Doll-A-Day 165:A Doll of My Own Making: Tiny Regency Lady

  Shew! According to my son Fuzzy this was the hottest day of the year so far. It was so hot that I spent most of the day outside working, rather than be in our oven of a house! (No air conditioning.) I took pictures for what will be a longer review post, but it was so late when I finished working that I'm just doing a quick post and am saving the review post for some time when I can devote more time to it.
  So today's doll is another that I made myself.

The metal ring at the bottom is the base of a stand I made  to be able to display the dolls at shows. It's not attached.

This lady is less than an inch and a half tall.

As you can see, her shawl is removeable.
She's made of polymer clay, and her arms and legs are jointed, so they can be moved.

She's made to look like an old fashioned china doll.
I mixed a very pale colour of clay, and then painted her with acrylics and glossed her with the glaze I talked about yesterday,Triple Thick.

 She doesn't look as nice here, but you have to remember, she's enlarged MANY times!

She has little sculpted curls all around her head.

 I was pretty proud of the way her hair came out.
That's it for today. See you tomorrow for another doll.

Doll-A-Day 164: Nesting Dolls of My Own Making (And My Own Family!) and the answer to that glaze question

  First of all, London Peony, our Blogiversary giveaway winner has FINALLY received her prize. She sounds happy with it! She's planning a photo shoot with it, so I hope she will share some of the pictures with us,or alert us if she posts them on her blog.
  Now, a while back I did a post on another of the tiny dolls I make, and one of our readers,Margarita,asked me what kind of glaze I used. Today I'm showing you another project I did using the same glaze. It's this set of nesting dolls I made for Ivy one Christmas.

Left to right: Ken, me, Emma, Fuzz, and Ivy.

It was a set of  blanks I bought and painted for Ivy, since she collects nesting dolls.

What to do with Ken's hands? Why let him hold a prop: his most frequent real life 'prop'? His knife and fork of course...

I drew the faces with pencil and chickened out when it came to painting over my pencil lines.I painted them with acrylic paints and used the glaze Triple Thick, by Deco Art.

Triple Thick says it only takes one coat, but I did give these a couple of coats to make them extra shiny.

Ivy would kill me if she saw this because I don't have the halves perfectly lined up. (She has a thing about lining the halves up.)Notice my left thumb.

Triple Thick is supposedly resistant to cracking and yellowing. It seems to live up to the claim so far. These nesting dolls were done in 2007.

Emma when she still wanted to be a movie director, before she went to film school and completely changed her mind. That's a video camera in her hands.

One thing about Triple Thick though: I have noticed that once it's been opened it starts to go thick and sticky fairly quickly. (Like, within a couple of months or less.) So, unless you use a lot of glaze in a short period of time, buy the smaller bottle instead of the large jar. Price per ounce is cheaper on the big jar, but unless you get to use it all before it gets too sticky to use, it ends up being less economical simply because of the waste. 

 

Fuzzy.

By the time I got to the Ivy, the smallest nest, it was pretty tiny and hard to even hold while painting it. That's my excuse for why the tiny one looks so bad!

Ivy is holding her favourite larger doll, Baby.There's no way I could have painted her other favourite doll in scale to that nesting doll of her.Her other favourite is a Kelly friend,Major Mint from Barbie Nurcracker.

Major Mint originally looked like this and was a boy. We thought he was so pretty he looked more like a girl, so 'he' became 'she', and, as she did with a lot of dolls at the time, Ivy named her 'Blue'. (It was her favourite colour and the only one she knew the name of, since she was only 2 years old.) This is the only one named Blue that we still remember the name of. But then, we still see her on a regular basis.

Since the dolls are painted to look like our family it worked out that there were five of them and five of us.

That's it for today. See you tomorrow for another doll.

Doll-A-Day 163: Skipper Saturday:Funtime Skipper

  Today's Skipper Saturday doll is the European Funtime Skipper.

She has bend legs and a twist and turn waist.She was available in 1974.

When I saw her at an auction I thought she was Partytime Skipper from 1976-79. Partytime is also a European Skipper that looks like a Malibu Skipper with pale skin and pale blonde hair. The big difference is that Partytime's legs don't bend.

She was wearing something else when I got her, but another of the Skippers I got at that auction was wearing Funtime's yellow two piece bathing suit.The presence of the bathing suit was another tip off that this doll was Funtime Skipper.

She's wearing her original bathing suit, and Skipper's Flower Girl Get Ups 'n Go dress from 1978.

Mattel had already made a Skipper fashion called Flower Girl, but what else are you going to call a Flower Girl outfit?

This Flower Girl consists of this dress, a matching bonnet,a bouquet, and yellow flats.

This outfit is actually considered to be rare.

The bright blue eyes stand out better on this pale doll than Malibu Skipper.It doesn't help that Malibu also has lots more black eye makeup!

I like this girl way better than the weirdly tan Malibu Skippers.

Although she does have the same stiff, course hair as Malibu Skipper.

I've never been a fan of tans anyway. As a red haired person, I tend to be naturally pale, and I like being pale,or as a pale friend of mine used to say, "maintaining my perfect fish belly complexion". My mother never really realized she was raising a red haired kid, (She had brown hair.), and always complained that I was "pasty pale". She could never understand that I don't mind being pale. (I actually tan. I just don't want to.) Anyway,I'm not as 'pasty' as I could have been, considering the red hair thing. I'm pink really.

 Maybe this doll is just Malibu Skipper after she wised up to the tanning/skin cancer thing.

See you tomorrow with another doll.

Doll-A-Day 162: Growing Sally

  Today's doll is one of my childhood dolls. She's Growing Sally, by Remco.

Growin', as we called her when I was a kid, was made in 1968.

She has a special feature: She 'grows up'. She comes with two wigs and two outfits.

I appear to have misplaced a shoe over the years.

She's 6" tall, but when she 'grows', (Her body extends at the waist with a simple pull.),she becomes half an inch taller.

Growing Sally at 6" tall...

...and 6 and a half inches.

There must be a lot of years in that half an inch, because she goes from a little girl with ponytails, to a sophisticated grown lady in a satin evening gown.

"Stop! In the name of love..."

The grown Growing Sally always made me think of Diana Ross when I was a kid.

Actually she looks more like Mary Wilson, but Diana Ross was the only Supreme I knew by name when I was six.

The Supremes, Florance Ballard on the left, Diana Ross in the middle, and Mary Wilson on the right.

In any case,I was definitely getting The Supremes from that dress and hair. 

 

Her dress got ruined when I took her to my Grama's in a blue briefcase my Dad gave me. On the way there the blue inner pocket melted paint on Growin's dress, and the forehead of one of my other dolls. At least Growin' could change her dress!

The wigs just slip on and off. The little girl wig has a white ribbon on each ponytail and one on the top of her head.

  The African American Growing Sally came in this little girl dress. It doesn't seem to be long enough for her though. It looks a bit like a Heidi dress. Heidi was also made by Remco, which could account for the similarity.

There was also a Caucasian version of Growing Sally. Unlike the African American doll, she had molded hair, so when she was without a wig she didn't look bald, or weird. I just realized I didn't take any pictures of Growin' without her wigs. Oh well. She would have been embarrassed...

 The Caucasian Sally had a white grown up wig and a red yarn little girl wig, instead of the black haired wigs my girl has. 

She has a much less realistic, cute, silly freckled face that reminds me a lot of the type of dolls I bought quite often when I was a kid. I'm not sure I ever saw her then though.

I loved my Sally though.

Poor Sally had a bit of trouble standing for her photo shoot: When Emma was little she and I spent an afternoon playing with Growin'. Ken came home from work and tried to take part. In trying to make Growin' sit down he broke her left leg off.  (He also blew the transformer on my childhood train set, and overwound my sparking snowplow.Can't let him play with anything!)

See you tomorrow for Skipper Saturday.