dressmaking and that's about it

We'll start with the lighthearted stuff.

I felt bad that my Cerisedolls Lyse (who is still sadly nameless because I keep prioritizing other things) was still sitting around in a baggy plaid shirt while other people had gotten custom clothes.

So I threw together a quick dress for her.

 I'm not sure any of these really showcase how the dress looks/functions but they were the ones that came out okay so that's what we're going with for now.

I could not locate much in the way of white fabric so the bottom is sheer. I will make a proper lining for it when I locate my material. I know I have some somewhere. I really wanted to make her something in light blue, but I have no light blue at all. Only dark blue.

It's a bit later than I thought so we'll skip the rambling for now and save it for another time.

sweater!

I haven't gotten any good pictures of the newly assembled body/head combo in the previous posts. I don't have any proper clothes for her yet so she's just wearing this black coat that obscures any sense of figure for the most part so it really doesn't look any different at the moment from the original pictures.

However, my Unoa Xyle (mentioned two posts ago) arrived and I set about giving him a face up and making him some properly fitting clothes.

I was doing such a good job of avoiding oddly sized dolls despite multiple temptations in the 51cm range. Alas, Unoas are my weakness.

Here he is in his new sweater. I need to see about styling his wig so it doesn't cover half his face. Or making him another wig. I'm not entirely sure what I'm doing with him yet. But I did make myself sell some things to make up for my impulse buy and I've decided I cannot get any new dolls until all of the ones I currently own have clothes and names.

mods, cont...

A couple days ago I finally decided to do some additive work on the mod project. And then I let it sit a while longer because I used the cheap epoxy (I wasn't sure I wanted to waste a bunch of the good stuff on something that not only might not be permanent but also might end up a horrible abomination).

Well anyway between the cheap epoxy which doesn't match the body at all and the horrific uneven mess that was my dremel work I just wasn't sure this was going anywhere.

But I finally decided to do some sanding work and here are some pictures of the results:

So here you can see what I meant about the epoxy not matching the body at all. The sanding job is not at all perfect but I felt it was good enough for the time being. I wanted to paint over it and do a trial run with the head to see how things were coming along. Also the heat was brutal and I was dying. 

So at this point I took the body over to the airbrushing and face up station and made a rough attempt at color matching.

Behold the truly horrendous fruits of my labor! I felt like it looked better prior to the paint job when I saw how these pictures turned out but as it sits here on my desk with a fan blowing on it to dry the paint, I'm less distressed. I think it was just the sub par lighting combined with the paint still being all shiny making it look terrible.

As soon as I'm sure the paint is dry I am going to give it a few coats of sealant and try the head with it and see how things look.

mods

So I had this brilliant plan. Go to Yahoo!Japan and search for a cheap used SD13 girl body and so some minor mods and I figured that would be pretty in line with what I wanted for the head that has made an appearance in the last few posts.

Well, I happened upon an Unoa Xyle and with the yen being so weak against the dollar right now it was a really good deal. I tried to talk myself out of it and stick to the plan, but I failed. I told myself I would bid once and ignore the auction until it was over and I kind of figured someone else would come along and snag it out from under me, but they didn't and I ended up winning.

So that puts a new girl body on the back burner for a while. But I decided I did want something at least semi functional as a temporary and I kind of liked the proportions with the head and the ancient Customhouse body it had been sitting on, so I decided to see about maybe modding that to work as a temporary.

It's very rough right now because I was just trying to get as much generic shaping in as possible before the dremel ran out of batteries. I have a corded one but it only has one speed setting and I find it very hard to work with at times. I'll likely do a bit of additive work as well and then sand the top part smooth. And then I'll do some work on the lower torso as well.

Luckily these old bodies have such thick resin that you can do things like shave off large chunks without damaging structural integrity. That's part of why I was considering an old SD13 because I knew there would be plenty of room for mod work. 

I haven't decided yet if I will do anything to the arms. The legs should be fine as is. I might also take the time to refine the lower torso joint I made years ago since it doesn't match anything at all. Or I might just put the lower torso back together to make it easier to sculpt on. But we'll see. A lot depends on how happy I end up with it as I go along. If I end up liking it enough then maybe this will end up being a more permanent solution. And if I don't then I won't want to spend as much time on it if it's going to be replaced anyway.

But so far I feel like the general roughed in shape of things is coming along okay. Once the dremel is recharged I'll probably work on it some more.

I wanted something that wasn't on the super super tiny side, but a lot of female bodies I see these days that are not super tiny tend to be extremely busty. And I kind of felt like that wasn't really the direction I wanted to go with this particular project. I did find a few that might work but most of them weren't going to pose any better than this body anyway so it didn't really feel like a terribly worthwhile expense.

One of Doll Chateau's bodies really appealed to me but the price tag and the wait time really didn't.