Shoes for Dale Leroy

  Okay! Here's the latest update on Dale Leroy,the felt doll I've been making,named after the son my mom always wanted. I made him some 'big yella work boots' like my dad used to wear,that Mom wanted her mythical little boy to wear.  I was going to paint his shoes on the felt feet I made on him, as I have done for the other felt covered dolls I have made. You may have seen some of those in my "A Doll of My Own Making" posts. (See the sidebar.) Then I thought, well, maybe I will make him some separate felt shoes. I found the right colour felt in my stash.
 

I thought I would just cover his feet  in yellow felt and paint on some shoe laces. Then I thought I could glue on thread or string and make faux shoe laces. Then I decided I would make his shoes like real shoes, in separate pieces, with tongues, and all that. Then I decided to even actually lace them with thread laces.
 

The white felt is for the soles.

   So these are the 'big yella work boots' Dale Leroy ended up with.

They aren't removable. Sorry Ivy. I glued them on.

His pants are pushed up so you can see his shoes. I haven't tried pulling them down over the shoes yet. They may not fit!

  

 
I even remembered at the last minute that Dad,who always replaced the laces that his 'big yella work boots'  came with right away, with leather laces,used to wrap the laces around his ankles a couple of times before tying the shoes.

The shoes took me a while, but I did do one wise thing I usually don't do. I made templates for the second shoe from the pieces of the first shoe, once I had fine tuned it. 

He kind of has Frankenstein feet now.

You can see some glue. This is why I have only made Caucasian people so far. I sort of make the felt moldable with the glue when I make the hands, especially.The glue blends into the pale felt,but would show with darker felt. Ivy had a costume she was working on at college, and had me experiment with mixing paint with the glue(Fabri-Tac). It doesn't work!

Of course, since the feet weren't exactly the same, the shoe didn't fit the other foot the way the original had fit the first foot! 

  So the one foot looks a little wider than the other one. But I have feet like that, so why can't Dale Leroy? He's my brother, after all!

An Update on 'Dale Leroy", and Other Things

 It's been a terrible week. Hasn't it? But we all have to remember that things have been terrible for a long time. If what's happened lately makes a difference,it might be worth it. I just fear that things will be just the same when this all calms down. I never cease to be stunned at how people can think that people aren't all just people,that they can treat anybody differently for any reason. my dad taught me that "You treat everybody the same." It's a shame not everybody teaches their children that.
  I usually try to keep the blog light,but I felt I couldn't post without mentioning what's been going on, because it's too important to ignore. To return to 'my happy place',I thought I'd show you the progress on some of the dolls I'm making. Some of you may remember my attempt at a felt face doll.  Well he still needs shoes,hair, and his face painted, but he now has clothes!

I had been working on him, but I stopped to work on Emma's birthday present. I'll show you that in an upcoming post. But this guy got a shirt and some bibbed overalls.

That stitching is terrible.

  Ivy scolded me for gluing the clothes on these guys. I tried to tell her how hard it is to sew these tiny things, especially when I don't sew very well. But now that she's a professional seamstress,(She gets paid for sewing costumes,so that makes her a professional.),she thinks I should sew everything. I appeased her by sewing this guy's clothes. I sewed everything except his pants cuffs...

...which are rolled up and glued,his shoulder straps, which were too tiny to sew,and his shirt collar...
 

...which was so narrow that sewing it was just causing the fabric to unravel on the edges.

  I sewed most of his clothes one night while Ivy and I watched a Betty Hutton movie called "Spring Reunion". Even for an old movie that one overdid the old movie thing about casting people too old for roles. The people were supposed to be at their 15th high school reunion, and they all looked closer to 45 than 33. And considering they were only supposed to be 33,people kept asking Betty Hutton,"Why did you never get married?" She was only 33!
   I think I'm going to call him Dale Leroy. My mom always wanted a little boy. She wanted him to have red hair,wear overalls and 'big yellow work boots',like my dad always wore...

Kind of like these, only taller.

...and she wanted to name him 'Dale Leroy'. (Leroy was my dad's name.) I always appreciated I wasn't a boy, so I didn't have to have that name. Not long ago somebody pointed out to me that she could have named a girl Dale. I'm glad my mom didn't think of that. (Apologies to anybody named Dale,but that name is just not for me.)
  The other thing I've been working on, besides Emma's present, was putting some wire bodies on a couple of the heads I had made and painted. I showed you the heads in a previous post. Well here is the first one to get a body.

Like Dale Leroy,this one is about 4 inches tall.

As you can see,I also got as far as the arms the other night.

Yes, he has a goofy face. A lot of my people come out that way.

  So that's it for this post. Until next time,remember to be good to others. We are all only humans.

Doll-A-Day 178:A Doll of My Own Making: 'Mama Doll'

  I'm absolutely pooped and in pain after mowing the yard. So,while I kick off my shoe to try to ease the pain in my foot, (Nothing in particular wrong with it, I just have a lot of pain.), I am going to use some already taken pictures of a doll I made for today's doll.
 First of all, thanks to Emma for helping to clean up the look of the blog. She made it a little less cluttered so hopefully it will be a bit easier to look at. She also added Adsense. If you don't want to view the ads they can be blocked, I'm told. But at this point a few cents here and there will be a help. It's a trial run, so if there are complaints I can remove them.
  And while I'm thinking of it,Magic Attic Alison is attempting to do her part to help pay for the van repair. She is for sale on Ebay right now if anyone is interested. You can recognize her because I used the same pictures (plus a few for details) that I used on the blog post! I also finally have one of my hand made dolls on Etsy again too. It's my tiny one inch tall old lady that I featured on Doll-A-Day 132. She's doing her part to help pay for having the cement poured for my Dad's veteran's plaque which came in last week. UPDATE:Both Alison and my 1 inch old lady have been sold.
  A while back, on Doll-A-Day 87,I showed you Papa doll. Today I thought I'd show you Mama doll. Both have been sold, but their memories linger on...

She has an upswept 'do.

Her little lace shawl is removable.

 You can see how small she is next to this quarter.

 

She can be seen on the slideshow on the Tamsykens web page, along with Papa and all the other dolls that I have already had to say goodbye to. (They have been sold.Sniff!)

Like Papa she has tiny sculpted thumbs and painted on shoes.

She's wearing a lace petticoat under that dress. I can't remember if I put bloomers on her or not. Probably.

Her head is wooden, and painted with acrylic paints, and sealed with a clear glaze.

She doesn't seem as expressive as Papa in these pictures, (Maybe he just has more to say.Whatever he's saying, she seems a bit shocked by it here...), but her little arms and legs are poseable too. They're felt covered wire.

Mama has red hair, and side glancing eyes. I made Papa to match her, so he has side glancing eyes too. When placed on the appropriate side they can look at each other. (Or not, if you want to have them made at each other...) Mama and two little girls in footie pajamas were sold to the same lady. She requested Papa to go with them. One of these days I'll show you the little girls.

  That's it for today. See you tomorrow.

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.