A tiny face and a big house.

  Lately rather than sewing my attention has been fixed on doing my first bjd face-up and getting more work done on my dollhouse. I'm doing the face-up slowly, ridiculously slowly and I know it. I'll do a thin coat of pastels, spray with Mr Super Clear and then I'll leave it. Not until the spray dries, not even a couple of hours, but for days.
 I'm doing it this way for a couple of reasons. Firstly I don't want to rush myself and get either overly cocky or overly anxious - that is how I make mistakes. Secondly, I get crazy ideas when I'm working to do things I hadn't planned to do and I want to give myself time to think over whether they're necessary or a good idea or not. . . usually they're not. Thirdly I'm enjoying it, so I want it to take longer.
  Probably the biggest problem I'm having with it is lighting. The face looks very different depending on the light. In some lights it looks almost finished. In other lights it hardly looks started.

Dollmore Zihu under natural light.

Dollmore Zihu under warm electric light.

 How much more work her face needs, I'm not sure yet but she still needs lower eyelashes and I want to neaten her lips with a coat or two of water colours, and I want a little more shading on her upper eyelids. Other than that, I'm still undecided but throwing up a couple of ideas in my head.

The dollhouse is finally at a point where the end is in sight. I spent all day yesterday trimming and gluing in cornices (and I'm glad that's over!) and most of the interiors still need finishing touches and tidying up. There's only one set of french doors left to go in, which would have gone in on Tuesday, except I never bought handles for them so they're waiting for those to arrive. And then all that needs to be done is the roofing, railings for the balconies, a latticework trim around the foundation and the front stairs!

 Of course then all of the roof needs to be covered in thousands of tiny individual cedar shingles. . . but I'm trying not to think about that.

But it's starting to look like a real house, both inside and out, which is exciting!

It was turned the wrong way to be able to get a shot of the exterior today (and it weighs a tonne so I didn't want to turn it around) but I got a couple of interior shots. Not of the lounge though. . . the floor in the lounge is dusty and there are wood shavings and little balls of paper towel through it, and a sink lying on it's side; making it look like an abandoned derelict building.

 Blue and white kitchen. Taken on a weird angle because 

if I bent down the dog tried to climb on my knee and lick my face.

 The library. In the plans this is a bedroom but I wanted a library.

Taken from a weird angle so you can't see the gaping hole in the wall

where the roof will be.

A little of the derelict building feel. This is supposed to be a bathroom

but I decided to make it a bedroom, and the house only has running water

in the kitchen. (There isn't actual running water in the kitchen, it's imaginary 

running water, if that doesn't sound completely insane.)

One thing I've found interesting building the house is how I react to cutting myself. If you build a house from a plywood kit you will need to trim pieces sometimes, and you will cut yourself. And I will point out that every single time I have cut myself it has been just after I've thought "I really shouldn't be doing this this way, if I slip I'm going to cut myself." so it's my own fault. 

 But at first if I cut myself, I would inspect the wound, get a band-aid and if it was bad, for the rest of the day I would pull the band-aid off every hour or so to check on the wound. Now if I cut myself my only thought is to get a band-aid on as quickly and tightly as possible and then to spend the rest of the day checking the house for signs of blood! I think I could sever a finger and so long as I didn't bleed on the wallpaper, I really wouldn't care, I would just keep building.

That's all for now. Hopefully I'll still have enough fingers to type with for a while yet, but I can't promise anything.

Dreams and Dolls

 I've been sick with pneumonia for nearly a month now. It's nothing to worry about, it's a mild form, but it gets in the way of all my plans. In my loungeroom there's the doll house I've been working on for a year and a half, a Kish doll sitting in a box full of pattern pieces waiting to be dressed, and under a towel there's my new treasure - my first bjd; waiting for a face up. I have plans for new clothes for my Patience and I haven't even measured her yet. And every time I try to do anything, suddenly I'm tired and my head spins and I just know I'm going to mess it up!
 My bjd though, performed a miracle. The two boys that I live with, mostly ignore my dolls, if they acknowledge them at all it's to comment that they're creepy. This doll, on the other hand, they're both actually impressed by.
 I say it's my first bjd, but it will probably be my only bjd. I'm not patient enough for that kind of doll. I got a Dollmore Zihu and even though she took less than six weeks from the point of ordering to get here, that was the longest six weeks of my life! I'm not patient enough for that.
 I'm going to do her face up myself. Even though she's the first and only bjd I have ever seen in person. That's a little daunting. Every day I think of that and then think "You can't honestly be planning to do this! This is crazy!" But on the other hand another voice in my head says I can, I have years of experience doing pastel and water-colour portraits, which is probably the perfect practice for that kind of thing. I know I can do it. I also know that if I mess up, I can remove it. I'm still terrified of starting. Possibly because this is a doll I've dreamed of having for fifteen years.
  I always wanted a doll that was a good size to make clothes for that could be customised as Claudia from Interview with a vampire. Anyone that likes the story will probably at that point ask "From the book or the movie?" and all of them would be annoyed because my reply is neither. Somewhere between the two. Zihu is perfect because I wanted a doll that was firstly pale without being a fantasy shade, they pass as mortals in both the book and movie and no matter how bad the lighting was a Dollpire doll or something similar, isn't passing as mortal. Secondly and most importantly she had to have a child body. That means no boobies. I decided years ago she would have to be a bjd but when I started researching bjds I discovered that the ones with realistic child faces tend to have breasts, sometimes they're small but they're there. On the other hand the ones with the realistic child bodies tend to have unrealistic oversized heads with huge eyes. It came down to a choice between two dolls, Narsha (the main doll from the collection Zihu is from) and Zihu. I chose Zihu because whilst Narsha has a prettier more doll like face, Zihu has a strange personality to her face, I could easily imagine the mind of Claudia inside that face, whereas it would be easier to imagine Narsha without a mind.
 Meanwhile, while I'm here, I have to say I LOVE Dollmore! So far for my Kish girls I have bought bjd products from Alice's Collections (just shoes and they were great and a great price), Luts (wigs and shoes, I wasn't overly impressed by either. Wigs look and feel quite plasticy, shoes very average in every way except price which was high), Leeke (one wig, one pair of shoes - both excellent with qualifications. wig very frizzy but I wanted it to be and chose one that was, shoes were fantastic quality but would have preferred shoes of slightly lesser quality at a more reasonable price), and Dollmore (shoes and wigs.)
  Dollmore's wigs (I have three now) are consistently great quality, their shoes are well made, and their prices are really reasonable. Alice's has cheaper shoes but Dollmore has a bigger selection. Also they send free gifts. A lot of free gifts. My Zihu came with a pair of black lace tights, a pair of underpants, eyes (as expected), a wig, a headband (which will be perfect for her when I'm done), a bookmark, a russian doll keyring and a cute cat keyring. (Just to be fair Alice's Collections also sent me a free magic eraser with my order from them.) It made opening Zihu's box like Christmas!

I'm sorry I have no pictures today but this isn't a real post, just writing this because I can't sleep because of coughing. I should be well enough soon that I hopefully can get another proper post done.