Monday, March 19, 2012

it's been a while...

Life got very busy and took me away from the world of Blythe for while... but strangely when life got so chaotic that I couldn't cope - my girls were waiting there for me as an escape and a way to soothe my stress.

Almost a month ago, my future mother-in-law had a stroke & we have been on the road a lot and spending a lot of time in hospitals, dealing with a lot of emotions.Things have also been chaotic at my job the last month since we got a new boss who is changing everything daily. When I felt so fried that I didn't know what to do with myself, Blythe came through.

I haven't made anything new for the girls, but I've been enjoying looking at pictures and patterns.  I've been day-dreaming about projects and researching tutorial information. It's been wonderfully calming.  My fiance will go next week on Family Medical Leave for 2 weeks to help out now that his mom is home from the hospital.  Being apart from him for 2 weeks would be so sad and stressful if it wasn't for the plans I have been making to start a new phase of customizing my sweet clone girl, Charlotte & to sew lots of dresses for both Charlotte and Wondie with a big stash of awesome fabric I bought a while back and never had time to get into.

I also want to do a fabric softener hair spa for both the girls, as well as this vintage "Little Miss Revlon" doll that I found at a thrift store, who is in great shape but needs a little TLC.

For Charlotte, I bought two sets of eye chips - one apple green & one handpainted blue w/gold accents. I'm going to be brave and try to get the Blybe/Basaak eye chips out - at least the front-facing ones...

I am going to do a little more sanding on her face-plate to remove her existing makeup & do a new faceup with pastels & acrylics for her lips.

And I am going to try adding some extra hair to her scalp to spruce up her hair without changing her too much. 

I am weird about that.  I'm in total awe of the work that customizers do with Blythe dolls, but I could never rip apart Wondie.  Charlotte I am more brave with because her scalp falls off all the time, so it's really easy to lift it off and see inside her to add sleep eyes and change her pull rings and string.  I gently sandmatted her face w/out going close to her makeup.  I was planning when I got her to change her eye-chips and buy her wigs and such... but I wasn't into the wigs at all and I was afraid to try changing out the clone eye chips because I've heard they are really hard to change & I didn't want to break Charlotte.

I have one really long-haired wavy brunette wig that is close to Charlotte's natural hair.  I got it because I wanted to be able to put in on her as a quick fix and still keep her general look and style... but it was awful - first of all, I felt like I was torturing her to get it on her and she just seemed unhappy.  I know that is weird to say about a doll... but I felt like I could feel her unhappiness with the wig and it just didn't seem right.

I think I will try to use the long hair of the wig to do knotted method in between Charlotte's regular hair to just fill in what she has... then I might give her a little trim to make it all come together.

I used to be freaked out by the difficulty in removing clone eye chips, but I'm getting more confident with it because neither Charlotte nor I like her front facing eye-chips at all.

Here are the hand-painted eyechips I got... I think they are gorgeous. They are made by Elficious on Etsy.



I'm getting a little braver and I just love the idea of fixing up Charlotte so she feels really special and unique.  I am totally in love with Gentle River's face-up and I would like to try something like that for Charlotte - with deep red lips, green eye shadow and warm coppery coral blush.

I think I may try to do her eyelids so her sleepy eyes are colored to match her eyeshadow & add some new longer softer lashes.  It's pretty exciting.

I'm just a fan of stock for proper Blythes, though!  I'd much rather sew that do the customizing, at this point.  Customizing scares me, while sewing calms me... the customizing is for the end result, while the sewing is for the process.