Doll-A-Day 2023 #237: My Secret Project: Custom Funko Pops

   Before we continue on to the two doll show blow out posts, with a million pictures, we're going to pull back and talk about those 'projects' I was working on that were taking all my time. They were only secret because Emma reads the blog sometimes, and they were secret from her.

  To preface, Emma's wedding theme is nature and fairy...and music. Here are the  center pieces for the tables she came up with. I helped by making a few of them. There are loads of them. This is only a few.

  Emma's bridal shower was the 26th. I set myself the job of making a cake, and hors d'oeuvres. I started out with one idea for the cake, but then feared it was too much like a wedding cake and changed the plan...twice. I still wanted roses on it though. I have made icing roses before, and polymer clay roses, but never sugar paste anything. But I decided to make sugar paste roses for this cake. I ended up spending ages making sugar paste rose petals, thinking they could be stored in ziplock bags and all be assembled at once. Don't you believe it! I knew the sugar paste dries out quickly, even as you're cutting the petals, and they have to be tucked into a ziplock bag as you go. What I didn't know was that they don't stay moist in a ziplock bag for a week! Because I was trying to do the roses and something else at the same time, something that Emma and AJ could NOT see me working on, I made the petals and then tried to finish up the other project while they were away recently. When I got back to the roses, I made some, and they were fine. Then I started having a problem with the petals cracking and splitting when I tried to roll the edges and round them out. I ended up having to make some new petals, and also not roll some of the others as thin as they should have been. 

  Her shower was 'groovy' themed. Music was still involved. 

In back: Me, my sister, and AJ. In front, Emma and Ivy. They are grooved up for the occasion. I don't do 'groovy'.

  Oh, for the cake itself I used the same 'light golden cake' recipe I used for all the kids' first birthday cakes, except I added a boatload of black raspberries, which Emma loves. The cake is a fairly firm cake, but I was a bit afraid the berries would make it too gooey and it wouldn't bake well. I thought about adding less liquid in the mix, but decided to leave it as the recipe said. It turned out just right, and maybe still a bit firm, so it was okay. Except, of course, when I was dumping the cakes out onto the cooling rack, there had to be one that stuck in the pan and fell apart. I hid it between the layers. When it was all stuck together, no one would know! 

  I finally came up with the idea to make a record for the cake top, with the roses on it. I originally thought of making it from icing, coloured black. But then I remembered what happened to the kids' mouths when I made a Harry Potter's head cake for Emma's Harry Potter birthday party: everybody had black tongues and lips! I didn't think all the dressed groovy adults at Emma's shower, taking pictures for posterity, would want black mouths. So I changed the plan again. I finally remembered how hard the glaze for Ken's favourite birthday cake gets. It's chocolate, and delicious, but can get pretty hard. So I thought that would make a great record! I could put plastic wrap in the cake pan I would be making the cake in, and make the chocolate record in that. Then it would fit perfectly on top. I could lift it right out with the plastic. And with it being firm, I could make lines in it with something to make it look like a record. The trouble was, I didn't have my recipe for the glaze, so I had to fake it. It came out far too runny at first, so I redid it. It seemed okay, and it wasn't bad, as long as it was in the pan. It got hot in Ohio again, so I had to put it in the fridge to keep it hard. But making the marks wasn't easy. It looked messy. I also made a record label out of white chocolate with food colouring to make it a light purple. It was nice and firm. Then I realized I should have cut the middle out of the record so the label would be flat, and not raised above the record. It was thick and sitting on top of the glaze. So I removed it. I realized a record needs a hole in the middle, so I tried to poke one, breaking the label in the process! I melted it back together as well as I could. I almost didn't remember to trace around the label first, so I knew where to cut the record out. I did that, and not a bad job, I guess. Then I put the label back in. I made up a very thin version of the cream cheese icing that I had used between the four layers of the cake, and on the outside. Then I  made an icing bag out of a sandwich bag,(Hey, I'm not at home. I have to make do.), and filled out the label. It was 'Matrimony' records, and the song was "I Do" by Emma and AJ. Then I used the leftover icing to glue the roses on the cake. I even smoothed out my bad record rings and thinned out the edge and make it look halfway decent. I'll show you the cake in a second. Before I do, let me explain that as AJ was handing it to me, as I sat in the car to go to the shower, he rubbed the roses on the top of the car door frame. One of them fell off, and the others were pushed forward and over and wiped out part of the lettering on 'Matrimony'. He stuck the rose back on, but it got a little broken. Then as he was carrying it into the shower the roses were sliding off. He stuck them back on and was pushing them, not realizing how delicate they were, and they got a bit crushed and broken, and the worst one ended up in the front. I nearly cried. I had spent so long on the roses and the cake, and I had gotten it to look almost presentable. Luckily it was really dark in the shower, and Emma didn't look too closely to wonder what 'Matrimony' had been before it got partly erased. Unfortunately, I didn't take a picture of the cake before it got messed up. So just remember all of that when you look at the pictures of the cake.

   For the other edible item, I ended up making spinach artichoke cheese...thingies. I forget what they were called. Artichokes are one of Emma's favourite foods, so I thought that would be good. I mixed the stuff up the night before, so all I had to add was the eggs and cream cheese and half and half the day of the shower, and bake it. It was good. Ken wants me to make it again. I told him that I am not doing something that time consuming on Thanksgiving or Christmas, as he suggested, since I just want to spend time with the family, but I would take his other suggestion and make it for his birthday. 

  That was the edible part. My other project was inedible. (But the cake and bars were. Really.) But for a few months I had had the idea to make custom Funko Pops of Emma and AJ. I was originally thinking for Christmas. But then I thought about making them for the shower. Emma said she wasn't doing a cake topper at the wedding, because, 'nobody does that any more'. But I thought if it was a really cool Emma and AJ, like the Funko Pops, that maybe she might change her mind, so I thought if I gave them to her at the shower, she'd have the option. 

  Funko has a 'Pop Yourself' feature at their two actual shops, but those are nowhere near here. One is in California, the other in New York, I think.. You can go in and choose the parts you want and they put it all together for you while you wait. I checked the website, and they had a Pop Yourself thing, but it was only to make downloadable avatars. Too bad because I think I made a pretty good Emma! The AJ options weren't good though. They announced they were going to have the Pop Yourself figures coming to the website in August. I waited, but it didn't happen at the beginning of the month, and I couldn't wait any longer. I needed to make sure I had them for the shower. So I started looking at figures. I spent AGES looking for the right figures to make them out of. I found one I thought would be good for Emma's. "She's almost Emma already." The hilarious thing was, she turned out to be Zooey Deschanel, who is Emma's style icon, I guess you would say.

  When I told her, Emma said she was flattered that the Zooey was deemed to be 'almost Emma'. (It would be like if someone was making a Funko Pop of young me and wanted to make it out of a Kate Bush.) Anyway, I couldn't use Zooey. For one thing, she's about $100. For another, if I managed to get one, Emma would want to keep it as is, (I was right.), and for yet another thing, it would be wrong to make Emma from Zooey. Just not right, but I can't explain why. So I kept looking. It had to have long hair with bangs, and I wanted boots and a skirt. I looked at millions of figures. I almost settled for Parks and Recreation April, because she had a cross body bag and polka dot blouse. But she was holding a coffee cup, which isn't an Emma thing, and she had her arms crossed in an attitude I didn't like. I ended up getting a Zombieland Wichita figure, for Emma's head, and Moon Knight Layla El-Faouly for Emma's body. She at least was wearing Emma's puffy jacket, even if I did have to paint it yellow. 

Emma also had to have glasses. I got a cheap J.J. Abrams figure for the glasses, although I wasn't sure if I would use them on Emma or AJ.

  For AJ I found the perfect head on a Queer Eye Jonathan Van Ness figure. It only needed glasses and an earring.  For the body I looked and looked and finally figured I could use Bubbles, from Trailer Park Boys. He filled the bill for his untucked plaid flannel shirt, which would only need a colour wash to make it the right colour for one AJ has.

  I figured the pants and shoes would work. The cat I could try to turn into their cat Arthur. But then I'd need to find another tiny cat to turn into their other cat, Cowboy. The glasses were the wrong shape and colour, so they would be of no use. So I ordered one from Hot Topic. It didn't come and finally I asked why, and they said it had been lost, but it was no longer on their site for ordering! So I got my money back and tried to find it in a store. Nobody had it, including Hot Topic stores. I tried another figure that would have been great for AJ. It was the 'It's practically AJ already.' figure. It was  Rip Wheeler from "Yellowstone".

  Let me remind you what Emma and  AJ look like.

Ivy, AJ, Emma, and Ken in London last year.

  So I tried to get the Yellowstone figure. It was supposed to come out in August, along with the Bubbles figure. Neither of them ever seemed to have come out. I even saw one thing that said the Yellowstone one was going to come out NEXT year! Eventually I gave up on them and had to settle for using J.J. Abrams body for AJ. That meant painting a plaid shirt, which can't be good! So here were my main components as I started the project.

Jonathan Van Ness, Wichita, and J.J. Abrams.

  I finally bought the figure for Emma's body, and a cheap Bullet Train 'Ladybug' figure for the glasses for, as it turned out, AJ. 

Emma got J.J. Abrams' glasses. 

   I boiled water and held the Wichita in it for 10 minutes until I could get the head off. Then I boil soaked the Moon Knight figure so I could remove that head. That one was different. It was a bobble head, and taking the head off wasn't quite as easy. I wish I could have kept the bobble aspect, but they glue those things in way too well, and pulling it out stretched the wire, and it was unusable. I got a $3 bobble Funko and tried to remove that head and see if I could use the wire, but there's a thing in the head it's sort of made to, and it just gets ruined every time you pull it out, and there wouldn't be one of those things in the Emma head to connect it to anyway. So I had to give up on that idea. But I used the Moon Knight body. Before I could paint anything, I had to do the Sculpey stuff first. I found out you can actually bake Sculpey on the Funkos, and they don't melt. So I made Emma a skirt, and some sparkly silver boots with black laces, like the ones she has. I also made her a cross body Beatles purse like one she has.

Like this one.

  The figure was holding some scarab thing. I don't watch that show. I don't know what it is. But it had to be disguised. So I turned it into a cell phone. Everybody thought it was a Roku remote, including AJ, and he thought that was perfect, because he says Emma always has the remotes. I said fine, if you want to think that's what it is, you go right ahead! As long as it works.

  I had to paint Emma's hair. I used a paint which was already conveniently the right colour. Something still wasn't quite right, and I realized she needed eyebrows! I have painted eyebrows on dolls before, and I have a really hard time getting them both the same. I suppose I could paint The Rock, but anybody else is a problem. But I got Emma's right on the first try! I got lucky there. 

  The next problem was making J.J. Abrams' glasses fit with Emma's hair. Short of poking holes in her head and trying to put the legs of the glasses in there, the only thing I could do was cut the legs short, and make it look like they went under the hair. That worked, but then came the really hard part: getting that head on the formerly bobble head neck. AJ's was easy. Both figures I made him from had the same kind of neck. But with Emma's the bobble head figure had a thick, long neck, made of hard plastic. I mean really hard. My sister got me a dremel for my birthday, and I thought it would be easy to dremel the neck down to the right shape to pop right in the head hole. Nope. I don't know what they made that thing out of, but it wasn't dremeling. I would have still been sitting here dremeling that neck. So finally I gave up and decided to dremel the head hole a bit bigger instead. That worked better, but it still took longer than I thought it would have. Whoever made that dremel does NOT want my review. I did finally get the head on, but it took some scooting as well as dremeling to get it down far enough to hide the spiral indentation where the spring was. Luckily, it looked okay that way.

  For AJ, I painted that blasted shirt plaid. I won't say I did a good job. I kept hoping I could get something else at the last minute. I also painted his pants a more blue jean colour, and painted the shoes to match some green suede ones he has. The glasses were the hard part. (Other than the plaid shirt.) I boiled the head and removed the glasses from the Ladybug figure, only to find out that the legs of the glasses only went so far. The rest of the legs were part of the head! So I had to Sculpey the rest of the legs on the AJ head, and bake it. I put the rest of the glasses to them as I was forming them on the head, so that they would take the shape, and HOPEFULLY fit together after the head was baked. Luckily it worked. Then I had to glue the frames together, and paint the Sculpey parts black because my supposedy black Sculpey turned out to be charcoal. The only other thing I had to do was put an earring on AJ.  I knew I had a little container of loops off Christmas ornaments at the house. You know. The little loops like in Hallmark ornaments that you put the hook into hang them by. I just had to remember where I put it. Luckily I was able to go straight to it. There was only ONE gold one! I thought that since I only had one, I had to make sure I didn't lose it. I wasn't sure if it would be the right size, so I brought another couple of options. But the ornament loop turned out to be just right. I had to bend the straight part so that it would be in the right position, and I had to poke a hole in AJ's head. Don't think that wasn't nerve wracking! I thought, 'Here's where I ruin it!" But it was okay.

  When both were finally finished I gave them a coat of fixative, so the paint wouldn't come off.

  As a final blow, the day I finished the figures, just a couple of days before the shower, I got an email from Funko: They now had Pop Yourself figures available online. Thanks for nothing Funko! Oh well. In the end I think I like my Emma better anyway and they don't really have the right parts to make an AJ. 

  So here are the final products, the cake, and the figures. Don't judge me!

  The cake:

My best rose was the pink one, top row, third from left. It should have been where that horrible purple one on the right is.

  The figures:

  Let me remind you again what the real Emma and AJ look like.

Here are the particulars.

Emma first. Painted hair, coat, and leggings, added glasses, Sculpey skirt, boots, purse, and cell phone/Roku remote, (Take your pick!) 

Sawn off glasses.

Sculpey cell phone/remote.

I tried painting the hands to make the skin tone match the face, but it looked awful. So I removed the paint and decided, "Close enough."

Sculpey purse, skirt, boots.

Tiny apple logo.

And AJ.

Modified glasses.

Sculpey legs, painted black. 

Added earring.

And that infernal shirt!

Not my best work. At east the worst part is in the back.

The painted boots are probably the most well done, because they actually look like suede!

And here they are where they were placed after being brought home. They're part of the crowd.

And here are Emma and 'I'm just going to make an appearance at the shower and not stay'-AJ, with their figures of themselves.

It was very dark in there, and I still have no autofocus, so my pictures were crap.

  So now you know what I was doing all that time. I know I promised you the August Doll Book of the Month today, only 2 days late! But this was a really long post, (Sorry!), and I'm sleepy, and my bad shoulder is calling time. SO we'll see that book and another doll post tomorrow. See you then.