When I was a little kid, I had baby dolls.  They were piled in a crib, which was then put at the back of my closet and never ever played with because I didn’t see the point of babydolls and found them creepy.  Changing diapers, even ones only filled with imaginary poo, was never my idea of fun.

When I was slightly older, I had Barbie dolls.  I liked them well enough.  I sewed for them and made furniture for them, mostly. I had a dollhouse that was the coolest thing ever, and would arrange and re-arrange all of the furniture to get each room perfect.  I didn’t really play dolls with friends.  They wanted Barbie to go on dates and shop, which I found terribly, terribly boring.  But then they didn’t appreciate my kidnapping, murder, and alien invasion storylines either.

I didn’t touch a doll again until after college, and that was Pullip.  Pullips didn’t appeal to me as a doll, more as a vehicle through which I can do everything else I like.  Pullips combine my interests in customizing, painting, sewing, storytelling, carpentry, interior decorating, photography, web design, and more.  I’ve stuck with Pullips for a long time because to get tired of them wouldn’t be getting tired of dolls, it would be getting tired of all those other things.

But!  Pullips don’t combine everything I like to do, and not everything I like to that could involve Pullips does involve Pullips.  In fact, unless someone went into my workroom, no one who visits would have any idea I liked dolls as there isn’t a single doll-centric thing around the entire house.   Madness!  So the next few posts I think will be about some of the other things I enjoy…

When pullips first came out they had huge feet. This was great for balancing (they could stand on their own) but not so good for finding shoes! The shoes they came with were often so rigid and tight, one would have to cut them open to get them off the feet. People lamented, and eventually when the type 3 body was released, pullip fans rejoiced as they could now put cheap fashion doll shoes on their dolls!

…Fast forward to 2012. Now the coolest doll shoes anywhere are made for Monster High, and newcomer Barbie brand Stardolls have shoes that are also made for oversized feet. And the pullip collectors lament, if only the awesome shoes fit my dolls!

Well, most of them. Me, I’m psyched! I adore the type 1 body, still have some dolls on type 2, and now I can have all the shoes I want *mad cackle*

There is relevance here. See, doll shoes are traditionally made kinda rubbery to make it easier to get on/off doll feet. Unfortunately, resin is not so rubbery. Shoes made for Monster High dolls, when cast in resin, often will no longer fit Monster High feet anymore. This is the case with the current shoes that I’ve cast, unfortunately. After 2-3 days of curing, the resin loses all residual flexibility and shoes that fit monster high dolls straight from the mold, no longer fit. But they still fit pullips. As I primarily made these casts to add to my pullips’ horde of shoes, no biggie.

However, I am displeased, because I would really like to be able to cast things that are SLIGHTLY flexible. It opens up more possibilities. My eventual plan is to be able to make things like shoes off of my own designs, after all. Therefore, I bought 2-part clearcasting vinyl (I had previously been using resin) and have some opaque casting plastic coming in the mail. If anything I am thorough…

So for now, please enjoy my pullips’ new shoes. And a couple of sets of eyechips made from the excess resin:

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