DollsArtCats

I made Ashley a necklace today--I always forget just how small these dolls really are, so maybe this should be a belt instead. I still have dolls to paint, but it rained much of today and the temperature has dropped, so I will have to wait for my chance to spray. Meanwhile lots of people need clothes, and here I am making things for Ashley, who has an entire giant box of clothing and shoes :D I also found a piece of polished jasper (at least I think it is jasper) that is the same color and style as the weird volcanic rock I have, but much much smoother. Here they are together: This was the last bit of sunshine all day, too! I did look out the kitchen window this morning and discovered that I have one more hanging ornament, but this one is on the outside of the window: This ornament has legs! :o It's one of those gold banded garden spiders; it's made an elegant web across most of the window so I need to start getting up early and see if I can catch it covered w...

I needed to clean out the closet where the girl dolls hang out--I had remodeled it a couple of years ago to have extra shelves and a vinyl floor (making it easier to clean than carpet), and as the dolls were out anyway, I would take a few pictures. It's a good time to check for missing pieces and make a list of who needs what. There are a few girls missing from this photo--two that are not fully complete (missing parts) and two that are boxed up for the Museum of Soom I have going in the basement, one doll that I am considering selling, and one that is visiting the boy's closet for reasons unknown (probably space considerations; the girls closet is packed tight.) It's not a great group shot--I felt that some of them were a little precarious and my assistant doll wrangler is in Philly. When she comes back out in July we might do a new shoot and I will clean up things like the catbox lid and toys you can see here, and set up the space properly for the best lighting...

(The character here is Gypsyangel's Roxanne , for Victoria7 at Daz 3d.com) I did get the new version of Daz Studio (4.9) to install, and it is a lot better than 4.8 as far as I can tell. For one thing, it renders for me, even with the Iray renderer, which does not play well with my low end video card..but it does render. I will say that at first I had a bad time with it--it rendered everything in hot pink, ... which for some inscrutable reason is because Zone Alarm had quarantined freelibrary.dll, and once I had googled around, reinstalled Daz, and finally pried the .dll from the jaws of Zone Alarm, it worked fine. Zone Alarm still hates Daz Studio, with good reason, because Daz wants to be in constant contact with the mother ship, even if you are just rendering a decade-old flat plane with a beach scene, which probably shipped with Poser 4 or something. But now I am ready to become a content creator once more, or rather a content painter while someone else figures out ho...

I had to drop off the porcelain doll from the doll show at the Goodwill, so of course we had to go in (J was not enthusiastic, so I didn't stay long). I did find this sword--it's probably some Noble Collection replica thing, it's too big for a letter opener, and the blade was a bit nicked and pitted, but it is a perfect size for a big SD doll. Also there was a bag of thread, a silk dress, some wired ribbon, and a tiny aspic mold: All this fun for under 20 dollars! J also did some household things today--he took down the wire we have on the roof to melt snow and prevent ice dams (unlikely in June, even in Chicago), and took down the inside plexiglass on the kitchen skylight; the skylight that is over the table. About two weeks ago I looked up, and saw a spider on the inside of the glass, above it, but below the outside roof bubble, and I felt bad for it being trapped in there. Then I looked up a few minutes later and the spider was between the sandwiched layers of pl...

The sweater was created by Kate Davies Designs and is available as a digital download on Ravelry, if you want to knit your own..the page says that there have been over 6000 owl sweaters knitted, but I think that is counting sales, not completed sweaters--I bet a lot of them are half-done in a ziplock somewhere. I would know. I spent most of today not doing doll things, but trying to fatten up a virtual spider on a template. the spider ended up looking bloated like Violet Beauregarde on the color map-- but still renders out like one of those slender garden spiders. :p Maybe I need virtual flies.

I finally found ice cube trays. We had gone to Tuesday Morning, a odd-lot store that has a ton of kitchen things at discount prices, and even they didn't have a single tray, not even novelty ones. I was starting to think the only people that still carried ice cube trays were the "novelty" stores, and I would have to drink next summer's ice tea with little penises bobbing around in them. But the manager at Tuesday Morning said that while she hadn't been able to find any for her store, Dollar Tree had "lots" ("and for a dollar!"). So we drove over there and not only did they have standard cube trays, they had novelty Halloween ones. For a dollar. I also picked up another Squeaky the Rat since the last Squeaky went to live with catcara , though in return she sent me the Flocked Spider of Awesomeness. I shall send her the Novelty Ice Tray for this season. We also found a pumpkin at Trader Joes, and some pumpkin bars: And while we were out yester...