New addition to the family

Please welcome Volks YoSD Nana, Vera, to the family.  Volks’ four sisters (Nana, Megu, Sara and Kira) head mold has always been one of my absolute favorites and I finally got to bring it home in YoSD size!!  She has such a delightful, tiny, little, precious face!  And it’s kind of interesting to see how the faces give off a feeling of completely different personalities.

V looks like an outgoing little girl, almost mischievous, while Vera looks shy and reserved.

I’m still debating whether I want to keep her default wig, which I happen to like quite a bit, or get a pink wig as I had initially intended.

I will be moving to a new apartment next month, so I am hoping all of my doll-related activities can resume by that time!

Thanks for watching!!

 

A-line purple dress for one year old girl

As promised, an a-line, purple dress designed and made for one of my friends’ one year old baby girl.

Temporary Hiatus ??

Womp womp womp.  Well.  I suppose it was inevitable.  With summer being over, and the impending deadline to apply to a doctorate program quickly approaching, I came to the sudden realization that… surprise-surprise, I have most definitely procrastinated long enough and now I have to complete my Master’s Thesis within the next month, take the GRE test in November at the latest (not to mention I want to get the highest score possible so I might take it a couple of times and have not really dedicated myself to studying for it) , and gather letters of recommendation and all that necessary jazz.  LE SIGH.

My dolly corner taken over by text books for my thesis

In the meantime, I have to sew a little girl dress for a friend’s baby’s first birthday, and make me and Vivienne a Halloween outfit.  My outfit would be for me to wear, obviously, but Vivienne’s outfit would be to participate in DoA’s new sewing project.  Therefore, I will be popping in and out of the blog to play around a bit, but most of my energies will be consummed with school for the next couple of months.
So wish me luck that I am able to complete all of my requirements AND get into a good doctorate program !!  I look forward to an entire 9 months or so of pure sewing fun after this little hurdle is jumped and before I have to start school again in August 2013.

Vacation at South Padre Island, TX

I am currently on vacation !! All sewing shall resume next week 🙂

Vivienne and Victoria–Volks SD 10 Tae II and Volks YoSD Lin

I’ve been putting off the writing of my master’s thesis for too long now.  Today I decided I had to sit down and read and take notes and was able to do so after walking the dogs, a brisk swim, and a short nap.  The problem is that all along, all I could think of is what kind of dress I should make for Vivienne next, and how I have to design a dress for a friend’s baby who is turning 1 in October.

I just want to sew!!

Anyways… I’ve been wanting to play with my dolls all day and I finally got around to it later tonight.  I took some pictures of Vivienne and V.  Lighting was not so good so that affected the quality of the pictures.  But they just look so cute together.

Enjoy ^^

I really gotta buy the rest of the flooring for better pictures.

Dear Vivienne, stunning as always.

Where’s Valentine?? Valentine is in hiatus until I get her a new wig!!  The one she wears is much too big for her head.  Hopefully I can change that soon so I can take a picture with all three of my girls.

 

**All clothes are by sweet p.

Decora Girl event

Here are the promised photos.  I’m not too happy with the hairpieces.  Especially the big bow… I couldn’t get it to sit right.  But overall… V looks SO cute!!

I guess V is kind of a snob… being the Queen V and all, I felt like keeping Decora classy was the way to go with her.  So this is what came out of that.  Some beads, a flower pin, a big bow, and a couple of cheap hair pins I purchased.  Coincidentally I found a small bracelet that spells out Victoria… I wonder who made it for me… it’s been sitting in my treasure chest for years !!

I’m glad I got to do the Decora challenge because now I know V looks cute in pink.

A shot of the socks… the left sock is too big.  I’ll have to re-make it. *Needs shoes desperately!!

Cute little girl!! Waaa I love sewing for my girls.

Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed as much as I loved putting this outfit together ^^

DoA Decora girl project–WiP

I joined the next round of the sewing project on DoA.  This time, the theme was Decora girl.  I did not like this style too much and do not feel as though it fits any of my girls.  I’m more of an Elegant Gothic Lolita fan.  I guess you could say its that Victorian-inspired fashion running through my veins. However, I still wanted to join so I decided to tone it down a little bit.

I was very much inspired by this “toned down” Decora outfit:

And I ended up using a pattern I bought here.

These are some of the progress pictures… tun tun tun!!!

I wanted to create a PINK dress since that is very much quintessential Decora.  The purple and white fabric at the bottom is actually a scarf that I do not wear because I do not like it, so I decided to upcycle it and make mismatched socks–since this is also a Decora trait.

Some progress pictures… and…

Tune in again for the finished outfit… I just really need to finish a headband and an accessory to cover up a mistake I made on the dress.

New Leeke wig for V and dress up for grabs

After a long wait a new wig has arrived for V.

I am struggling a little bit with fly aways and putting the wig on, but I like it much better than the last wig.  It suits her better.  Cute little V just needs shoes now.

You will also notice “wooden floor” in the dollhouse.  Now I just need more of it to cover the entire table and something to cover part of the wall.

The last few days I re-made the A-line YoSD dress and am giving it away in DoA in the near future–I don’t feel comfortable charging for my dresses yet as I am still a seamstress in the making and make some mistakes which lower the quality of the dress.  I love making them non-the-less, and hope that a YoSD lover out there finds that this dress suits his/her girl beautifully!!

My mission as a seamstress is to inspire a sense of beauty in other BJD owners through my clothes.  I want everyone who looks at my dresses to be transported back to a place of childhood dreams come true–in the end, this journey as a seamstress has been just that… a childhood dream come true.

What is your childhood dream?

Canon PowerShot A560 Macro Lens

All these years I’ve been blaming my camera for taking poor pictures.  This to the point that I have thought about saving for a better, more expensive camera (this one was around $100 bucks).

Pictures like this one greatly disappointed me:

I had to go into Photoshop and edit the file so much just so her features could be appreciated a little better.  In fact, I think it is in that same post that I am writing about how I need to learn to take better pictures.

In the past I have read about how important camera settings are.  At work too, students interested in photography often mention the importance of learning about the settings.  Well darn, today I had one of those eureka moments that led me to google “canon powershot a560 macro setting” after reading about macros in this blog post.

So after figuring out where exactly my macro lens is, which is supposed to be really good, I went from this:

To this:

😀

OMG. I honestly did NOT know my poor little beat up Canon could take such amazing pictures !! What’s best is that I only did minor Photoshop editing compared to any of the other pictures you might have seen in the blog up to this point.

You can see her eyes now !! Not just dark circles like in previous photos.

So, if you were thinking of trading in your old camera… think again and play around with your settings!! True story.

YoSD A-line dress II

 

This morning I got up early to finish the A-line dress and to take better pictures for your enjoyment ^^ … so enjoy !!