Tiny Tuesday. Boxed chess set.

This week for Tiny Tuesday, I have one of my favourite items in my dollhouse. It's also probably one of the most ridiculously frivolous items in my dollhouse. A little boxed chess set. I have no idea what brand it is. Unfortunately a lot of my dollhouse items came in plain white boxes, some had stock codes scrawled on them in pen, but most had no branding on them, which means it's often hard to know who made what.

The box is made of walnut with applied carvings. It should have a little brass pin to hold the catch shut but it was missing one of the pins that held the hinges on, so I took the catch pin out to fix the hinges. Now it always sits with the lid slightly ajar.

Inside it's lined in green plush although my camera tends to turn greens bluish, it's actually a deep Christmassy bottle green. Across the centre is a trough for the pawns and either side of that is a row of tiny compartments to put each of the individual pieces in.

The pieces are all individually shaped. But because they're so small, it can be hard to know which piece is which. Even still I love that the pieces are actually different - that's why I bought this set, it's the only set I could find where the pieces weren't all the same.

The pieces are incredibly tiny and impossible to get out of the box without turning it upside down and tipping them all out, and then I'm terrified of losing one!

So why do I say this is ridiculous? Well partly because it was around sixty dollars. Looking back I can't believe I was willing to spend that on a box of miniature chess pieces. Partly because I never actually bought a chess board, so the dollhouse dolls can't even use these. And mostly because the box is so big. The library desk is the only table in the entire dollshouse that it fits on and it takes up so much of that, that it can't be used as a desk. Turns out the box is just under five centimetres (two inches-ish) front to back and most dollhouse shelves and tables are only around three and a half centimetres deep!

Tiny Tuesday. LOL and Merida figures

For my first Tiny Tuesday post I have a couple of little dolls that found their way into my house over Christmas. 

  First up is this Li'l Outrageous Littles doll. I had read about these online and had no interest in getting one. I don't like babies. They look like Bratz and I don't like Bratz. And in Australia they're generally priced between sixteen and twenty-five dollars. As a general rule five dollars is my limit for a blind box toy.
 But one day I had just been reading about how terribly hard to find these are and that afternoon we went shopping and they were EVERYWHERE! Target had a display of these at every single register. And almost every shop had them discounted. We ended up at Toys R Us where they were twelve dollars (by far the lowest price we'd seen) and I caved.
 I also immediately regretted it and assumed I would get whichever doll I was least likely to like, because I'm optimistic like that.

 Consequently I was pretty happy when I got the super hero baby with pigtails! Probably the only one that I was going to be completely happy with. Having said that, there's no chance I would buy abother one of these. Ninety-nine percent of the fun is in opening the packaging and they really are over-priced for what they are. I'm pretty sure if they were in blister packs there's no way they'd be more than ten dollars.

  Next is a Tomy buildable Disney Princess figure. Another blindbag item but at four dollars, far more reasonably priced. She's got a look that reminds me of the Funko-Pop dolls but she's still instantly recognisable as Merida. Her dress is actually a lot greener than it turned out in the picture. I was really pleased with this one. I bought her and a Frozen blindbag from the same range at the same time. Then I looked at the packaging and realised that out of the figures offered, unless I got Merida and Elsa, I was going to be disappointed. Luckily I got Merida and Elsa! (Sadly Elsa has since been kidnapped by the Giant Baby and I can't find her.)

Finally I got this Jakks Pacific Merida mini doll. These dolls are about three and a half inches tall and while the Frozen ones seemed to be everywhere last year, I've only seen the other princesses once. I chose Merida because she's hilariously awful.
 I would call this look 1980's country music prom queen. Not Merida. It looks nothing like her. Her little box had a LOT to say about her being posable. Um . . . Ok.
 My issue with that is that all of her plastic hair makes her head almost impossible to turn. It also gets in the way if you try to lift her arms. And if you do manage to lift her arms?

Suddenly her arms are growing out of her waist! I'm pretty sure that's not actually how anatomy works. On top of this the full extent of movement in her legs is this -

The poor girl can't even sit down! I actually love this doll, because she is so incredibly terrible. I think that might be weird. And now every time we go shopping I'm searching for these just so I can see if the other princesses are this bad. But so far I haven't spotted them again.

*The pictures in this post were taken on my phone and the whole post was written on my phone so I apologise if the pictures and formatting are slightly rubbish.

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.

A Strange Christmas Story (sort of)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plans

My plan to do "My stuff" for an hour after the baby goes to bed has come to nothing so far. I've been working a lot more than usual which means I get home at ten or eleven at night and I'm not working on anything then, generally I've been up since six am and all I want is my dinner. And if I did try to do anything in that state, I'd muck it up.

Not quite so cute when it's three AM and he's screaming the house down!

Also the Giant Baby has stopped sleeping. The mothercraft nurse says this is normal and it's called two-year sleep regression and will go away on it's own. I'm not completely sold on that idea. His Dad puts him to bed when I'm working, but if he's making any noise at all after that his Dad gets him back up again. I'm pretty sure this has become a bad habit and now he expects to be gotten out of bed if he wakes up at all.

Despite all this, in the delusion that I'll eventually get five minutes to myself I'm making a list of stuff that I want to get done. Not a big list because I want to do EVERYTHING but I'm not putting everything on the list - it's extremely short and prioritised; and there's no time limit. I'll finish when I finish, then I can make a new list.

Dress fitting for Not-Glinda. Nearly done. At the moment see-sawing

between Grace and Charlotte as her name.

First I want to finish the things I've started. Finish Not-Glinda's dress and finally give her a name, fix one Baby So Beautiful's hair. The other Baby So Beautiful still needs a dress. The My Child dress she's wearing fits ridiculously badly, but her new dress is on hold until I think of something I want to make her instead of forcing myself to make something that I don't want to make.

Her collar sticks up weirdly and I'm not completely happy with how full her fringe is,

but at least she doesn't look like her face is melting anymore.

I want to look at making a light tent for photographing dolls and things. At the moment this is sounding like a fairly simple process but it still remains to be seen if it is or not.

I have a Dollmore Zihu.

The bad lighting here makes her look a tiny bit alien

 I've had her for a few years now. I gave her a face-up when she arrived. And I love her more than nearly anything. But I still haven't made any clothes for her. I still haven't settled on which wig is hers. I bought a wig specially for her and it really doesn't suit her but I have two others that I quite like on her. Mostly she needs clothes.

I also got an Iplehouse KID for Christmas.

I'm not happy with her eyes but I think I'm happy with her wig. . . maybe

 She needs clothes too. And I have to decide which wig is hers.

Put away in a cupboard in our laundry is a charming young lady named "Miss Three-Head".

She's never even been unwrapped!

She's a lutz doll with two extra heads that I bought not long after I got my Zihu. She doesn't have any face-up yet. I haven't even unwrapped her and have completely forgotten which of the Luts heads she has! Two of the heads have no eyes. And I have no wigs that will fit her. I know that I had plans for her, when I bought her. I have NO idea now what those plans were. I'm not even going to say that I have to do anything with her just now. But I do have to decide WHAT I'm going to do with her. Have some vague idea at least.


Lastly in my dollhouse I have a library. With some lovely bookshelves.

Lovely empty bookshelves

And a grand total of maybe six books. I want to make some books for the dollhouse. I'm talking about making some book covers in Photoshop, printing them out and gluing them to blocks of craftwood. Not any ambitious miniature bookbinding of actual readable miniature books for me!

And of course continue to amass a collection of ridiculous and creepy Shopkins Happy Places toys, that just keep getting weirder.

Shopkins Happy Places. Fun but possibly the creepiest thing ever.

Shopkins Happy Places house exterior.

It's happened. I've lost my damned mind and gotten into Shopkins. Not the weird "What the hell are you even supposed to do with these?" Shopkins that have been around for a few years now, but the newer, smaller, Happy Places, dollhouse Shopkins.
 I've been eyeing the dollhouse sets ever since they came out but hadn't really intended on buying any of them. Then I was sent out to buy myself a Christmas present from the Giant Baby and somehow came home with the dollhouse. The very next day, the same shop had the Party Studio house extension in stock. That found it's way under our Christmas tree too. And then through various sources by the time Christmas was over I had all of the furniture and doll sets that go with the basic house and the party studio.

Furnished house.

And the Party Studio.

 A basic run down of how these sets work so I don't sound like a completely mad person for the rest of this post.
First there's the basic dollhouse. It's cute, the rooms are a little small and I wish the ceilings were higher but it was relatively cheap which makes it easier to deal with these issues. This comes with a doll and roughly half of the loungeroom furniture and accessories.
Next there's what they call "Welcome Packs." Each of these contain a doll and about half the furniture and accessoroes for a room. There's one for the bathroom, bedroom and kitchen but not the loungeroom because the loungeroom welcome pack is more or less what comes with the house.
Next there are "Decorator Packs." There's one of these for each room and they have the other half of the stuff for each room.
Then there are doll packs which is just a doll and two tiny accessories and lastly "Surprise Delivery" packs. Surprise delivery packs look like teeny shipping boxes and come with three random accessories. The three accessories will all be for the same room and usually related in some way eg. An egg, an eggcup and a saucepan.

Surprise Delivery egg and eggcup. . . not sure why the egg is green though

Each room has an animal theme. Bunnies for the bathroom, bears for the bedroom, puppies for the parlour and kitties for the kitchen. And ALL of the furniture and accessories have the faces of the animal of the room they belong to (and the ears and tails.) Apparently they're called "Petkins". The concept of petkins raises a lot of questions to my mind that probably I wouldn't wonder about if I was a kid but I'll get to that in a bit.
The Party Studio is an extension to the basic house and while Party Studio sounds pretty fancy, it's really just an extra bedroom and a dining room. It comes with a few pieces of furniture for each room and a staircase. I'm counting the staircase separately because it's not fixed in place. The extension can be slotted into place on either side of the house and the staircase can be attached to either side of the basic house or extension in the same way.

Basic house, staircase and Party studio

Anyway when the Party Studio appeared so did two new decorator packs (one for each room of course) and three new dolls.
The structures are well made and seem fairly sturdy and has cute details like power outlets in each room. I like the way you can connect them on either side rather than having one set layout you're stuck with forever. It bothers me a little how small the rooms in the base house are. The rooms in the Party Studio (I feel stupid and pretentious every time I say "Party Studio") are bigger even though there's less stuff to go in them. But the decorator packs and surprise delivery packs do come with small "floor tiles" that can be connected to the house to make the rooms bigger. Except the can only be connected to the ground floor at the sides and they look a little silly.

Power outlet

Every room has built in shelves and the ground floor room of the Party Studio has a little window that opens. The loungeroom has a cute aquarium - actually just a square of transparent blue plastic with fish and seaweed moulded into it. Along the roof of each structure is a strip of bunting and paper lanterns. The bunting has little faces - bunnies, puppies, kitties and birds.

Detail of the bunting. Third flag along is clearly a bird and clearly not a bear.

Since the first three animals are also the theme animals from three of the rooms in the base house this makes me wonder if perhaps the bedrooms bear theme was originally planned as a bird theme. So far there is no room with a bird theme.
Most of the little pieces of furniture and accessories are made of a slightly rubbery feeling plastic. The bunk bed from the sleepover bedroom is made of harder plastic and there may be more pieces that I can't think of off the top of my head. Ninety nine per cent of the furniture has little animal faces. Painted eyes, moulded painted ears, little raised muzzles with painted mouths and little moulded tails on the back. I have considered removing the paint and filing off the ears, tails and muzzles and repainting this furniture to be more realistic but that would be a LOT of work and I'm not sure I would prefer that. The little faces are cute and since the dolls and houses are quite cartoony they look pretty good together.

Petkin chair showing face and tail. I don't know that I'd be overly comfortable sitting in that chair.

The little dolls are cute. Even though their features are clearly copied from the larger Shopkins dolls, they're nowhere near as terrifying. They're adorable. The dolls are roughly 3 inches high but because of their moulded hair, the actual height varies from doll to doll. They have little rubbery removable dresses but I'm not sure how useful this really is. You see, their sleeves are painted on their arms, their shoes and socks are painted on their legs, and both are fairly outfit specific, so swapping their dresses looks a little weird. On top of that, the more hair the doll has, the harder it is to get her dress off or back on again. And frankly if I was a child, I would be far more likely to just swap their heads around if I wanted to change their clothes. Heck, I'm an adult and if I ever want to change their clothes, I'll just be swapping their heads.

These are the dolls that came with the Welcome Packs and house

More dolls. The pink eyes are a little creepy.

Even more dolls.

If you undress the dolls they look like they're in a Jane Fonda workout video.

And the three dolls that were released at the same time as the party studio.

And now on to my issues with these sets, or as I like to call them "Reasons to suspect Shopkins will be responsible when I finally go completely mad."

 1. The Sparkle Hill Happy home.
 I don't have this. I will never have this. The only place I've seen it for sale is the Walmart website. It's a variation on the basic house but with special holographic wallpaper and glitter through the paint. It even comes with special edition kitchen furniture which is all glittery. Yay. . . Except, wait a minute. The only way you can get half of the loungeroom furniture is packed with the ordinary basic house. So if you get this you either have to have an unfurnished lounge or buy the basic non-glittery house as well. On top of which the kitchen furniture it comes with is the furniture from the Welcome pack but all pink and glittery but this won't match the rest of the kitchen furniture. You'll have 1 glittery kitchen chair and one plain 1. This idea really bothers me.

What's more disturbing a toilet with a face or food with a face?

2. Petkins. So depending on how you look at it the idea of Petkins can be kind of disturbing. Everything had these little faces. The furniture, the food, the toilet, the toilet paper, the bath. . . Are they alive? Or are they just cute faces on things? I can deal with the idea of the cute faces but if they're alive? That's a whole different story. Firstly there's just the concept of how annoying it would be if all of your possessions were alive but then there are the more complicated concepts like do they eat? Do they poop? Do they breed? Because if they did that there's your whole day gone just feeding them and cleaning up their poop. And what do they eat? All the food in the house IS petkins! That's just gross. Furthermore, I'm not sure what would bother me more, a toilet and toilet paper that's alive or eating food that's alive, but I'm pretty sure both things would disturb me greatly.
3. Pictures from the Puppy Patio sets (which I haven't seen in person yet.) show that it has stuff to look after a dog. A kennel, a dog bowl, a dog bone. BUT there's no dog in sight! Sooooo either this stuff is to look after an imaginary dog OR the puppy petkins. If it's the petkins, then this house is pretty underprepared to look after all the other damn animals in it and also Yay! 

The puppy petkins get to eat dog treats that ARE puppy petkins! That's not creepy or cannibalistic at all.

How many different coloured TVs does a shopkin really need?

4. A LOT of the stuff you get in the Surprise Delivery packs are just recolours of stuff that was in the furniture packs. While I'm all for having choice, getting something new is WAY more fun than getting ANOTHER television in a different colour.

Riana Radio and her accessory that's . . . not a radio

5. Riana Radio. One of the individual dolls is named Riana Radio. Until I opened her box I thought her accessory was a little kids karaoke machine and microphone. Nope. It's a diary and a pen. Why?!  Why would you name a doll Radio unless her accessory was somehow to do with music?! The others make sense. Spaghetti Sue is cooking spaghetti. Sarah Sushi has a bento box of sushi. Melodine is playing piano. But there's no logical connection between the name Riana Radio and a diary.
6.And this is going to make me sound like a huge whiney baby and I don't care.
There's a whole new set of Happy Places stuff that's been released. A games room and laundry extension, a backyard and pool extension, and a heap of dolls and furniture packs to go with them. I've been seeing them all over Instagram since Christmas. It appears these sets are available EVERYWHERE.  . . except Australia. The fact that I could walk to Moose head office (I wouldn't because it would take about 3 hours and I have shit to do, but I COULD if I really needed to) for some reason makes this more annoying. I want to see the new sets. Especially the pool and garden stuff. I want to see the little catalogue that shows all the new stuff. I especially want to know if the rumours are true and some of the new accessories are indeed a poop scooper and poop because that is so terrible it's hilarious. But none of the new stuff has shown up anywhere yet.

In all fairness I finished writing this last Friday and have been waiting to take pictures and since then the new stuff has shown up in our local shops. Probably expect to hear about it soonish (unless our internet goes out again in which case close to soonish.)

Stalled.

  I'm having a hard time getting anything done lately.
  Christmas was chaos. Then the Giant Husband was on holidays which was great but he always wants to be doing something which left me with no time or energy for my stuff.
 On top of which I've been a bit off. Not ill as such. I've developed a weird sensitivity to sunlight. We don't open our curtains ever because otherwise I burn. I wear sunscreen whenever I remember but I still burn. And when I burn I come out in a horrible, hivey, blistery rash on the burn. And when I have the rash I feel awful. Tired and sluggish and headachey and everything achey and cranky and just not good. That's what I've been like for most of the last six weeks. Meanwhile the Giant Baby has been a turbo-charged ball of fury because he doesn't like being hot and it's been quite a warm Summer so far. Consequently Summer is quickly going from being my favourite time of year to a big pain in the neck.
 Meanwhile all the stuff I'm trying to do has problems. Whenever I pause a project, for some reason I lose confidence and have trouble getting back into it. At the moment I'm trying to bully myself into finishing Not-Glinda's dress but so far haven't quite finished.
 The Baby So Beautiful dolls are having issues. The broken one has a wig now. She needs clothes. I have no idea what to make her. Every idea I come up with, I discard twenty minutes later because I hate it.
 The one that just needed her hair restyled is currently bald. I tried to curl her wig without getting her head wet. They have a hole under the wig in the back of the head. I didn't want water getting in there and damaging her eyes. But it meant her curls ended up sticking out on a weird angle. I couldn't get them to sit right. So, I've taken her wig off to try again but haven't done it yet.
 I got an Iplehouse doll for Christmas. I chose one of the kid size ones the assumption that she'd wear the same size wigs and shoes and possibly clothes as my 14" Kish dolls and my Dollmore Zihu. I ordered eyes the size the website said to order, unquestioningly. Paige's page says eye size 8-10mm. I ordered size 8 which turns out to be way too small so currently I'm waiting for new eyes for her.

  I have so many plans for this year. Things I want to make things I want to do. Getting time always seems to be an issue so I've decided to make a rule that every night once the Giant Baby is in bed and we've packed away his toys, I get to (or have to depending on my mood) spend the next hour doing my stuff. Haven't started that yet, only came up with it this morning, but hopefully it means I'll get more stuff done. I'm going to try to make a post in the next few days outlining the stuff I want to get done, or at least the stuff I want to prioritise because it seems I want to do EVERYTHING.