A new year and some dolly thoughts

Picture: morguefile.com

Christmas was and went, the year 2015 has turned into 2016 and I´ve not updated anything since our little Christmas dolly meeting. Time goes by so fast! Of course I was going to do a Christmas photoshoot, but something always came and interrupted my plans, so - no pictures. Also sadly the darkness, the rain and the lack of snow stole my entire Christmas spirit away anyway. I had a nice time, but something was definitely missing. :/

Anyhow since it is a whole new year now, I want to wrap the old up and tell about my future plans.
The year 2015 was my first doll year after my 5 year brake within this hobby. I was very surprised how hard the excitement and inspiration hit me again after such a long time!

Things I achieved:
* I bought two dolls and sold one.
* I started making the diorama + crafted little things in it.
* Purchased new clothes and shoes.
* Commissioned a clothing set for Lyra from Etsy (still under making).
* Purchased doll stands for all of my bigger dolls (review coming soon).
* Made my first faceups for others than my own dolls and did my first customisations/ repairs for a BJD (more about those later on!).
* Made many new doll friends and participated on several meetings.
* Purchased a light tent for photographing. It´s been on my wish list ever since I purchased my first digital camera back in 2010. The tent has been ordered and still on delivery, but hopefully coming soon.

My future plans for the year 2016 are:
* To continue and finish the diorama.
* Learn to take better photos and generally be more active on that area.
* Purchase a doll I´ve been drooling (still on the desk of the doll artist, but according to her, soon to be ready for a perorder!).
* Get to know my only SD girl better and create her more complete personality.

...And the biggest plan of the year is:

* To participate the Ldoll festival on Lyon, France.
Nothing is certain yet but I would really, really like to go there. I have never visited any BJD convention before and it makes it even more tempting that it´s inside EU and not too far away from Finland either. I wouln´t dare to travel alone but we have already had some discussions about going there as a group with some doll people on Facebook. Let´s see how the things turn out.

Overall I´d say 2015 was a pretty good and productive year. The new plans are pretty exciting too and I hope you all will have just as exciting times ahead as I do.

Some unfinished things waiting for inspiration

Package from Russia

On November I made an order on Etsy shop called CaramelBJDcom. They sell doll socks and clothing with awesome prints and they had a 1st year anniversary sale coming up. I had been admiring their items for a while and when I heard about the birthday sale, I had to take advantage of that.

I purchased three pairs of socks for Lyra, four pairs for Stella and also jeans and a shirt for her. All of the items were pre-order stuff so I had to wait for a while for them to be made. The shipping took a bit longer of what I was expecting but never the less, everything was fine once it came. All of the clothes were packed nicely and nothing was missing. The quality is wonderful! Let´s see what I got:

The items were well organized and labelled correctly.

And here´s Stella modelling the clothes:

Darn she looks cute!
Notice the new purple shoes how well they suit with the outfit.

There is just one word to describe the shirt: kawaii! The jeans are absolutely perfect and so well made. The fitting is snug with no loose waistband, just like a well tailored jeans should. There are little working pockets on the back side:

Then the socks, first Stella´s:

From left: Vanilla Bouquet, Gzhel, Blue and Pink, Caramel

...and then Lyra´s:

From left: Autumn Evening, Dead Head (there´s a deer skull on the knee), Mechanical Romance

All of the sock fits with no complaining and look good. Some of the pictures on their shop are a bit lighter or darker of what the products actually are but nothing so drastic that you´d be disappointed. Overall the colours are very vivid. My experience of this Etsy seller is nothing but very positive and will definitely buy more from their shop also in the future. I highly recommend!

Little Christmas doll meet!

We had a Little Christmas meeting on Saturday 12th December. Lots of people, lots of dolls, lots of talking and nice time. For the first time ever I had a chance to meet Xaya from A Little Book of Bluefairies and see some of her lovely dolls. Enjoy the pictures!

Dust Of Dolls: Appi

Azone

Enaibi dolls tiny, tiny mouse.
She was only about 7 cm tall!

Frodo

Soom Mirabil

Bluefairy Tinyfairy May Valentine with Soom goat legs

Minifee Karsh as Legolas

Minifee Mio, Azone and Piposdoll cat

My girls Stella and Lyra!
(Minifee Ryeon and Atelier Momoni Nena02, Reira)

Bluefairy Tinyfairy Patric.
He was just like the Joxter from Moomins!

Luts Centaur

Volks Lorina

Unoa girls

Xaya´s Bluefairy Pocketfairy girl and Cocoondolls tiny Hilla

Xaya´s Bluefairy Tinyfiary girl

Project Diorama: Change of plans

One day while walking home from a market, I found two glass doors leaning on a dumpster. There was no way I could´ve left them there and I grabbed them with me. The decorations are beautiful and perfect style for the greenhouse study. I tried it with the flooring and it looks even better than the previous window I had there and as a bonus, this new one is much lighter to handle and it is exactly as tall as the white one was. Wow what a coincidence! The only con is that it is narrower than the flooring so I have to add there a lengthening piece. I will paint it white and distress it a bit.

The other wall is also progressed with cutting on the upper corner and window opening, which is raw at the moment and waiting to be finished with Dremel. However, I have to straighten the upper arch of the window opening just for the reason that it´s easier to make the glass and the framing with straight lines than curved.

Captured In Glass eyes review

After Lyra joined the group, I have been on a quest on finding the perfect eyes for her. I had already bought a pair of ED´s 12 mm Milky urethane eyes, but as she arrived, I soon realized that they did not look good on her because of the wide iris. The iris covered almost the whole eye opening which was not the impression I wanted for Lyra as she is a sharp and smart girl who is far from that droopy-eyed, child-like appearance, so a new pair with more realistic iris proportions was a must.

As I scrolled the DOA and red many threads with pictures of different eye brands, I came up with Captured In Glass. The eyes are hand made by a person called Lu, and while they may not be as perfect and vivid as ED´s, there was one feature that made me chose them: you can order custom iris sizes. Not many eye maker offers this option and CIG´s prices are well worth the quality, starting as low as $ 8.38. Special requests adds a few dollars more but even then they are very affordable.

I arranged a little group order to save on the shipping costs ($ 6 for one order despite the number of pairs). The waiting time was one week from placing the order and the shipping took another week. Here is what my GO participant ordered:

From left to right: ET67, EJ02, ET24
All in 16 mm, normal dome, round back with handle.
Taken in natural light.

From left to right: ET67, EJ02, ET24
All in 16 mm, normal dome, round back with handle.
Taken with flash.

All of the above eyes are 16 mm, round and with stems on the back. The colours are pretty accurate within the sales pictures on CIG´s website, only the ET24´s are almost black in colour and to me they look more like the ET21´s. Also the irises are slightly smaller on these than on the other eyes from this batch (shows on the pictures above). There seems to be some subtle variations between all of these three pairs although technically they all should be 16 mm. If you looked closely and compared the two eyes side by side, the pupil on the other eye was off-centered but this was not very obvious with the bigger sized eyes, but the smaller the scale goes, the more noticeable the flaws come. That is the nature of handmade items though, so just for a record for those who investigate their items with a looking glass, these eyes are not for you.

 My vision for Lyra´s eyes were intensive amber brown. The E6 looked just the right colour but as I very much liked the look of the EN realistic eyes, I asked if it was possible to make the E6 colour in the style of EN series with low dome, flat back and sized 12 mm with 5 mm irises. The answer was yes.

I was very excited when the package arrived but the surprise was not a happy one: my eyes were not what I asked for. Not that they would have been ugly or poorly made, but they were not the colour nor the size I ordered. This is what I got:

The colour I was expecting to have:

E6
Photo: cig168.com

As you can see, the eyes I got were just plain yellow instead of amber. They had this nice iris pattern that EN style has, but it was so light that only the photo revealed it. With naked eye you barely noticed it. I guess the beautiful pattern stands out more on bigger eyes. I didn´t got the smaller iris either. I am not sure if she accidentally sent me a wrong pair or what, because I even sent her many illustrated pictures of the proportions for the eyes and examples of the colour just to make sure she´d understand. I had really high hopes for these eyes and immediately sent a reclamation about them. Lu answered very quickly, was deeply sorry, apologized for the disappointment and promised to make me a new pair. At that point I started to wonder if my request was just too difficult to execute/ understand and that maybe we were stumbled across a language barrier (and because of that, I do blame myself). I decided to ease off Lu´s task by asking if she could make me just the ordinary E6 but with smaller iris. I red between the lines that now she finally understood what I meant - and if I am not very wrong, I think I heard a relieved sigh from somewhere across the globe. Maybe she was just too polite to say no for my first request even though she didn`t quite get what I wanted? Anyhow, she also promised to give me an extra pair of eyes for free as a refund. Okay, so now I was relieved too and started the waiting again.

When the second delivery day came, I was even more excited than on the first time. Maybe I could finally have the eyes I had been waiting for so long? And yes, the new re-made eyes were perfect! On the picture below I put the first "wrong" pair in the middle for comparison, on the left are the extra refund eyes and on the right are The eyes for Lyra. You can see the difference between the colours of the middle and the right pair. The extra eyes I got are 12 mm and green, probably Y18 or Y45. Definitely a keeper for possible future characters and the yellow´s in the middle would be great for some animal-ish character (wolf/ bird/ etc.).

All are in 12 mm, low dome, flat back.
From left to right: maybe Y18 or Y 45, custom EN eye (unknown colour), custom E6 with 5 mm irises.
Photo taken in natural light.

And finally here´s Lyra wearing her new and - oh so beautiful and perfect - eyes:

E6 in 12 mm with 5 mm iris, low dome, flat back

E6 in 12 mm with 5 mm iris, low dome, flat back

They are lovely, aren`t they? When I put them on Lyra, all the pieces just clicked on their right places. She was born just as I had imagined! Last, with the both packages there were some eye putty and lash strips to go with the eyes as freebies.

Eye putty and lashes

Even though this experience included some drawbacks, I will definitely be a returning customer for various reasons. 

Pros:

- the prices are super affordable

- the quality is beautiful

- the colour chart is huge

- you can ask for special colours/ sizes/ etc. (as long as not asking too complex things)

- the waiting time is short

- Lu is super sweet and always wants to make sure her customers are pleased with their purchases.

Cons:

- tiny imperfections 

- language barrier in some cases

I hope this review was informative and helpful for all of those who are thinking of getting CIG eyes.

I am now also @ Instagram!

Photo: Instagram

Just a little announcement: I have created an account on Instagram and the user name is buttons_and_pastels. I`ll be posting there everything related to BJD´s, and will be showing more work-in-progress -pictures of my crafts. You are welcome to join me there too, just hit the follow button. :)

Shoes, shoes, shoes!

A while ago, I purchased a Minifee high-heel feet for my Stella. I didn`t have any nice shoes to go with those tip-toes, so I headed to eBay. I had red from DOA that some of the 22" American Model and resin Evangeline Chastly shoes fits Minifees nicely and the seller is paul_zhangby. There are lots of different brands on the seller´s store and some of them will probably fit other sized BJD´s as well even if they are not originally made for them.

I bought six pairs of shoes of which five of them are here:

The brown & pink flats on the left are for Lyra and they are YoSD sized. They fit her perfectly! The yellow boots on the middle are originally for Ellowyne/ Tonner/ Marley and the item description stated that they fit on most of the YoSD`s but unfortunately they are waaaay too small for Lyra. However, they are so detailed, cute and well made that I might just keep them as a prop on Lyra´s greenhouse study.
The browns, the greens and the pink boots are for Stella and fit well as I had red. I purchased the brown ones only because the back of them is black and since there wasn`t any black & white pumps that would have met my taste, I decided that I´ll cover the brown part with white or black paint - or if I dare - with turquoise! Actually I bought one turquoise pair, but few days after I had placed the whole order, I got a message that said they were some how damaged and could not be send. I got the refund but because those specific ones were the ones I wanted the most, I chose the second-best ones and took these violets instead:

These suit Stella´s pastel coloured style well too.

I am very pleased with my order and the whole transaction. All of the shoes are detailed, well made, the prices are super compared to the quality and the seller trustworthy. I highly recommend the seller to anyone who´s seeking for nice shoes for dolls.

Last, from a marketplace I found these pearly pink flat shoes with heart shaped rhinestone buckles:

I don`t know the brand (there was no mention about it) but they fit the Minifee flat feet like a glove! I just randomly bought them because they seemed to be the right size and luckily they turned out to be just that. I must take some pictures of all of the shoes on a doll but nowadays it gets so dark so early that taking photos is a bit of a pain. I really have to buy that light tent and some daylight lamps for sure.