DollsArtCats

I have this liquid Fimo from Staedler that you are supposed to bake in the oven, and it is suppose to cure and be clear and flexible. It's not clear for eyes...it bubbles and looks cloudy, no matter what I do about the time and the temperature I cook it. If I make a dot on some foil and cook that, it comes out OK, but that isn't all that useful. So I decided to just try pouring more in a foil container and adding some glitter, and cooking that, and see what happens. I just wrapped foil around this plastic xacto cover for the shape. bwahaha a use for the Glitter Flakes! Cut them up small... After I added the Fimo, the blue Glitter Flakes stained the Fimo blue..:o Ready to cook... Ding! Out they come, I let them cool for about ten minutes, and then it is time to unwrap them! Quite a bit of flash around the edges. The Fimo is so rubbery the xacto would not cut it, so I used some scissors to trim the edge. It's like the stuff that flip fl...

I almost forgot to put this up--I made some feather eyelashes from black craft feathers; the look is very dense and like false eyelashes, it works ok for Lenore (Iplehouse Bliss) because she is supposed to be a goth chick, but they are fussy to make and tend to flop and shed. (Ignote the purple makeup, I need to adjust it a little. The eyebrows are just what they are, too. I also took an hour last night to mess with my translucent "effect" Fimo and some opalescent special effect Sculpey. The opal looks the most convincing if you can roll it thin, and use a push mold to make it smooth. A top coat of the Sculpey glaze looks good too. I made some eyes with the translucent Fimo and you need to cook it at 250, not 265 on my Black and Decker toaster oven, for 18 minutes. Longer and it turns yellow. The Fimo cookable glaze is still a fail, and I am about to give up on it. The transucent eye whites turn out to look too dark in eyewells, because it's dark in the heads. XD How...

When I bought my Delia secondhand, she came with a broken finger (we joke that this is a sign of a genuine Impldoll). Impldoll was willing to cast and ship a new hand to Delia's first owner, but the owner found it easier to sell her, and I just figured I would make a sculpey finger and glue it on. It's a hassle to get fingers to stay on hands, though, so I thought it might be easier to just make a new hand out of sculpey, especially as the set I got for Christmas had a block of Sculpey that was exactly the right color to match the body. Here is the original hand and the Sculpey one with it's current owner, an Impldoll Bella (Erzulie). Erzulie might have to timeshare with Sicktress' Deesse head, so I wanted to be sure everything worked OK on that body--or at least so there weren't any missing fingers. The hand itself is a bit lumpy--I found out that you can't sand or carve the hand after you cook it, because the sanding and carving show up as much lighter than...

The weather was insanely great here today--low humidity, 80 degrees, and sunny--so off came Perdita's head and I painted her up. It went pretty well for me and an Iplehouse head (I always have trouble painting realistic heads). Then I tried to put microglitter on her eyelids. Don't do that. The Perfect Pearl shimmer powders are a lot more the right scale for shiny things on a small head. I sort of papered over my mistake with some Jaquard duotone purple/gold shimmer paint, put in some of the sculpey eyes (her "proper" eyes are drying still) and took her out for a photo or two. It was super windy by then and after a couple of photos the wind blew her wig off--but I am so happy with her. She is the first cheerful Bianca I have ever seen! I may still put in eyelashes but I have to order some special ones from Mint on Card for her. I also did some more eyes because I wanted to try the Modge Podge Dimensional Magic on the eyes I had made before, and you need low humidit...

Some time ago I had an Iplehouse Addiction Bianca, which was gray. I loved everything about her..except that she was gray. Replacing her in pinky-normal is not easy, though--you have to go through Doll Choice, there is no layaway, and well, she isn't a cheap doll. So I just shelved the idea of getting a new Bianca after I sent the gray version on her way, and then I saw the toothy version for sale on the Den of Angels marketplace. She was in Slovakia, but the seller is one with a great reputation and my neighbor gets mail and packages all the time from Slovakia and the Czech republic, so I went ahead and bought the head. Slovakia post is efficient, and there was tracking--Slovakia to Vienna to ISC New York and then to (I assume) the sorting center for trucking, rather than airmail. And then nothing. And nothing. After several days I wrote a letter with pictures of the head and sent it to the sorting post office, and the next day! got a personal and very cordial email from the pos...

Balthazar is a survivor from when I had "Eight Tiny Reindeer" , aka Sphaler heads, in time for Christmas 2012. I still have 3 of them, Balthazar, Fu Bai (because he has a yellowing problem and no one would want him but me) and Zinnober, the ginger kirin nerd. (I also had Caspar and Melchior, in keeping with the Christmas theme). The Sphaler thing happened because I just liked the sculpt, there were a lot of them, and because I was graphing a "price vs time" for Soom releases so I could see when the optimum time and place was to buy Soom parts on the secondary market. The answer seems to be "wait two years and buy it from someone in Texas". The price of a limited Soom (and maybe a Volks, I have no idea) climbs up steeply after it's release, then gradually sinks down to a low after two years, and then levels off; or if it's a very pretty but rare sculpt, climbs back up. (This also is influenced by Soom's re-releases, which can depress the price...

Bat wings! The black sculpey has a strange and wonderful texture when uncooked--it's a little sticky, almost.

"Oh, duck feets! Just what I always..wanted." Here is what they look like painted.

Krowbar had a Fairyland 65cm male body that I thought would be great for Gideon, as I had one once before ( Xtal has that one now). So we did a trade--she told me up front he had an "Ice Arm" that she wanted to keep, and I thought that was fine since I could just stuff a nub of resin in the arm hole and attach feathers and Gideon could have a "Wing Arm". Krowbar felt that she should send along a little something extra with the body, since it only had one arm..so she sent... a head. This head, in fact: I thought maybe he was a Scar Breakaway, which are very much liked by people who collect Fairyland dolls, but after some Googling I found that while he was the Breakaway mold, he was really Ital the Ice Lord, which explains the Ice Arm. I'm not sure what explains the scars, but that seems to be a thing with Fairyland. Krowbar had added the smaller eyes (which I like a lot) and the fancier ears, and it turns out the teeth as well--they were done so well I thoug...

It turns out that Benny is a small man..too small, in fact; which turns out not to matter: I had finished his ears and was using the pliers to pull out the foil support so I could dig out his eyewells and cook him, and I was doing this over the trash since I was making a lot of little bits of foil..and of course I lost my grip on the head... and BOOM into the trash he went. Luckily it was mostly paper, cookie crumbs and bits of foil in there, but his ears squashed off entirely and his profile lost some shape as well. Raw sculpey is a pain to keep nice. But I fished him out of the bin, and decided it would be better to shape his ears separate from the head and glue them on after cooking them separately-- since they were thinner than the rest of the head and would cook too fast. So I put his head in the oven for 35 minutes, and he came out perfect as far as cooking goes--nice and hard but not scorched or brittle. Then I took him over to the newly arrived Euclase body and it was ...no w...