I will confess that I bought the Draculaura/Clawd set for those shoes.  I didn’t really need Draculaura, and I’m assuming that sooner or later another Clawd would have been released who didn’t have such a terrible, terrible outfit.  But… those shoes…

Clearly I have something of a shoe problem.  It’s ok.  I admit it.  But if I basically spent $30 to get them, why would I be doing…whatever that is to them?

Craft stuff is messy. Very. Knowing this, even I shy away from molding. It’s not that it’s especially messy, it’s just especially hard to clean up. One DROP of this stuff on the carpet and it will never come out. No matter how much you scrub, or what cleaner you use. Get it on your skin, and it will take some serious repeated scrubbing to get it off…and it feels so SLIMY! Eew.

….Buuuuuuut my husband is on business travel. Teenagers throw wild parties. I pull out my messiest craft supplies. It’s not like he doesn’t know what I’m up to, he just doesn’t see it. And I don’t hear the screams of horror. So it works out all around, really.

I got a few modeling books the Christmas before last on modeling, as well as some rubber/resin/etc. I find it interesting, but I don’t have much need for it. I debated making some specialty eye chips, possibly doll masks. Nothing especially pressing. I tried molding eyechips and the 1-part mold worked wonderfully, but the mold-release agent didn’t work on the two-part mold, so I just got a fused block of silicone.

The most interesting thing I could think of was shoes. Doll shoes, of course. I have a dream to make retro platform shoes with tiny goldfish ‘swimming’ in the platforms. It will be awesome. But I am totally not up to that point yet.

The problem is shoes are hard! Lots of tutorials for casting out there (and books!) and none of them have explained to me how to go about accounting for a shoe with a foot cavity or, horror of horrors, straps! So I’ve been experimenting, all week. Mostly failures, but as of writing this I have half a dozen tiny resin shoes that have come out and fit on doll feet! I believe I have no mastered the basic high-heel. Next stop: Mary-Janes!

Eventually, when I’m done I will make a tutorial for how to cast shoes. After I finish figuring out out myself ^^;

I mention this because I’m not especially talkative, especially online.  If I have something useful to add, I will.  If I don’t think I have anything to say that is either a) useful or b) interesting I tend to spare my fingers the typing and everyone else’s eyes the reading.  If I were a comedian, I would definitely be one of those “Don’t think I’m nearly as funny as I am” people.

I’m sure there are dozens of topics I could talk about that people would find interesting, just as there are dozens of topics I could talk abut that I don’t generally because I think most people would find it terribly boring.  Like my fascination with nail polish.  See?  I bet your eyes are already glazing over.

(suffer the sparkles!)

And yet there are blogs on nailpolish.  I’ve visited them.  To me, they are interesting because they are things I don’t already know.  However, this is not a website about nailpolish, it’s a website about customizing.  Therefore, to most people reading this, the nailpolish is not so interesting.

See the problem? I don’t blog for myself, because I already know everything I put in the articles and tutorials.  To me, most of the things I could write about are less interesting than reading an article on how to wet-marble nailpolish, because I don’t know how to do that and I already figured out how to do whatever it is I would be blogging about.

What’s the point of all this?  Feedback.  Specifically, if you all want to see more posts in the future, tell me what you want to see more of. Pictures of customs?  Random dissertations of the evolution of the pullip bust line?  The story of the time I accidentally shrunk a doll head?  Leave a comment here (or in whatever blogpost is most recent if that’s easier)or shoot me an email.

In case you were looking for a pullip-kid option, like me, here is the pullip mini head on an 11cm obitsu with two other potential pullip kid scale options, the pukipuki bjd and pukifee bjd from Fairyland:

Pukipuki has the same sized body as a mini pullip, just kid-proportioned. They can steal Kelly doll clothes, but not mini bratz, like mini pullip and dal. Pukifee is a little bit bigger, and doesn’t have any ready-steal clothing options, though moxie dresses work all right. The obitsu doesn’t look as nice, but it is roughly 1/5 the cost of a pukipuki, and 1/9 the cost of a pukifee.

Side views

The pukis can reasonably cross their arms, but the obitsu can hug itself. It also has better leg crossing range.

Obitsu can lean forward more. Pukis can be pushed further forward because their joints will pop out due to the strings, but this is as far forward as they can be convinced to go without being held.

The less realistic curve of the legs gives the obitsu more knee range, but all three dolls can convincingly kneel.

I am going to put together a tutorial for the 11cm obitsu/pullip or dal head hybridizing next!

Since then, she’s sat on a shelf, sadly. I didn’t even take pictures of her redone outfit until now, almost a year later. For a while I was debating stripper her of her stock bits to make a Lilith Dal, but of course as a limited edition, she’s quadrupled in price and is extremely rare, I’d feel pretty bad doing that. So the time has come for us to part…

She comes with all her stock bits, including her fangs which are still sealed in the wrapping as is her card. She’s been going between $2-300, so I’ll say $250. If you’re interested, you can email me at gwenniemew(at)gmail.com

The original plan was to have much more elaborate outfits, but my wrists are not quite repaired enough to do that, so a compromise was reached on their school uniforms, which were plenty complicated enough to keep me working on them for a few days.

Their faces and eyes are just about perfect to the anime (well, for having their faces on long taeyang heads instead of little heart-shaped clamp faces) and as much of a pain as their outfits were, ironing pleats into 6″ uniform pants is something that leaves you feeling slightly more accomplished than frustrated.

These guys are pretty hard to photograph. The dark uniforms and hair wreck havoc on my camera, and I’m not good enough at adjusting my camera settings or my photoshop to fix it. Basically all the dark colors want to become black and all the lighter colors (like skin) want to wash themselves out to near-white. And of course, the backdrop screws with the color settings. I took a whole series on a nice blue background and couldn’t use a single one. Because I suck.

Lelouch is the much easier to photograph because all I have to worry about is getting the contrast to work out. Poor Suzaku’s another story.

Er… this picture came out a bit red and I couldn’t manage to fix it in photoshop. For Suzaku, a fur wig was just right, giving him that tousled spiky look, but for some reason the camera setting like to push his medium-brown wig into dark-country. I can lighten it using the shadow/highlight function, but that screws with his uniform, turning it from black to grey, and for some reason also makes him look really red. He’s a sage base, so not red at all. Nice light tan. I’m very confused.

But sometimes, for that particular look, you gotta do what you gotta do.

(part two of Extreme Customization)
There are fewer places to buy wefted hair than doll wigs, these days.  I bought mine from coolcat (see links) shops.  There’s also one My Little Pony customizing store that sells wefts of hair, but at pony sizes, which is around 3″ wide, I think.  It takes about 6′ of weft to do a pullip wig.

The colors weren’t exactly what I’d hoped for from the pictures online, the light green was lighter and the darker green darker.  Before I started to sew, I draped the hair over the head to make sure it would still give the look I was going for.

And then I sewed.  A non-parting wig is basically one long spiral sewn into a stretchy wig cap, all done by hand.  With two colors, I was alternating the spiral on part of the head.  My lap became very furry.

Wigs generally look like shit when you make them until you style them, which involved a lot of hot water and an iron.  Once I got all the hair nice and flat, it was time to style!  After a weeks of waiting for hair and couple of hours of sewing, knowing that one slip of the scissors and you’re f*cked is a nice way to put the pressure on.

The look I was going for was “I did it myself with a razor blade!” chic.  She’s an evil clown, after all.  Ironically, that was harder to do than normal bangs, because I’ve cut normal bangs dozens of times before, and a real ‘bad job’ would not look nearly as nice as this stylized sort of chaos.  The hair length is cut more evenly (in the above picture she’s leaning against the wall so her hair doesn’t fall naturally), but at the same sideways skew as the bangs.  I think there’s more hair in my trash can than there is left on her head, but that’s usually how it is unless you plan for a very long, bangless wig.

Coming up next: clothes!

I saw my friend Hina over the weekend, and she brought me these two girls to take a look at:

Mercu and Jupi are the cosmic twins, and their hair is, er, out of this world.

These two girls have a reputation for bad hair brand new, and out of the box, their hair tends to frizz, tangle, and most people just end up changing out their wigs. Hina bought these two at a bargain price with their crazy hair, and if dolls could get mange, I’m pretty sure this is what it would look like.

Anyway, there’s something liberating about working with something so incredibly bad that just about anything you do will be an improvement, so I put some water on the stove to boil, filled the sink with near-scalding water, got out a wide tooth comb and a bottle of conditioner.

Hot water softens the synthetic (plastic) fiber, and conditioner does to doll hair what it does to human hair. I used lots and lots of both while trying to comb out the tangles, working from the bottom upward on both dolls. The comb’s teeth broke off before I was done with Mercu, so I used my fingers. My fingernails started catching in the tangles and breaking, so I went to the drawer, got out chopsticks, and used them. They didn’t break.

After Mercu’s hair was detangled, it was still extremely bushy, so I poured water from the kettle over her hair. Just-boiled water will relax and even straighten hair, but usually it takes more than one application, or soaking the wig in the water. Pouring it works well if you want to keep the waves wavy.

Jupi was more of a problem. While some of her hair I could detangle through the whole length, quite a lot of it was matted into gigantic knots I couldn’t begin to pull apart. I couldn’t save all of the hair, so I reversed the strategy I had been using and started working from the top-down. I got all of her hair detangled to about thigh length by making the knots and tangles below that level even worse, and then I carefully trimmed out all of the impossible tangles.

After the tangles were cut out, I went through and gave her a more uniform hair cut, conditioned, and poured kettle water over her head as well. After her hair dried it shortened (due to the curls) to butt-length, but the hair was soft and tangle-free and at a shorter style, will stay that way more easily.

What a difference! Just to demonstrate how crazy these wigs are even new, I pulled out the Mercu wig I had taken off of mine when she arrived after preorder. Since then it has sat in a wig net. Yikes!

Ulquiorra is finally done! Well, technically he was done around 2 weeks ago, except I only just had the time to put together a photography setup that allows for his bloody 28″ wingspan.

It seemed that at least one photo of both forms of Ulquiorra (I ignore the dress form) would be good, and since Ulquiorra’s second release is a bit of a secret, I thought the silhouette from behind was a nice setup.

…but back to the custom of the moment:
Ulquiorra’s tail is as non-static as his wings, and poses nicely.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to figure out how to make an energy lance for him. I imagine it would be possible with clear resin, but seeing as how creating a resin sculpt would cost around $200 to set up supply-wise, it didn’t seem necessary enough to warrant the cost. I eventually figured out how to do a similar effect with photoshop.

So what does the future hold for Ulquiorra? He’s going to live in sunny Florida with Ichigo, so they can ‘play’ together. I suspect this Ulquiorra is better off than the unreleased Ulquiorra, who has to put up with Grimmjow’s shenanigans

Using contact paper and decoupage, I remodeled a Bratz Angels case. This case has a hard shell, which is awesome, but it’s covered with bratz artwork, and that just won’t do! I carefully cut contact paper to cover the outside of the shell, trimming around the fixtures and clasp first, and then used pullip flyers as decoupage material to decorate. I decided I wanted one side to be classy, so it just has a cameo type picture on one end, and the other side to be more fun.

This is the side with a bunch of my favorite flyers. I generally threw them out, but I kept some, like the flyer for Noir, and Nero, coupled with a few of the more recent ones sent to PUDDLE by Jun Planning USA (since they dont put them in the doll boxes anymore). In the past I’ve used flyers as material to put in pullip-sized picture frames to decorate the dollhouses.

………Aaaand the inside view.
It is really only big enough for a Dal to stand straight in (pullips need to bend their knees) but that’s all right. I like compact. I’ve made carrier bags for multiple dolls before, and they always turn into these huge things. I’m not a big-bag kind of girl, I’m more of a small purse type. The case already had two elastic straps that secure the doll at the waist and the knees; I think if the case hadn’t had them, I would have lined it with some kind of synthetic short-hair fur.

Koi is an extensive customizing project started quite a few months ago, and finished in time to debut at PUDDLE this year. Now she’s back from PUDDLE and I can safely put her up for sale.

Because Koi was made from a bait head, she doesn’t have the ‘cost of a pullip’ included in her expenses, so she is only $300 (that includes shipping in the US–outside of the US, shipping will be discounted). This includes a OOAK handmade wig and OOAK full outfit whose pattern was developed just for her. She also has the rare volks ball-jointed 27cm EB Beauty body. Her head was painted with for-plastics spraypaint and her makeups was airbrushed and hand applied with for-plastic airbrush paints. All makeup was double sealed with both brush-on sealant and airbrushed spray matte sealant. If you’re interested in her, you can email me at gwenniemew(at)gmail.com