Impldoll Idol Female Hands/ using thread to separate fingers

So Buff made me this gorgeous outfit for Coriel, but the basic dress part of it needed to have me take Coriel's hands off, as the sculpt has a "wide" hand pose and the sleeves are very fitted. (I think this is why Iplehouse's first EID girl, Jessica, had her hands posed like this):

That's Cherie, an SID girl, but the hands are the same as the old EIDs, with the fingers curved in so they don't catch on sleeves.

Anyway, I tried to take off Coriel's hand-- and it turns out there are such tiny hooks in there that the only way to retrieve them is to cut off the elastic and swap the little hooks for larger hooks:

That ugly brass hook is one I made out of 16 gauge wire--usually I steal hooks out of the extra supplies Granado sends with their dolls, but I have used them all up. :( But the homemade ones work fine. Since I had the hand off anyway, I thought I would try using thread for a finger separation and see how easy it is. This is what I started with, black embroidery thread:

First of all, don't use colored thread--you get tiny fibers everywhere. Second, tie your thread to the back of a chair or a door handle or something to anchor it. I ended up putting a book on the spiral pad but a chair would have been better. The embroidery thread worked, but plain white sewing thread worked much faster and made a thinner cut.

I think most people use the thread to start a slot, and then switch to 600 grit plus sandpaper to shape the finger. I decided that I didn't want to separate the fingers any more than this, because I didn't want to weaken them too much, and Coriel already has a couple of fingers that could wear rings. Here are the hands lightly blushed ( I just noticed that I hadn't pushed that left hand back on all the way).

The Idol arm has a cool set of elbow stops that fit into matching grooves in the elbow:

After some thought, I opted to put suede in both shoulders (and I may go back and put hot glue in there instead) and I put a long piece of thermostat wire from one forearm, through the shoulders and down to the other forearm so she could hold things (like toads).

That is the size of the thermostat wire--I think it's 14 gauge but I would have to look.

And here are the magnificent tooled gauntlets Buff made--they are about 2 inches long--