temporary fixes

I always kind of marvel at the number of things I seem to have neglected to mention on here. A lot of things from last year, really. I was not in the best place emotionally and sometimes I just didn't feel like talking about stuff as it happened I guess.

But I'm feeling chatty again so have some information on something I neglected to talk about before.

Sometime last year (I cannot for the life of me remember exactly when) I acquired a Blossom Doll Molly head in a trade (at least I'm fairly certain it was a trade? I could be mis-remembering) and I briefly tried to put it on my white skin Impldoll body but I didn't like the proportions so much and I also had already made clothes for that body that I didn't feel suited the head. So I put the original head back on that body (which is also too large for it) and Molly ended up in the head cabinet.

I spent most of the pursuing months on and off looking for a cheap body for the head. I strongly considered one from Mirodoll because they're just so darned affordable, but ultimately I decided the amount of work I'd have to put into it to make it work the way I wanted it to would not be worth it.

Then April Story had their closing sale and I was very very tempted because I felt like their bodies were far more elegant and well sculpted and the price was really good. But ultimately I decided to be financially responsible and I passed on it.

Fast forward to about a month ago. I had enough spare money to afford something relatively inexpensive (as I had not yet gathered the motivation to start selling things) so I put up a WTB thread and set a maximum I was willing to pay and within a day three people had gotten back to me. One of the three had an April Story body up for offer and I jumped on that offer.

Because of the seller's class schedule they were not able to ship until last week, and yesterday the body arrived.

Sadly, it is still too small for the head but it will do for now. Initially it really bothered me but it doesn't so much now.

I couldn't find a wig I liked on the head until I tried on Aura's old fiber wig. I was about to get set up the boiling water to make it lay flat again (because I'd boiled the back to make it capable of being in a high ponytail) but then I got this idea to try to style it.

I initially wanted some sort of bun, but I was having a great deal of difficulty getting it to stay in place as the hair was just a little bit too short to wrap around itself enough.

So I decided to try a braid. But the high braid look wasn't working quite as well as it did in my head, so I ended up wrapping the braid into a sort of bun type deal and holding it in place with toothpicks. But then she had hair still hanging down in the back (cuz that was part of how Aura's hair was styled) and too much visible wig cap, so I was messing with ways to pull the rest of the hair back and ended up doing yet another braid along the base of her neck. It looked fairly ridiculous so I looped it around and pinned it onto the braid bun and it still looks fairly ridiculous but oh well. It'll do for now!

Have some pictures.

 I could not get the side shot to come out clearly for some reason.

And here she is from the front. There are an absurd amount of flyaways because the wig was boiled to lay in a very specific position. At some point I may boil it again in its current position to calm that down, but for now it doesn't bother me much.

 My other temporary fix was to give little Sollux one of Id's spare shirts that he never uses.

This is a truly horrendous picture but for some reason he would not cooperate. The shirt is ridiculously out of character for him but at least he's not half naked like he was before. I need to make so many clothes and I'm having such a hard time motivating myself to sew. I suppose I could do something crazy like buy clothes but finding the right sorts of things is so hard...

Lyse Photos

Okay so here are the promised pictures of my Cerisedolls Lyse! Yesterday it was very dark and rainy and I could not get anything that looked even half good enough to be photoshopped into something other than an abomination.

Today the lighting is better so I was able to use photoshop to make something SLIGHTLY less abominable. When I get more money I'm getting something better than a point an shoot that might as well be "baby's first camera". It's the worst. XD

I am adding a cut since there will be some NSFW pics. I tried to get some of her clothed but since she wears an enormous shirt half the time (because I've been too lazy to sew. Also I don't know what I want her to wear yet) it hides her figure and makes her arms look awkward.

selling things

I've been considering selling some things for a while but I get unreasonably attached even to things I don't plan to use.

I recently pulled out the sleeping Vivien head I modded and decided I liked it a lot better than I originally thought. Probably even better than the default head. I am very reluctant to sell either (despite having no need for TWO Vivien heads) because I know it is very unlikely that I will ever get a chance to own this head again.

After agonizing over it for a few days I put the default Vivien head up for sale on DoA. I love the head and it works really well for the character, arguably better than the one I modded, but I just don't feel that... pull. There's no sense of attachment. But there is with the one I modded, so I've decided I'm going to keep that one.

I also decided I'm really never going to make use of my Sist Bully face again or the Impldoll Charles head that came with the body I got for my L-bi.

And after holding onto it for a bazillion years after I wasn't using it anymore, I also listed my Latidoll Chaim head. This is another one I know I will never get back if I let it go and I'm not sure if anyone will even be interested in it so many years after its release but it's just sitting around doing nothing in the head cabinet so I might as well see if someone else wants it.

I did not list my Soom Sphaler even though I probably should have. I completely forgot I even had the head (which is never a good sign) but I'm going to give it more time to think about whether or not I want to pursue the project I had in mind for the head.

In other news, some other sales went through and I was able to gather enough funds to acquire a secondhand Lillycat/Cerisedolls Lyse. She'd been on my wishlist for a while and even when I wasn't sure when/if I would ever find time and motivation for the hobby again, I still wanted her.

She's in cream skin instead of caramel like I originally wanted, but she's absolutely lovely and I'm completely smitten. I don't own anything that fits her so she's been sitting around in a massively oversized plaid shirt I got at one point when my friend was considering making a Marshall Lee doll.

Her posing is FANTASTIC and so natural. She makes almost everyone else look so stiff and lifeless by comparison.

I will have to try to get pictures later! For now I must be off to work!

finally

I finished off my 6 month layaway back in September and then waited another two months for Dollzone to finally complete my order. But now, at long last, I have my DZ Raymond head that I ordered to replace my previous Kael.

And adhflijwrkewjrkwejifdsujfiosdjwerjakjdskj I love it so much. I think the blank head looks way too young to be Kael but it's fantastic and I am so smitten and I have not felt this way in so long. It's so cold out I'm not sure how well face ups will work out but perhaps I'll attempt to give that a go later. Or just wait and see if we get a random warm day. It is Texas. It will likely happen. And I can live with him blank. His face has wonderful structure.

I really didn't expect to be excited. I've been on sort of a semi hiatus from actively doing anything with my dolls for a while now and I thought it would be such bad timing on this head arriving. I thought I'd look at it and think "well this is nice" and then put it on the body and forget about it for a while. But noooo he is so fantastic.

His poor hair is a mess after spending 8 months in a box. I'm going to have to try to figure out how to fix that because this will not do. For now I'll let it slide and he can be disheveled and blank and sit on my desk next to me and watch me play WoD (or wait in the queue to). But we'll get this wig issue sorted and spend some time giving him a proper face and he will be perfect and wonderful!

I'd take pictures but he's such a mess it wouldn't do him justice. Maybe later.

Arrivals!

My package I mentioned before finally arrived! So now I can talk about what it is without worrying about inflicting further bad luck on its arrival!

I traded with someone on DoA for an Impldoll Charles. I was primarily interested in the body for my L-bi head but after seeing the Charles head in person I may end up doing something with it after all.

The body is so small though.! I was not expecting it to be quite so slim. I'd read that Impldoll's MSD bodies were slender but it's hard to tell from pictures.

I made him a wig out of a spare fur swatch I had lying around since baby Sollux stole the black fur wig I was using for one of my Unoa boys and the other two wigs were either not as functional as I remembered or too unruly from spending time in the wig box.

This is an extremely horrendous picture that exists primarily to show that he has a wig and a body now. And a random assortment of clothes I had in the right(ish) size.

The wig is extremely fluffy, which I'm not sure about. I like the color though! I haven't really decided for sure what to do with him. I'd intended to make him my new Nazoe after I sold the head I was using for the previous one but then I thought he made a cute blonde and I'm sort of tempted to make him into a younger version of Auralion.

Will give it more time before I do anything crazy. I also need to redo his face up (because aside from the eyebrows it's still the way it came to me from Yahoo!Japan yeeeaaaars ago) and blush it to match the body.

The other arrival was some appropriately sized purple eyes for Orkas. I would like to eventually get some with smaller irises but these work for now. Unfortunately(?) I like this head much better with these eyes.

My camera was being a jerk so it didn't want to pick up the color of the eyes. I had to adjust them in photoshop so that they didn't just look black/grey.

I went through a phase a couple days ago where I was severely tempted to use this head for Atlas , which would have forced me to go off in search of a new Orkas. Not something I'm eager to do because this has been my ideal Orkas head for a loong time now. Previous Orkas was modded to look more similar to this head so I'd really just be back at square one if this didn't work out.

head comparison and face up

EDIT: I may have gone ahead and gotten eyes in the right size anyway as well as a new wig. The current one is a little too coarse to sit the way I want it to and hopefully this new one will be closer to the right color. I do like redhead Orkas but he's supposed to be a little more strawberry blonde.

We are now fully committed to operation "attempting to recoup your losses is futile."

So here is the modded reminisce Vivien head (left) next to the default open eyed one (right). I don't have anything even remotely close to the right color in the right size for this head so I'm having a hard time deciding what I think.

It has helped me decide what to change if I continue working on the modded head instead of using this one.

The larger eyes make the head look larger as a whole, so now I"m not entirely sure if it works okay on the body I was using.

I am debating on whether or not to buy eyes in the right size first or work more on the modded head to see if I can't make myself definitively happy with it. If I don't keep the open eyed head then the eyes will not really be useful for anything else, so I guess it can't hurt to work more on the modded head first.

I need to close the eyes a little bit more at the top to give the impression of glaring and the right eye needs a little carved out on the lower lid in the outer corner area. This time I will also likely blush it to match the body.

packages

Two packages were supposed to arrive yesterday. Both of them were marked undeliverable as addressed, so this morning I went down to the post office so I would arrive the minute they opened. I wanted to try to intercept my packages before they were returned to their senders.

One package I did manage to get. My Elfdoll Vivien open eyed head arrived. The other is... somewhere. I don't know where. The post office didn't know where. They said they'd try to get my carrier to find it and bring it to me today but they didn't show up until really late in the day and I missed them so the package may or may not be in the apartment office. I guess we'll see tomorrow morning.

But about the head.

Wow, the eyes are so much bigger than what I did with my eye opening job. I guess I just wasn't getting a sense of scale from pictures and made them way too small? But now I'm used to them that size and they feel enormous at their regular size. Tomorrow maybe I can give the new head a face up to see if I prefer it or not.

I'm trying to talk myself out of being tempted to keep both. It would be weird to have two completely unrelated characters with the same mold, so I'd have to do something like mod the head I opened the eyes on to be sleepy again or something to justify keeping both and then I probably wouldn't alternate them like I should so it would defeat the purpose. I should just sell whichever one I decide I'm not going to use. Just a matter of convincing myself to actually do it. XD

Right now I'm exhausted from being out and about all day and waking up early to hunt down packages.

I'm afraid of talking about my other package until it arrives. I keep worrying I'll somehow jinx it despite the fact that its arrival has already been jinxed.

eye mods: Id

I was thinking last time I took photos of him, that I needed to bring Id's eyes in a bit because I'd opened them a bit too much for eyes to sit properly in them.

But I kind of put this off since it didn't seem like a very fun project and doing face ups on heads that small is scary.

Then yesterday I was ... doing something. I completely forget what. And I saw a picture of one of the little 1/6 guys on the Crobidoll website and he had these little teeth and I thought they were adorable and I decided that I wanted to not only bring in Id's eyes but also mod his mouth open a bit so he could have cute teeth too. XD

So I got out the epoxy and made his eyes a bit smaller. And, as always, I overestimated how much I'd need and mixed up too much, so I also gave him little elf ears while I was at it.

None of the pre-faceup pics turned out okay because it was night time and I forgot to turn the brightness back up on my camera. But here is one after the face up so you can see his ears. I should have sanded them more but I was impatient to see if his eye mods would be obvious once he had a face up so I just went for it before sanding more.

And here he is from the front. The eyes aren't even, which is something I also was planning tow ork on before giving him a face up, but again... wanted to be sure I was on the right track before devoting more time to it. But everything seems to blend in pretty much seamlessly around the eyes so I'm very happy about that and will go back in and work on evening them out when I'm feeling less lazy.

The worst part was doing the teeth, honestly. I'm terrible with using brushes on face ups as it is, but I'm even worse when I'm wearing glasses (and I can't wear my contacts for at least a few more days..) My eyes just have no idea how to make sense of something that precise when I'm wearing glasses. I'm sure with enough practice I'd get it down but it's very frustrating since I'm not used to it.

I can live with the asymmetry for now though. It's less obvious in person I think.

And some bonus shots of Shino after having his collar brushed so it looks less matted. He's sort of currently my favorite and has been sitting at my computer desk for the past week or so.

And now for some completely un-helpful photos!

As promised, I was productive today. And as promised, I worked on coat making. Weird, considering I never stick to what I say I'm going to do. Or, almost never..

But today I did what I said I'd do.

I have no in progress pics of the construction because it actually started at around 3am before I'd gone to sleep yet. I was pretty excited about working on this project and wasn't having much luck relaxing for sleep because I kept planning out how I wanted it to work in my head.

Late night/early morning brain got the better of me and I didn't take drape into account when selecting my fabric, so I ended up with something a little more thin and floppy than I wanted. The collar is pretty much what I had in mind though.

I didn't have any spare black fur but I did have this jacket I bought ages ago on DoA. I was really new and had no idea what I was doing and bought it based on the description. The thread didn't have a photo and for some reason it never occurred to me that I could ask for one. So I got it and immediately realized I had made a huge mistake and would never ever use it and it has sat in a drawer ever since.

But it finally came in handy and I cut it up for the collar fur on this jacket/coat/thing.

Here are two pictures that completely fail to capture any detail. Pretty much just "Shino's face" and "fuzzy collar". Black on black may have been a poor choice in retrospect but again.. me at 3am. Not the best critical thinking skills.

My planning also didn't get to the point of planning out the rest of the ensemble. In my head just putting the coat over what he was already wearing (a black button up shirt and some black cargo pants tucked into boots) seemed like a fine idea. In practice, this isn't quite as stylish a combo as I had hoped. In part because the coat looks kind of like a fur collared bathrobe.

I was much more displeased with this whole ordeal earlier in the day when I was redirecting dissatisfaction with other areas of my life onto this project. However, I went ahead and dealt with the issue after many hours of resisting doing what I knew had to be done, and I feel a lot better now.

new wig for Avignon

I had been thinking about getting Avignon a new wig and really the only thing stopping me was my inability to find the right color. But after a zillion years of browsing the marketplace on DoA, I managed to find a wig in the right color!

I thought it was going to be too big but it's actually exactly the right size for her tiny Souldoll noggin! No need to mod and potentially destroy it! Yay!

It's so fluffy XD It took me a while to even begin to make it manageable. It was just going everywhere and I had no idea what I was doing, but eventually I googled something to do with floofy hair and managed to figure out something.

I got new eyes for him because I was hoping to replace the really really bright ones he has now but the dome is too low and they didn't fit right. Oh well. They're nice eyes so I'm sure someone else will use them.

I slightly changed where I part Orkas' hair. For some reason I am more happy with him this way. I have no idea why it made any difference at all but it did...

Still on the fence about that lower lip but I'm going to give it more time before I make any decisions about it. In person it's stopped bothering me as much but in photos it feels very large.

I am not working on Sunday and I want to attempt to make Shino and Alek some jackets then. Or at the very least make SOMEONE some clothes. This is a thing I need to do. The number of people in need of clothes is decreasing but one day that number is going to hit zero. Only new arrivals will be clothes-less. That is the goal!

EDIT:  After an  un-successful attempt at giving Ezsphrein a new face up yesterday, I sort of got it in my head that my Latidoll Chaim (who has been my Ezsphrein for years now. I think longer than anyone else) looks too young for the character I want him to be. I've kind of always resisted replacing him because of how much trouble I went to to get Chaim, but the more I thought about it the more I really didn't think he fit the role.

So I thought for fun I'd just throw this spare Souldoll Chiron head I have on the body I had Chaim on. The Chiron head was airbrushed grey to go with my Impldoll Triton body but I wiped it so I could take pictures for a potential trade on DoA and then my trade partner ended up being interested in a different head which kind of worked out since once I had Chiron all cleaned up I was reminded of why I liked the sculpt to begin with.

So I tried the head on the body and tried on the official Ezsphrein wig and I immediately liked the combination so I went to go give the head a face up. It's pretty messy in places but I'm happy with it overall.

Fun story, the whole reason I 'updgraded' Defliel from a Customhouse Chamomile into a Souldoll Killian was because his head was too big compared to Ezsphrein's. This started a sort of domino effect where over the course of a few years I ended up replacing pretty much all of my heads so that everyone was at least reasonably in the same size range and didn't look too terribly weird together.

So I guess it's sort of come full circle now.

I was initially considering attempting to sell my Chaim head but the more I think about it, the more I think I will just hold onto it and one day when I am overflowing with funds I will get him a body along with my Customhouse Chamomile head (which I have held onto for ages because it was my first SD) and they can sit around and be old school together and sit on the porch and tell these young'uns how hard it was for them in the good old days. Wearing poorly made sock clothing. Having smudgy face ups sealed with gloss sealer because I didn't know there were different types. All that good stuff.