With just over a week left to go, Lisa is very busy sewing......
Every now and then, one of the other girls will come to see how she's doing....
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The angel outfit for Pink Laryssa is coming along nicely. The customer asked for a white dress with pink accents. Fancy, please! So when I went to Fabricland back in November this beautiful embroidered gauze caught my attention, so I bought some.....  I've been having issues trying to come up with a design. I hauled out many bolts of lace , and all my white fabrics, and started playing with them. I thought the pink flowers on the gauze might be a bit too bright for the main part of the dress, so decided to semi-hide them under a soft semi-sheer cotton & silk blend. No matter what lace and fabric combinations I tried, I'd always come back to this basic design....  Still not sure about what direction to go, especially with the bodice, I decided to just start and see what happens. Sometimes an outfit will "make itself". I'm sure many other artists have experienced this same phenomena themselves, when an outfit has a mind of it's own, and the inspiration and direction seems to come out of nowhere, and I'm just the person putting it physically together. Well, that's exactly what's happening with this angel outfit - it's designing itself as if guided by some unseen force, and I'm just the hands putting it together ......  The skirts are ready to be sewn onto the bodice, and I've started the wings. Again, it's a case of the various fabrics jumping out at me - "Use Me!" - and then having to figure out how to work with them. The wings want to be made of lace enclosed between two layers of sheer white fabric. I've never made wings like that before, but I'm sure they will turn out to be perfect.
I'm very curious to see how this outfit turns out. All the doll outfits currently still available, have been reduced! To see more details and prices, click on the images below.... For Kaye Wiggs girls....
For Iplehouse BIDs....
For Iplehouse KIDs....
Ringo finally found a large flock of Canada geese and Mallard ducks, huddled in the snow..... 
...so he finally had a chance to feed some geese.... 
Nami and Ringo still wanted to go feed the geese, so we took them to the lake again, but this time we went to a different location, at the base of the Scarborough Bluffs. The trees and bushes along the western edge of the rocky point were covered with a thick layer of ice from frozen spray...... 
"But where's the geese??" 
Today I want to share something a little different. No one in my family other than my husband is really interested in my dolls, so when my granddaughter, Teagan, brought her new Our Generation doll that she'd received for Christmas, along on her weekly Saturday morning visit in the end of December, she noticed my little photo set-up on the dining room table - the one I'd been using all Holiday season - and asked about taking a picture of her doll there. Excellent idea!! It would be fun for her, but also from a purely selfish perspective, maybe I could train some future BJD lovers to talk dolls with. So I posed her doll and snapped a few photos, then printed them out for her......  The following Saturday Teagan brought another doll - one she'd received for her birthday - asked about taking another picture. I still had all the tiny balloons from my doll's New Years's portrait, so they'd be fun to include. Natalya, another granddaughter, whose into My Little Ponies in a big way, had brought two of her Ponies, and asked to have them included in some pictures as well.....   I printed out pictures for both the girls to take home. Today, Teagan brought another doll, this one dressed in a hiking outfit, and with the picnic set we'd given her for her birthday. She was all eager to take some more pictures, and with it snowing outside, we set up a little outdoorsy scene in the studio....  Natalya brought her ponies again, and wanted them in the photos too.....  Natalya told me that she had written a little story about the pictures we took last time, and had taken it to school to read to her class. Okay then, time for some really story-worthy pictures......   I'm sure everyone is recognizing my Christmas room setting and many of my props. They work just as well for my granddaughter's dolls and ponies as they do for my own dolls. And it's so much fun! I'm curious to see how long they will be interested in bringing their dolls and ponies for pictures. Maybe I'll get some 'doll buddies' after all!
Better go print out the pictures so they can take them home..... Lisa had spread out the fabric and was ready to lay out the patterns, and of course Bonnie wanted to help... 
"I can pass you the pins!" 
"Thanks, but those pins are very sharp, so I think I'd better do it myself" 
Last time I was at Value Village, and I was looking for used baby clothes with tiny stripes, it occurred to me that many of the onesies had embroidered figures on the front, and they might make cute tops for my little dolls. So I went through everything they had, and found a few with figures small enough to be on the front of a tiny top. Yesterday I made one up..... 
The onesies are very small, but after making one top with a figure on the front, there's still enough fabric left to make at least one more plain top without a figure. Not bad for a dollar or two! 
Efreet was very happy with his new top.
It was made using my Free Long-Sleeve T-Shirt Pattern Peach loved Lisa's choice of the beautiful lavender taffeta with gold embroidery and sparkly sequins. 
Bonnie grabbed the end of the fabric and wrapped it around herself.... "I think this colour really suits me too, don't you think?" 
Now that Lisa has her own sewing kit, and it's her birthday at the end of the month, she wants to learn to sew by making herself a pretty dress for her birthday. That sounded like a great idea, so I took her to Fabricland so she could choose a pattern, and the fabric....  We picked up everything she would need....  When we got home, Lisa couldn't wait to show everyone what we had bought...  "Wow, this is really beautiful! Can you make me a dress like that too?"  In the meantime, I've been busy finishing off photo albums from last year. There were several folders full of photos on my desktop which either needed to be added to existing albums, or made into new ones - mostly photos of my Kaye Wiggs dolls. There's also quite a few doll outfits made last year that still need to be documented as well.
Then once I get some nice photos for 'thumbnail buttons', I can release the first albums of 2015. In the meantime I'm working on the new albums even though there are no links to them yet. |
AuthorMartha Boers is an award-winning Canadian doll maker and costumer specializing in fantasy and historical-style costumes. Archives
September 2023
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