a totally different doll and was way too big. I still like how it looks on Zihu though.

                                   
Next is a Dollmore wig with pigtails. I hate these pigtails wigs because I can never make them look even. The two pigtails are always different heights, or one sticks out at a stupid angle. I think they're cute but they make me swear.

The next one is another Dollmore wig. I like how it looks on both girls but I also think it looks a little bland and it belongs to one of my Kish dolls any way, so these girls can't have it.

           

This is a Leekeworld wig. Another one I stole off one of my Kish dolls for today. For some reason it makes me think every doll that wears it looks "French". I don't even know what I mean by that.

Next is another Dollmore wig. This is the one I originally bought for Zihu to wear as Claudia but I don't like her in it. I was disappointed that it didn't make Paige look more like Bernadette Peters.

I hate this next wig so much. The hair fibre is too thick (The individual fibres not the stitching), the styling looks clumsy, the fringe is only ok if it was cut in the dark with a lawnmower, and the "wispy tendrils" are huge hanks of hair!

Next is the default wig that came with Zihu. It confuses me. All the hair comes out kind of sideways like it wants to be tied in pigtails but it's not meant to. I never know what I'm supposed to do with this one. I think it make Zihu look like the little girl from the Beethoven movies.

This next wig is my favourite wig ever. It's by Dollmore and the fit is amazing. It pops straight on these girl's heads like a hat, without any turning inside out or stretching or anything. And then it stays on! And stays in place beautifully!

I love the colour of this wig, which may be why I bought it. But it's the same style as the chocolate coloured pigtails wig and has the same problem.

And finally a Luts wig that I love the colour of.

And finally a picture of the girls together in the wigs that are theirs for the moment. Looking at this I can't help but think Paige desperately needs a new face up. Next to Zihu, even though Paige's face is more professional, it has no personality.

Taking these photos, I discovered that one of the magnets in Paige's headcap was loose. It kept popping out and her headcap kept popping off. So, if Paige looks a bit weird here and there, it's because in about a quarter of the pictures, she doesn't have her headcap on. Not that it's not attached properly. More, I got fed up with fighting with it and took it off and she modelled wigs without it.