bjdonabudget

I’m sipping at a cup of Red Rose tea, plain old black tea is good stuff.  Better yet, Red Rose comes jam-packed with memories of my grandpa’s gift of collecting, the miniature figures that come in Red Rose tea were the first of many collections my grandpa started me on.  He heartily encouraged my doll collection by helping me step up to collector dolls while my friends were still wrecking the hair on their Barbies.  My great grandmother drank Red Rose, and when her estate was divided amongst the antique dealers and collectors in the family, I was given all the ‘commons’ from her Wade collection.  The little figures are known as “Wades” to their collectors, being as they were, possibly still are, made in Wade, England.  Color variations alone can make an interesting collection, I’ve had every shade of yellow in the form of rhinos and several shades of green in the turtle figure.

A darling display could set-up for your dolls’ collection of art objects in an inexpensive ’shadow box’ as the craft shops call them, tiny little shelves just the right size for your resin friend to show off their exquisite taste in art.  Wade figures are only the tip of the iceberg in things your doll could collect, tiny art pieces abound in import shops and trinket stands.  A few beads affixed together with sturdy glue can form a priceless vase, top it with some tiny silk flowers and you’d think Better Homes and Dollshelf magazine was coming for a photo shoot.  Be creative, your doll will love their decor all that much more when they know you made it just for them!

As a new doll mum, my msd has a limited wardrobe.  The other night when I went to the mall, I did something about that.  The Build A Bear store in the Smith-haven mall DOES have Friends 2 b made items, just not many.  Loolu is currently wearing an adorable turquoise spiderweb-printed witch costume that was only five dollars!  It came with a broom and a hat as well, the hat is a bit too large, but the broom makes a cute accessory.  I also go a black jumper with attached striped tee, haven’t tried it on yet, but for seven dollars, it’s a cute little dress.  It’s a good thing the mall is about forty-five minutes away, now that I know there is a Loolu-sized department in Build-A-Bear.  My cohort who went shopping with me was dismayed at even going in, but being a good friend she put up with me squealling about the msd dresses and even started looking at the toy critters.  The place fascinates me, I’ve never made a critter, but I love watching the machine shove fluff into the bears.

In NYC, there’s a huge build-a-bear and friends 2 be made has a whole shop, so maybe I’ll get to there sometime and give a full report of the cuteness.  I seem to remember it was near Amercian Girl Place, which I didn’t venture into as I’ve outgrown the American Girls dolls, just not too interested in young girl dolls, I like the ladies.  Perhaps one day I’ll sell off my Kirsten and Samantha dolls, both from the late 80’s before the company was bought-out and quality was at an all-time high.  Right now, I beleive the dolls are many states away, tucked safely into a storage closet at my parents’ home, with soo many other things I don’t have space for in our current home.  That’s what made Loolu such a great idea, if I focus on one doll, I don’t mind all the others being packed away due to space limitations.

In small-scale sewing, I’ve learned several tricks, like hemming the bottom of sleeves and pants BEFORE sewing the other seams which make the hem so difficult to get at.  One of the key tips I don’t follow as well as I should is fabric selection.  Cloth that frays easily is not a good choice to make doll outfits from, it falls apart while you’re sewing it and shreds of it end up all over everything if you’re half as clumsy as I am.  My last project was using a bit of an old hippie skirt, the long, wrinkled variety, and while pretty and light and flowy just like I’d hoped, it was a pain to make sure the seams would hold up to being put onto the doll.  My theory of needlework goes for overkill; if I mend something, that little spot will outlast the rest of the garment, but in doll-scale, that’s not always ideal.  While a veritable carpet-bombing of stitches will ensure durability, sometimes it just doesn’t look right, particularly on a small scale.  My next thing to focus on in my doll-dressing is trimming down the excess in seams and making the garments less bulky in bad places.  I think a good way to test my skills will be making some stockings as I previously mentioned, there’s an old pair of nylons just begging to made doll-sized.

So I’ve been playing around over at swapbot, and in the one-on-one trades board I got into the tagging games, where one person posts and there’s an ongoing chain of sending to the person who posts before or after you.  Yesterday, I got the most wonderful homemade soaps from the crafty-tag, and wow, they smell fabulous!  I love mixed craft message boards, there’s soo many great handmade things that other people do, I like the idea of making soap but I’ve not trried it yet, so I can someone a crocheted case for their phone and someone wioll send me soap.  It’s a great system, as long as everyone is honest.

Which brings me to my problem, the person I was supposed to send to ended up being banned for being a selfish greedy swap-lifter before I sent to them, so I’m sending to someone they were supposed to send a couple things to.   And, until I send out that package, I will not use the wonderful soap; because if I didn’t send to someone, I’m just as bad as the nastynasty who stole dozens of peoples’ work.  Yeah, I know I’m being a bit harsh on myself, it’s almost a good thing that I was late sending out the crochet goodies to that no-goodnik, she’s under investigation for mail fraud!  It’s just awful when people find things like swap-bot and think it’s just a handout for them from the trusting, good people who send what they say they’ll send and expect everyone else will do the same.  It’d be harder on me if I still had that crazy idealism that made anarchy make sense, some people just don’t care about right and wrong, only what serves them, until those people are done and over, there will need to be rules to help the rest of us deal with them.

Yesh, forgot the Japanese word that means lucky bag, but you know what I mean.  The dollmore bags last year yielded between three and four garments, with nothing fabulous showing up anywhere I saw in my websearch last night.  The system is different this year and includes a bigger variety of items, like shoes and wigs along with clothes, but if I’m sending someone sixty dollars for doll clothes, I want something more certain than a mixed MSD size baggie of fun.  I know if the bag had wigs, they wouldn’t fit, it might be boy clothes, it might be plain old boring stuff that we don’t like, so no lucky bag, at least from Dollmore, for me.

Maybe the Mimi’s parcels would be more my style, there’s a vague list of what to expect.  Everything on their site is nice, I wouldn’t mind any of it showing up in a lucky bag.  I do like that there’s certain to be shoes in the pack, shoes are what my girl needs most.  I’d might be better off just buying some shoes that I know for sure that I’ll like and will be in good colors.  It’s the idea of getting all these fun things at once that appeals to me really, not that I’d turn my nose up at a pair of msd jeans just showing up in the mail or anything, but a big old goodie pack of doll stuff just sounds like when I was a little girl and my grandmother was moving, my uncle brought over two HUGE crates of my mom and aunt’s dolls for me to take care of.  Sure, it was in June, but it was like a dozen Christmases in one, well, two, boxes.  I’ve still got darn near every one of those dolls, only sold off a few that weren’t to my taste or were roughly enjoyed by my aunt in her odd childhood.

While thinking of what I could ask for this upcoming holiday season, I came up things for my doll I can’t easily make myself, like shoes and wigs.  Ebay star mimiwoo has a shop with some nice deals on MSD shoes, my favorites being the creepers just like mine which I’ve mostly seen on boy dolls, so they may run big, and the ‘green bamboo’ slip ons, which any teenager will tell you, ain’t really bamboo.  Yes, they’re adorably cute little shoes printed with pot leafs!  I’ve been eyeing those shoes before I even knew what size doll I’d be getting, they just too funny.  Paired with a special-effects type eye it might bring a whole new meaning to glassy-eyed stare.  Does your doll have habits you don’t approve of?  On the next Maury…

There’s there pretty green eyes for $2.99, and these cute purple anime style eyes for the same price.  Santa better get his lap over to the computer, I’ve got some sitting to do!  If santa is looking for a ‘lucky bag’ they’ve got those too, the fukubukuro idea of mystery items that are a certain size in a surprise package sounds fun.  Wonder if they’re putting good stuff in the bags, wonder if it’ll be a great surprise or just a good deal.  It’s certainly a surprise, and I love a good surprise! 

Jpop dolls is also doing fukobukuro lots, here’s the MSD girl size one.    A pretty blue and black wig on their sales page might tempt me as well, something about curly wavy poofy hair on Loolu just looks soo right.  The owner pictures of their multi-tone wigs always look much prettier than the website shows them as.   Something about getting a new wig onto your resin darling makes for a bit of playing to get it ‘just right’.  Multi tone wigs may take a bit more play to get the perfection, but the website photos don’t seem to do them justice.  The sales wigs at Jpop all look nice though, their full price wigs are dreamy and worth a look too, but hey, this is a bargain-happy doll blog, I can’t advise my fellow clearance hounds to buy full-price, that’s what the alot of the other doll blogs are for!  It’s free to lookthough, so go get your fill of dreams and pretty dolls at Jpop and Mimiwoo’s.  You know what I’ll be drooling over…

So, to my own Santa-sweetie-darling:  If you’d like to be brag-worthy in a way I can share with the other doll-dorks and get my girl stuff for the holidays; Loolu is an MSD sized doll, and she wears a 6/7 wig, a 14 or 16 millimeter eye, and you can’t go wrong getting a girl shoes for her resin MSD-size feet, they’re much easier to get the right size for than my human feet (8 in ladies, 5 and a half or 6 in mens, including Chuck Taylors).  He’s a sweetie, he reads my doll-related gushings although I’m not sure how much of the doll-lingo has sunken in yet.  Poor guy, he’s getting his payback for me vaguely knowing what a ‘lucky dog’ is in racing, he can hear about face-ups and wigs and shoes… Not an even trade-off, but I’ve got the bigger end of that stick so I’m swinging it!

My last attempt at a tee type shirt for my doll ended in something that while structurally sound and very tee-shirt like, didn’t fit the poor girl very well at all.  Then, I tried again, cutting off part of the body pattern for a slimmer fit and altering the sleeve pieces to fit the new body shape.  My guess was right, Loolu has a very sleek, fitted tee in the most adorable print from a re-purposed tee I no longer wear.  The best part of re-purposed clothing is that the hems are pre-sewn, so properly aligning the pattern pieces when cutting them out can save several steps in the assembly process.  One pitfall to watch for would be pattern pieces with a distinct direction to them, be very careful and pay close attention that your pieces are being cut out right sides right.  If it helps, cut only one piece at a time even when you need two.  The small delay in re-placeing the pattern and cutting out another piece saves hours of heatache when you realize you’re out of fabric and cannot re-cut the piece which ended up backwards.  Sure, part of a hobby is the relaxion it can bring, but preventing a mishap is worth the time.  Now, to find some suitably small snaps (or pop-fasteners as Europeans have been known to call them) to finish up Loolu’s new shirt.  And to make her several more now that I’ve altered a freebie pattern for a perfect fit.

While my wrists beg for a break from the yarn, I’ve started thinking about sewing and other things I might be able to do without causing pain due to carpal tunnel related aches.  Given that I’ve just unearthed a large cache of old clothes with awesome details and small flaws, I’ve got plenty of fuel, now to light the fire.

Part of what makes it hard is that my doll has yet to quite define her style for me; she’s a quirky little thing.  We’re still getting to know each other, it’s been a few months but I’m rather guarded, as is she.  Surprisingly, she doesn’t object as much to light colors as I thought she might, odd how my own tastes aren’t reflected by my doll’s choice of dress.  Rather the way my lizard has different taste in music than I do, she clearly enjoys reggae, though some of it is not to my taste.  Am I being as crazy as that sounds?!  If you’d seen Bobarella the iguana’s reaction to music, you wouldn’t think so.  Something makes her glance around until she finds the source, either the tv or the stereo, or sometimes one of her humans will make fun noises for her amusement.  If I could post videos, I’d share the delightfully cute way she zones out to Pink Floyd’s guitar solos and perks up when the lyrics kick in.  Ahh, the joys of pets, doing cute things that no one else cares about for millienia now.

Perhaps I’ll stitch Loolu up something fun today between loads of laundry and other mundane household drudgery.  I will NOT touch yarn, no knitting, no crochet, no yarn at all until my wrists and arms stoip hurting for a few days.  Darned carpal tunnel.

I’ve been dealing with carpal tunnel for roughly six months now, andmy new interest in knitting small-scale is not agreeing with the crushed nerves in my wrists.  Perhaps I’m not knitting correctly.  Tension problems are common for new needleworkers.  I’ve seen the problems of crocheting too tightly in a couple of the people who have asked me to teach them.  Being a newbie knitter doesn’t go as easily if you don’ know any more skilled knitters to deffer to in times of doubt.  If my mother weren’t so very far away, I’m sure she’s sort it out and tell me just what I was doing wrong that makes knitting so painful.  So, in my aching defeat, I will return to sewing.  It was just a tiny little red cotton scarf I was knitting, simple garter stitch beginner stuff made more challenging by tiny needles and thin cotton yarn, probably nothing that my doll, Loolu, would wear very much, but it was something to keep my hands busy while I watched television.

In other news, there’s a very interesting site I’ve found called Swap-Bot.  While I just did my first organzied swap on the site, I’ve been a member for a while.  The one-on-ones trades message board always got me distracted, it’s quicker than waiting for a organized swap deadlines.  I felt bad, my part of the swap went out a bit late, but it was well-recieved.  I got my package just the other day, some nice stickers and starter bits to nudge me towards some paper crafts,  not my usual tastes, but it’s fun to try new stuff.

Not literally locking away a basket of yarn, but I’m putting away my hooks and needles in hopes of the pain subsiding.  Carpal Tunnel is a harsh mistress, she’s just decided to kick my butt this week.  In efforts to please the nerves in my wrists beyond just wearing the braces while I sleep and sit around the house, I’m putting away all the needlework temptations.

In light of the ban on yarn, I’ll still need ways to keep my hands occupied.  Chain smoking and eating to busy my restless fingers are not good ideas.  So I’ll draw, I can do that with the braces on.  The sewing machine may still work with braced hands.  It’ll speed along sewing projects to get the machine fired up.  Perhaps I can even do a bit of beading, my peyote stitch is finally free of rust, it’s time to try something beyond just practice.

On swap-bot there’s a fun little project that the other swappers are getting into called Dotees, little decorated figures with faces like dolls.  A dotee is like a mini art-doll.  The usually have hanging loops, though I’ve seen some which double as cases for nail care sets or other gadgets.  Hmm, both a case and a doll?  I can get into that.

This afternoon I had thrifting fun with a friend.  Nothing doll-scale worth bringing home to be found.  Yet, the great universal force that leads me time and again to the neatest thing on earth that can be had for only three dollars did not fail me.  I was sad earlier this week, noting how hard it is to find Barbie tee shirts printed on a black shirt.  Yes, I need a black shirt that says Barbie, because I’m into dolls does NOT mean I like pink.  One of my previous treasures suffered severe cracking in the bootleg logo, it was a child’s large tee that I found a pair of, different bootleg barbie images on each.  The cooler of the two is suffering from overwearing and underquality.  Today, at the very end of a ladies tee shirt rack was a NEW one, a legit barbie tee shirt printed on a black tee.  Given the New York to Michigan exchange rate, I did not balk at five dollars for a tee shirt, it was worth it.  I might’ve even paid that in Midwest dollars, where the thrift shops are notably cheaper.

I looked at the porcelin dolls for outfits that may fit Loolu, but nothing struck my fancy.  There was a poorly made chair that would’ve fit, but I’ve already thrifted a lovely Pottery Barn chair that Loo’s quite fond of.  My cohort was amused, she knows my doll’s name, that’s a good friend.  She even pointed out a nice little couch, it was just a bit too big for a barbie, but it was a very nice idea.

psst- to anyone in the Port Jefferson area of Long Island, there’s a fabulous thrift called North Shore, look it up.

Using a pattern found on a message board elsewhere, I tried sewing a raglan sleeved top for Loolu, my DoC mini size ball jointed doll.  It didn’t occur to me until we were trying it on that the pattern was made for a boy doll, the fit, or lack thereof, proves that Loolu is not a boy.  What to do now?  We’ve got a lovely hand stitched top in two tones of pink softness that would fit a boy doll, if I had one, and if that boy doll would be willing to wear that much pink.  Oh well, time to try alterations in one-quarter scale.  Perhaps some trim added to the top and some matching shorts would be okay for pajamas.  It’s like those Christmases as a young child where my mother trained me to carefully answer, after feigning a look of deep thought I’d say to my dad ‘I think mommy would like some new pajamas from us for Chrustmas’.  Ah, the slacker’s answer to everything, jammies.  It doesn’t matter how ugly they are, they’re just for sleeping in.

Tonight’s project will not involve a pattern, I have better luck doing my work freehand.  I’m thinking it might be a pair of socks, I remember a very simple how-to in an old Barbie magazone that involved a cardboard cut out the size of the finished stocking that might be just the trick to making some well-fitting socks with minimal seam allowances.  The pattern was slightly larger than the side view of the doll’s leg, cloth, or used nylons, was folded over the model leg and stitched very close to the edge of the board piece.  Trim off the excess fabric, a dot of seam sealer at the toe and top where the stitching ends and turn right sides out.  Yep, that’s what we’re trying tonight, wish me luck, good luck to you if you’d like to work along with us!

Feeling a bit under the weather, but at least I’ve got a lovely resin friend to keep me company as I sip at some tea and await the sinus pills to do their magic.  Thus far today, I’ve got an adorable little hat halfway made up, it’s lovely shades of red, purple and a tiny bit of deep orange with wooly bumps in the yarn, it’s going to be quite nice, but it’s not a style Loolu would wear, so we’re planning to set up a sales list of some sort, for the things I’ve made practicing to make things for Loolu.  It’s terrible, I know, every time I get an idea I have to try it out in a less-enjoyable yarn first, just to be sure I won’t wreck a ‘good’ ball of yarn trying something new.  The same with sewing, it sounds silly, but when I make small items like doll clothes, I start out by making several in hopes that one will be perfect when it’s all done with.  I’ve learned not to re-scrap the trial projects though, after many afternoons wandering though an arts and crafts fair thinking that I’m far too harsh on my own work seeing what these ‘professionals’ are doing…
Ah, the weather is a bit overcast, not too chilly but just right for a fall afternoon spent needle in hand to create some dolly wear.  Perhaps I’ll even sew snaps onto all the nearly-finished garments that’ve been waiting in my sewing basket.  The ongoing project of re-packing all of our belongings for the upcoming remodel has yielded a massive uncovering of elastics and fabrics I’d forgotten, ready to become cute little undies and dresses- a complete wardrobe is in order for my resin darling, I’d better be going to fetch my sewing basket and get on with the stitching.  Have fun, I’ll probably have a new project idea for us to try tomorrow!