DollsArtCats

Holy Mackerel! I bet they don't take layaway, either.

Between hauling garbage out of the house and ripping up carpet, I have been working on Sif...I should also be finishing a cover before my publisher thinks the floods have carried me off. The wheat is slow going, I probably could have grown it as quickly as I am drawing it. (That is an old key and a drop spindle dangling from her belt, in case you were wondering.)

Mirodoll, best known for making the cheapest SD ball-jointed doll bodies available, has decided to offer a couple of new colors beyond the boring Normal, Beauty White and Tan. I found this on Ilsonya's blog and I cannot top the comments that were made there; I laughed and laughed. (The reaction was mostly 0_o like mine, but funnier.) Here are the comments; I just put the link into Google translate: http://llsonya.diary.ru/p187626156.htm

The flowers are finally starting to open up. We spent some time gardening, but mostly we spent the weekend filling up the rollaway. In New Jersey it would be "Da can", and I use to rent them from a pig farmer down the road, who went into the hauling business after expensive homes were built around his pig farm... and then people started to complain about the smell. Truly, it was an impressive smell, but you think people would have noticed before buying their McMansion that there were several thousand pink pigs down the road from them. Normally the pig farmer trucked out his "waste" in tanker trucks to an undisclosed location (possibly the pine barrens) but on one occasion he had a spill in the road immediately outside the farm, and I had the bad luck to come around the corner in my F-150 and go sliding through it. That stuff is slippery. As soon as I got home I had to put rubber gloves on and hose off and bleach the underside of the truck; but for a year after t...

Saturday we went into Downers Grove to the Post Office; and then decided to walk around and do some shopping, since J needed some running shoes. As we walked up the main street, there was a fire engine right across from the Taqueria, and a lot of smoke. This is also right by the yarn store, so we walked up a little closer: Once we got to that building, all the stores in it had their fire alarms going, so we didn't go into the yarn store or the spice store. However, the cigar store (next to the Taqueria) had a sign that explained it all: "You Can Smoke Here." (We did once buy a Thanksgiving turkey from a small grocery store that was on fire, but it was a small fire in the back... and the turkey was on sale).

Yes! We are at 57 degrees outside! It feels really warm--I mowed the lawn yesterday, or rather 1/4 acre of the lawn before I got tired, and I started out mowing with a coat on. I have a 18 inch wide push mower, which sounds stupid for this much lawn, but I can always start it and it runs on cereal and coffee. All the stuff that has been put off because of the cold weather, now needs to be done--I have to paint the inside of the house, the deck, the places on the outside that were worn off by snow, and what seems like 50 doll heads and parts. I also want to re-landscape the back, since several plants did not make it over the winter...like the papyrus. I do wonder who sold the previous owner the papyrus, a tropical plant best known for gracing the banks of the Nile. The Chicago river, on the other hand, is not known for it's papyrus groves. I also wonder if the previous owner dug it up and brought it in every winter, which would make more sense. I just wish she had left a note or...

Fairyland redesigned their 65 centimeter Feeple body back in 2010, and came out with "Elf Chloe", with pouty lips and a bustline just under the Dollmore Lingerie Model size. I had no interest in her head (and she was incredibly expensive) but I was interested in the body, because it was supposed to "pose like a Minifee". So Neonraver gave me a deal on a used Chloe body and she arrived this week. I had assumed that Neonraver didn't care for the weight (I hefted Arianne02's Chloe and she was heavy ), or was perhaps disappointed by the "snowflaking" that Fairyland resin sometimes gets on the surface..this body has a lot on the lower back, it doesn't bother me and you can't feel bumps if you run your finger over it. So I played a bit with posing it, and noticed that the Saiph head, (still rolling around here unloved and unsold) matched the resin pretty well. So when I took my lunch break I thought I would pull the foot off the Chloe body, g...

If you had told me that I would want a doll of the Wicked Witch in Hansel and Gretel, I would have said "No Way"...but look; she is SO COOL. And it's a pretty sculpt, even prettier if you look closely at the portraits, they painted her lips a little smaller than they really are. She looks a bit like Galena to me. Here's the blank, from a posting by Fairyspit on Den of Angels: She comes in Gray or Baby Pink (what? That isn't Soom's Normal Pink? ;) ) and with a bewildering quantity of extras. She also is now a Good Witch, according to the promos: "...She was a very kind person. She treated poor Hansel and Gretel with confectionery when they found her house before showing them the way back home." Uh huh. Really, if kids came and nommed on my house, I would be out there with a shotgun full of rock salt, or maybe rock candy; but that is Soom's story and they are sticking to it. And to prove that they might be sincere about this, she has "go...

I saw this on Ilsonya's blog and it cracked me up, so I had to go to Lati's site and see what the rest of the photos looked like. He's got a cute little human version as well, and yes, there are yellow fuzzy toy chicks there too. (Apparently Lati made a Bast to go in the set, because she is in there as well.) Here is his sale page: Tiny Horus at Lati He would be tempting except for yes, the "no tinies" rule, and the fact that he costs as much as the 20 yard hunk of steel hogging my driveway; and he is too small to carry away my lumber and carpets. Of course if he really did have the power to move garbage, he'd be a bargain. In any case, he is really cute. His sales period is Apr 25th, 2013 - May 27th, 2013.

On the week when I am swamped with work, along comes the Granado 68 cm long-leg body for my Davon head. It's the first body Crocus designed and it is still a great body, more wiry and a little thinner than the Nuevo male body. (I wish Crocus would just keep making new male body types and putting them out--for one thing, they have the hip cuts and they stand really well). Because I have had no time to sew, my poor Captain now has only a single pair of underwear and a slightly too-small letter opener that if it were just 4 inches longer, it would be perfect. (It's actually a replica US Cavalry sword). My leprechaun Patrick will get it instead, and it will be about right for him. Everyone else gets rake tines. This photo is from where my "firepit" will be headed tomorrow, the Lemont scrapyard I hired a 20 yard rollaway to take away the wood from the fence, and an amiable contractor named Tony to shift the wood and to take away a lot of scrap metal we had sitting arou...

Gypsyangel is going to reissue one of her older V4 characters, "Zyanya" and wanted to add some new makeups as well as a new skin texture and new morphs, so I did a couple of animal-theme ones for her. I did some photoshopping on this test render--for one thing, right now I can't find most of my hair models (they are loaded on the old computer) and I didn't have Zya's skin for anything except her face, so I had to cover her pale little ears with my painted hair, and colorize her neck and shoulders. Gypsyangel will most likely do her own lips, too--while these are fun, they aren't as professional as the ones she does. For some reason, no matter what version of Poser I am using, if I am making my own textures, I can color them perfectly; but I can't get Poser to make a fake texture of wrinkles AND make the lips shiny at the same time. Poser says I can have one, or the other, but not both. And no translucency, either. My only consolation is that I have neve...

By Sunday, the water in Naperville had gone down enough that the bridges over the DuPage reopened, so we went down to take a look. Dick Tracy was probably up to his waist in water at some point, but he looked ok. This municipal building had a lot of sandbags on the other side where they had steps going down. "Honey, have you seen the picnic table anywhere?" This is nothing, of course, compared to cities like Grand Rapids, Michigan, where they have fish looking into office windows: Source, Reddit. But there was a lot more home damage in Lisle, where the East branch of the DuPage ran around the levee and flooded a lot of homes on River Road. There are carpets on the curb everywhere--normally each roll is supposed to have a 4.00 tag on it for the trash guys, but now there are just heaps of carpet--I have an unworthy desire to add to the pile my own rolls of dog-flooded carpet that we have been stuffing, one at a time, into our trash container.