Doll-A-Day 2019 #85: Ivy's Collection: Homemade Nesting Dolls

  Today's doll is this nesting doll from Ivy's collection.

There is one more that isn't in the picture!

  You may have seen the other set of nesting dolls that I painted as our family for Ivy. If not, you can see those HERE.
  The largest doll is 2 and 1/4 inches tall.

The smallest is so small we call it 'the crumb'.

I was so scared of losing it that I didn't even photograph it in the photo of all of the nests. I only did it with the one it's inside of, for comparison.

In the end I had Ivy hold it for me, because she swears it has a face, but it's so small I couldn't see where it is!

I made these for Ivy one Christmas.
 

This one is my favourite. I think she has sort of a 1930's look.

Ivy insists that nesting dolls are no good unless they have a lot of nests. So I bought a blank set with LOTS of nests!

This one is Ivy's favourite.

They were hard to paint. Where do you hold them while you paint? I ended up wedging the halves of the bigger ones on top of a shampoo bottle!

And of course, the smaller they got, the harder they were to hold.

I have no idea how I painted the tiniest ones.

I would like to think I could do a better job on these if I did it now, but...

  That's the doll for today. See you again 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.