Swampy!

Hey hey all!

Sorry it's been a bit empty around here the last few days. I'm having one of those weeks at work where all you want to do when you get home is fall in a heap and watch something mindless on the telly!

Anyway. I though we might like to close the Swampy chapter... erm... sorry, "Number 6" with a few shots of how she finally panned out...

This is her sultry look...

Shiny beeeeeds

Pretty frillies!

The Awesome Top Hat of Awesome

And guess what! If you've fallen head-over-heels in love with the Swampmistress, today is indeed your lucky day! We've been through a lot together, her and I, and it's time for her to move on. If you're interested in adopting Swampy, drop me a mail (duckiemonsterSPLATgmail.com) and I'll let you know what sort of fee/trade I'm looking for. 

Baldy Number 6...

Ahahaha! As of today, Baldy Number 6 is no longer Baldy... she's...

SWAMPY.

Hair's not properly stuck down yet. 

Oh, alright. Perhaps not swampy.

Swampy is kind of sticking though. 

Certainly words like verdant and mossy come to mind!
Stay tuned for better (daylight) photos once I've made certain she's going to keep her hair on!

Number 6 Needs Your HELP

Okay. So. Here's Number 6 in her costume, with her hat...

Something missing?
OH NOES NO HAIR...

(But I'm rather proud of the hat. Hand-stitched!)

Okay, okay. Less hat, more Number 6. 

Not bad for a girl who arrived covered in nail varnish!

I've engaged the lovely KittyCat to root up a scalp for her, but the chocolate brown I originally planned has had to be abandoned due to patchy dye uptake. I'm still really wanting a natural fibre hairdo, but do I go for alpaca? Mohair? What colour?!

Help me, Blog peoples. You're my only hope...

Eyechips: Grey, green, blue and gold, brown and gold.
Pull strings: mid brown ribbon with brown/amber glass beads and a dark wooden skull.
Faceup: Brown eyeshadow, dusky pink lips.
Lids: Copper glitter.

(Incidentally, she's got a full set of frillies too...)

A brief update on 5 and 6...

I know. I know. I was going to video doing the carving on 5.

But then I got ill and I put on Fargo and I... well. Accidentally just did all of it. Sorry.

Hey hey 5. 

Besides, you should be happy I didn't video it, because then you didn't have to bear witness to me cutting the t-bar far too short and saying lots of naughty words. 

5 eyes up 6.

5's hair is currently drying in the bathroom in an attempt to get the kinks out of her fringe. 6 is looking just about where I want her to be now. I'm going to start working on her outfit this week, I hope. Neither of them are planning on staying with me for long; I know where 5 is going already, not so sure about 6. She might just see where the airship takes her...

Number 6 Update

Okay okay. I know I said she just needed hair.
She also needed her lips entirely re-carving, okay*?

Don't judge me.

Unless you're going to say nice things :)

 *and actually, I've done even more to her since these pictures were taken. She's very nearly done. We're just waiting on her hairdresser to get back from her honeymoon!

Number 6: Baity bait.

In the Blythe world, 'bait' or 'baity' is shorthand for 'someone (quite possibly the seller, although I don't think it was in this case!) screwed up on this one a little/pretty bad/a whole damned lot, pay your money and take your chances'.

Alright, I'm up for a challenge.

This little beauty was a Cinnamon Girl, face mould EBL-7, launched in Feb 2003. She's supposed to have thick light brown hair, a set of blue/orange/green/pink eye chips, brown eyeshadow and light pearly brown lips.

Hey hey, Number 6! How you doing? 

Unfortunately, it looks like someone's decided that they don't like that, and have scribbled on her face with... um... nail varnish... before using a blunt paperclip to scratch out some lips and a philtrum.

Er... what's that on your face?

(Insert music from Psycho and do a slowly zooming-in close up here.)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!

Okay, okay. Caveat Emptor and all that. She was a complete bargain and I got in there first, so over she came from Spain. We got out the box, posed for two or three photos, then on went Hunger Games on Netflix* and out came the sanding sponges.

Then out came the x-acto knife. Which needed three new blades in the course of doing this doll's makeover.

Ladies and Jellyspoons. If you're looking for a quick way to spruce up your Blythe, can I suggest you use pastels. Volk doll chalks. Make-up. Acrylics. Watercolour pencils... in short, use absolutely anything under the sun with the exception of NAIL VARNISH. It's not that it's hard to get of, it's that it's:

1. Bloody impossible to sand off because... 
2. ...it's damaged the plastic underneath so badly that it just crumbles into nothingness...
3. ...and when you scratch that lot of nasty away, the underneath looks all... melty. 

It took the best part of four hours to strip back the faceplate to something I could even contemplate trying to carve/file/sand properly, and I'm not entirely sure even now that I got all of it. There's a patch on the outside of her left eye that just won't take pastel properly, no matter how many times I sand and re-apply, and the eye sockets ended up a little larger than I intended, because I just had to keep cutting away the bad stuff... 

Hah. In this shot, you can't see the 'melted' look to the lips and right eye socket. 

That said, she's not looking too shabby now. The perfectionists'll notice the slightly uneven finish around the top of the right eye socket and to the upper lip... sorry Ma'am, nothing more I could do. I tried sanding the hell out of it, and the finish just kept looking worse so I stopped. Her philtrum is a little more prominent than I generally like; again, nothing else I could do once the damage was fully assessed. Yup, those are copper glittery lids. Who likes Steampunk? I love Steampunk, as it happens. 4 new pairs of chips: brown and gold, silvery grey, green and blue.  

Not perfect... but a hell of a lot better

We're waiting on a chocolatey-brown alpaca side part scalp and some glorious ambery/gold beads for the pullstrings. And then instead of bait, I reckon she's going to be simply stunning. 

*Not a bad adaption of one of my favourite brain off reads. I think they got Katniss really well, Peeta wasn't too bad (and he only really grows properly as a character in the second and third books) Rue was perfect. Looking forwards to the next one.