Just an idea I had

Gift idea, or ostentatious home decor.

Ugh! More freaking plague!

I want to start by saying, I'm having issues posting comments on other people's blogs at the moment. As soon as I start typing a comment, the option to post that comment, completely disappears. Linda's blog won't let me comment AT ALL, other people's do sometimes but not always. I'm still reading stuff though.

For the next few weeks I'm going to try to post here as much as I can. Why? I'm going insane. The whole world is going mad. Coronavirus is everywhere and I'm trying not to think about it too much because it's setting off my anxiety. Which is hard because the websites I look at are either not posting at the moment or every second thing they post is Coronavirus. I want to not overthink it, but there's no way to distract myself, because there's nothing to read that's not going to bring it up. The hardest part for me is everything out of the US is encouraging self-isolation to prevent exposure, while last I heard, the official stance of the UK government was along the lines of "just get it and get it over and done with". Nobody seems to realise that these two attitudes can't coexist. If the UK goes for Herd Immunity, that wastes the whole self-isolation thing everywhere else seems to be doing, because six months down the track, it'll just pop up again! And I shall do my best never to speak of Coronavirus again. But as I said, going to try to post more often, even if it's something stupid and isn't overly professional, partly to distract myself, partly so if any of you are in the same boat, there's something non-corona-y to read.

 I still have not finished sorting my fabric. I keep forgetting to get boxes and I got distracted sewing for Tiny. Tiny is an extremely low maintenance kid, and sometimes it feels like the only thing I really do for her is make clothes. And she had suddenly gotten too tall for nearly everything I'd made. And I like her wearing dresses - they're quicker for bum changes and I don't have to fold them up. And at the moment, shop bought dresses look stupid on her. She's always been thin, but she lost a lot of weight with that virus she had, and last week she had hand, foot and mouth disease, which meant more weight loss. But now she's too skinny to fill out a size 0, but too tall for a size 1. I can at least make stuff that kind of fits. (Meanwhile, I'm replacing her steamed veggie lunches with mac and cheese or pasta, when I can get it and encouraging her to eat cheese and drink milk, in the hopes of fattening her up before winter.)
Anyway, here are my tiny dresses so far.

This was supposed to be made in a much larger print, without the lace. I made this, in a hurry, to test the pattern. Then I couldn't find the fabric I wanted to make a final version from. The lace was thrown on to hide some messy stitching (because I rushed it, and as I keep learning, rushing and sewing are not friends.) The overall effect is a bit more Little House on the Prairie, than I planned, and I suppose it's okay, but I don't love it.

I DO love this one! It's dotted swiss with a high yoke and waterfall frills. My theory was that she could wear this over a merino spencer and leggings for most of winter. But I accidentally used the wrong sleeves on it and now they're not long enough to hide an undershirt. But it's so pretty, I'll probably make her wear it anyway.

This one is my favourite. It's weird, but also awesome. Even more awesome because the shoulder frills (or bretelles, depending on how many vintage copies of the Delineator you read) are lined with peacock blue silk. Which looks amazing.

This last one I feel a bit blah about.

It's made from an old shirt. I like the stripes but I didn't completely think it through. I was going to gather the skirt on, but the baby was sick and the boy was a shit, so I quickly pleated it on instead, which probably would've been fine with any other fabric. I don't like what it does to the stripes though.

Grail dolls and party plans.

 Since I spent so much time culling my doll collection, I'm making a conscious effort not to buy new dolls on a whim. Basically I would rather buy fewer dolls that I really like and stuff for them, than a trillion dolls that I'm going to get bored of quickly.

 But my first new doll of this year has arrived. (I'm not counting my Iplehouse dolls as FIRST because they haven't arrived yet.)

 A Shirley Temple doll, I got on EBay. I've got mixed feelings about her and I knew I would have. I've always wanted a Shirley Temple doll to make clothes for. I find Shirley Temple a bit "meh" but a lot of her clothes were great. My ideal Shirley doll would be a number 3 Little Darling painted to look like her. Some were made at some point, for a convention, I've seen them on EBay. But since I don't have unlimited money or the patience of a saint, that's not really an option.

 This is the Shirley Temple dress up doll. I wanted this doll desperately, when Danbury Mint released her, back in the 90s. Eventually my enthusiasm waned a bit. Actual owner pictures never looked as nice as promotional pictures. So when I finally found one for sale in Australia, I was in two minds. I wanted her and knew if I didn't buy her, it might be years  before I saw another one that didn't require international shipping and I would regret it. But I was pretty sure that if I got her, I would be disappointed.

 She's not "blow me away" amazing but (possibly because my expectations weren't high) she's much nicer than expected. Sure, from a lot of angles, she has a maniac, serial killer, stare, she looks like she fell asleep in a sunbed, and her wig isn't in fantastic condition. Her dress is clearly the ballet dress from the Baby take a bow film, and not a great rendition of it. I actually think her dress is from one of the porcelain Shirleys that Danbury Mint made, but I'm not sure.

I actually really do like her and since a few years ago, when the real Shirley's costume collection was auctioned, I bought a copy of the auction catalogue, I have plenty of pictures to work from when I do make her clothes.

 I'm also planning the Giant Baby's Rainbow Candy Birthday party. Ugh. Last year, he had a rainbow candy birthday cake amd ever since has wanted to have this birthday be a rainbow candy birthday. This is last year's cake

The Giant Baby wants to decorate cupcakes at his party. Which is fine. Except our oven is shit. I don't know where to buy blank premade cupcakes and I'm a cheapskate anyway. I'm also not going to ask someone else to make forty odd cupcakes because I'm not actually Satan. So today I did some experimenting.

I had read that you can cook cakes in an electric fry pan, and I can't remember if I've ever made a cake in our oven. So we made up a batch of cupcakes and cooked half in our oven and half in the electric fry pan.

The verdict? As Tiny would say "Oh dear!"

The ones from the oven came out burnt on top, slightly undercooked in the middle and hopelessly lopsided. But very yummy.

The ones from the electric fry pan didn't rise enough, didn't brown at all (obviously they wouldn't), and tasted weirdly eggy.

Gah. I think I'm going to have to get my silly self to Big W to get a microwave cupcake cooker and keep my fingers crossed that that actually turns out decent cupcakes.

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.

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.