I Boil Some Eyes

I was prompted to try to make some sculpey eyes because I am tired of trying to fit eyes in Iplehouse eyewells--as far as I can tell, the only eyes that fit perfectly are made by eyeco, and they are not cheap. All my Sooms are perfectly happy to wear Ersa Flora and Safrin eyes, but the Iples have the combination of a long narrow eye and a shallow eyewell, so the eyes that are the right size visually gap on either side, like tiny sad marbles.

So fed up, I grabbed some sculpey and started rolling. My quick reading on the Internet of how to cook Sculpey came up with steaming small parts, rather than boiling them. This is better than boiling because stuff rolls around in a boiling pot and it can deform at the beginning when it's still soft. Here's the pieces resting in my trash sieve above the Goodwill pot. (While the official Sculpey site stresses that Sculpey is non-toxic, it recommends that you separate food prep items from the sculpey process; though interestingly they said using the oven was fine, and a more even source of heat than toaster ovens--they did recommend an oven thermometer though as "most ovens run hotter than the indicated temperature".)

And here they are out of the sieve. I knew they were done when I shook the sieve and they clinked. :D I was trying two kinds of pupils here, one with a dot of black Sculpey and one where you paint the hole with black acrylic and then fill up the hole with transparent acrylic glaze. It turns out the hole is annoying to fill properly, and the Sculpey looked better once glazed. Here are a pair painted brown, being filled with the Liquitex Glaze and Varnish.

Bex waits patiently for her test eyes:

I tried the three sets I liked best; but of the two yellow ones, one had pupils that looked too small and the other one had pupils too large. The brown ones looked the best, though they could be just a hair bigger and a slightly deeper curve to fit perfectly, but they are really close:

I think this is faceup number three for her, I was determined to end up with one I liked, and I also made her eyelashes from stripping the hairs from a paintbrush. I'm going to make more sets of eyelashes, as nice ones are both hard to find and they are sort of a consumable--they tend to get messed up just in changing clothes and from being stored.