spindledreams

[spindledreams]

[spindledreams]

How pretty!

Hello everyone. I have finally finished my crochet tapestry that took 7 months and spanned 1 stressful move, 1 new job, and like 4-5 depressive episodes. So now I’m going to bother everybody about it for like a while.

[spindledreams]

[spindledreams]

Wig ordered for Lars✅

Wig ordered for Singing Bird✅

Base doll for Marta on the way✅

Gotta touch up the face paint on Lars, restring Josefina and check on her stain treatment, and see if the putty is cured yet on Jack and Sally.

Also gotta find my kitchen and fold too many baskets of laundry.

[spindledreams]

This boy is getting a new wig because I did not go to Dolly Hair School, but even if I had cut this perfectly, the thinning in the back would have ruined it anyway. It's tolerable (not great) from the front.

But the back is an embarrassment.

I cut most of this the right length but it SO thin in the middle wefts that it looks like I shaved him bald in some spots. I don't think it's the weft *placement* - they're almost identical to the weft placement on the TM76 wig - but this wig had a lot more thinning in the middle layers than I realized until I was sectioning it to cut.

I could, if I was so inclined, make new wefts from the cut hair (it's about 6" long) but that is work I don't think I want to do. So I bought him a new wig on eBay. It should be here sometime next week.

[spindledreams]

My enormous house panther making friends.

[spindledreams]

Am I going a little overboard on this Singing Bird custom and pricing deerskin for a doll dress and moccasins and mini doll?

Maybe a little.

I'm also looking at my collection and realizing how much it’s grown in less than a year (I started collecting in November and it's July) and wondering if maybe I've gone a little overboard. I don't want to get rid of any but I'm definitely leaning toward scrapping the custom dolls of my kids idea I had.

When all is said and done with my current plans, I will have four modern dolls and my mini-me, six official historicals and another five unofficial historical side characters, and a Jack and Sally set. Plus three non-AG 18" dolls that will be strictly for listing photos and craft fair models.

That's... a lot, and I don't know how I'm going to display them all until I have space to build a "dolly dormitory" for them. I keep going between an actual room-sized dollhouse and just several deep wall-mounted shelves.

I think I got in just a little over my head.

[spindledreams]

I don't see *Miguel* having a Josefina doll, as he seems pretty deeply focused on his music.

But I can definitely see his little sister having a Josefina doll, and I can see him making up songs for her adventures, interacting with the doll in his own kind of way with his sister.

Maria Josefina Montoya Romero lives on an 1824 rancho in what would later become New Mexico. She and her sisters are still struggling with the loss of their Mama, and Josefina feels as if the family is falling apart without her. The arrival of Tía Dolores to help with the farm brings many changes, but change isn’t always a bad thing, and Josefina may yet find a way to heal herself and others.

Josefina was first released in 1997, and was American Girl's first latina doll.

[spindledreams]

Not enough energy for all the dolls I need to work on because of course I have too many plans to fit into a day and then I get discouraged and don't do anything.

Today I told myself to do At Least One Doll Thing. So I reorganized my doll supplies into Kirsten's trunk, which made my inner third-grader SO happy. I've been coveting that trunk since I got my very first American Girl catalog when I was almost nine, and I got REALLY lucky that someone was selling this one for a song. I've never seen one under $200, and I got it for $85!

I hung up all the clothes that are not currently on a doll, and decided to change Kirsten back into her Meet too.

I still don't know where that Saige torso got to, though. I went through every box and bag, and I can't find it.

[spindledreams]

She looks so happy to be home!

They said she wasn't real. That she didn't exist. And yet, here she is...

Silver-eyed Samantha!

Okay, obviously this beautiful late blooming April flower is not an authentic Samantha, but she is a custom doll created by my friend, @spindledreams, put together from genuine Pleasant Company parts. She started life as a Molly in otherwise excellent condition except for advanced silver eye. I've always thought silver eye is rather beautiful and, by coincidence, SpindleDreams needed to rewig a Molly doll and had a Samantha wig leftover from a previous project. We grabbed the doll, Spindle popped out the eyes, finished the paint separation to complete the silvering, painted her pupils, swapped her wig, and viola! A silver-eyed "Samantha" was born!

My original Samantha is less than amused by this.

Side by side comparison of the dolls. I don't know what year the new doll is, but my childhood Samantha is from 1992. She typically looks done with whatever the situation is and I love her for it. Right now, I assume she's annoyed because I put the Imposter in her dress.

[spindledreams]

Last night I got the eyes in the dolls. Happy with Sally's!

Mostly happy with Jack's - but I might actually paint those lids over with black after all because even properly positioned they don't close more than halfway.

The patch on the ear held when I was putting these in, but barely, and I don't want to risk it a second time to take them back out.

I also decided that since Sally seldom smiles with an open mouth, I would fill in the mouth with putty and let it dry. This morning I put tape over the eyes to prep them for painting, but I'm gonna give the putty a week to fully cure before painting.

Gonna have to hide these before the next showing or I might inadvertently give a potential buyer a heart attack.

Also, I appear to be missing a body. I could have sworn I put all the parts for each doll I disassembled in the same bag, but the bag with Saige's parts for Sally doesn't have the torso. And it doesn't seem to be in any of the other places I have dolls or parts.

I don't recall using it for anyone else. I have a general accounting of which dolls got which parts, and which parts I have sold or traded, and *that* torso should have been in the bag with the limbs because I originally intended to dye everything blue before I found a painting method to use for the limbs and decided to sew a new torso instead. I need the *limb cups* to make that new torso, which I was going to take from the original one. I do have a spare Samantha torso (which came off a damaged doll) that I don't need because it has the Visual Department stamp and I can pilfer the cups from that, but I would like to know what the house gremlins did with the Saige torso.

[spindledreams]

Mom was busy watching crime shows in her room while I was doing this and did not see me de-earing the doll, so I have not been disowned today for the crime scene in the kitchen.

Jack doesn't have ears, so I decided to remove them. I did accidentally cut into the hollow of the head removing the second one so I had to patch that.

I'm actually saving ears I removed until the Joss I'm using for Marta is in so I can see how annoyed I am about her ears and whether these can work for an ear transplant. You know, to go along with the wig transplant, the eye transplant, and the name change.

It occurred to me too late that I should have put the eyes back in before I removed the ears. I don't know how well the patch will hold when I heat the head to reinsert the eyes, so I may need to redo the patch if it falls apart.

[spindledreams]

Eyes!

They don't appear to fully close, which is probably normal and would be less obvious with normal lashes. We'll see how they look in the heads later. I still have sone work to do on the heads before I can reinsert eyes.

[spindledreams]

"Mama, why did you make snail eyes?"

Normally I only paint the lids and will cover the eye with tape and then hold them with hemostats to spray seal them, but this time I painted the entire outside surface. I stuck them onto q-tips with painters tape to be able to spray the whole surface without denting the paint with hemostats, and then I needed to put them somewhere upright to dry so I poked some holes in a Dixie cup to use it as a prop.

For Sally's lashes, I cut the lashes that came out of the PC eyes into small sections and painted them black, and glued them back in.

The lids have been painted and sealed as well, and once I get the weights glued back into these and everything is all reassembled, I'll share pictures.

[spindledreams]

Today, eyes!

I got these eyes in the mail today to practice an idea I had about removing decals - one Tenney set, one PC Samantha set.

PC decals were surprisingly easy to scratch out, but that scratched the eye too so I had to buff those out of the one eye. For the second eye I heated the decal and then removed it with non-acetone nail polish remover.

It does tend to take off some of the white paint too (I removed all of it) so I will need to repaint that. But these eyes are for Sally, so they'll be repainted anyway.

Tenney eyes came covered in some white substance that had to be sanded off. They're too dull even after using my polishing papers to paint from the inside, so I'll be painting the outsides and sealing them well. They will be for Jack. I haven't tried to remove the decal on these because I was pretty sure I would end up painting the outsides anyway.

Tomorrow I need to figure out Sally's lashes. I was going to use sections from the Tenney eyes but I couldn’t get them out and when I cut them off they were too short. I don't really want to get false lashes from the store for this. The only ones I can find locally are expensive

[spindledreams]

If I had a nickel for every-time a pioneer girl in Minnesota with pigtail braids adopted a raccoon, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice

[spindledreams]

The AG playthings scans are good - I have them downloaded and have printed a few. But you do have to check your printer settings because they may not automatically print to scale!

Side note, though, they never made patterns for anyone after Josefina, so Kit doesn't have a set.

Do you think Mattel would sue me if I uploaded pdfs of the patterns for the OG American Girls wardrobes, that AG themself pribted and sold back when they were the Pleasant Company?