blog.awsumgal.com

I finally took the Sybarite plunge! I have been mooning over these dolls for many months now. These dolls are not inexpensive and I felt it was important to pick just the right girl for me. I have been eagerly watching the 2009 dolls as they were released from Superdoll. I watched Avalon come and go lightening fast, then Karma, who was not for me, and Seville who sold out before I could even see her. I almost bought Raja, the Haute Doll Magazine exclusive, but I wasn’t completely convinced of her ultimate versatility either. (I still really like Raja.  I still may buy her, if she’s still around when I can next afford another Syb! Don’t hold your breath!)

I wanted a versatile girl and a pretty one too. That’s why Karma was not a good choice for me. Not to say that she wasn’t striking, but she’s got a harder, edgier look. Not what I was after for my first Sybarite. Her mohawk and flocked sideburns were going to prove a challenge to cover or remove for other looks. I wasn’t up for that challenge. Yet.

I jumped in with both feet and bought a Queen B. It was a long wait until she arrived, but when she did I was not disappointed. Even with all of the build up in my own mind about how wonderful she would be, she still delivered! Finally she arrived….

My but that’s an awfully big box!

And in the big box was a littler box….

And one more box….. (we’re getting closer….)

At this point I’m near to bursting with anticipation!

Et, Violá¡ Here she is before being disturbed at all….

This doll is heavy, I mean that literally! She has heft! Her resin is absolutely beautiful. It has a soft look to it. The light catches it beautifully and as a result, she is an absolute joy to photograph!

Here are some pics I have just taken of her. Her first photoshoot (of many, I can tell you!) with me :o)

See what I mean about the light caressing this resin “skin” ?

Dig those platforms, baby!

Standing poses are tricky without her stand. Due to her weight, even a slightly bent leg will not hold her up. She collapses on herself. One wonders if there is a way to alleviate this, hmmm…….

I will be ever so carefully removing her wig. I want to be able to change her look around with different wigs. I’ll be making a few of my own and I can’t wait!

She’s so much fun to photograph that I will be making room sets and accessories for her, not to mention haute couture for her to wear :o) There’s lots that I want to do. I’m really quite inspired! But all of that will have to wait until a couple of other projects that are in ahead of her get my attention. Best get back to work :o)

Hope you’ve enjoyed meeting my Syb….

Thanks for reading,

~awsumgal

Well, this is no longer a “work in progress”! This is a project completed! Not a WIP but a PC lol!

For those of you who have been following faithfully lo these many posts, I give you the finished outfit and accessories. Tomorrow it will be on its’ way to join the doll it will adorn, then another trip to its’ new home! From Canada to the United States to the United Kingdom, this gal and her clothing sure get around :o)

Without further ado…..

And there you have it! The boots are incorrect, but my client has made a pair for her and of course this is not the destination doll. This is just one of my pretty blonde Genes.

I do hope you’ve enjoyed the trip and what a long strange trip it’s been, lol! Kidding! It’s been a blast every step of the way.

Thanks for reading :o)

~awsumgal

We are coming to the end of this quite involved project. It’s been a long road but the result has made it worth every minute :o)

Along with Susans’ outfit I was asked to include her very cool skull decorated drum case that she carries as her suitcase. I wanted this to look exactly like Susans’ from the film.

I made the inside of the lid with silk, because it was the perfect colour, and it’s really nice, lol :o) The lid is padded and has an elastisized pocket. So that’s what this little one got!

This lid insert  fits beautifully into the painted lid of the case. I have attached the case lid to the bottom by sewing with beading filament. I have rigged this so that it will still open and will sit slightly ajar, if desired, for display.

The real case appears to have been painted with a stencil (like the Jimmys’ bands’ van) so of course that’s what I did too, tee hee! I made a high contrast version of the front of the case, cleaned it up on the computer and printed it on heavy card. Then I very carefully and painfully cut out all the bits to create my stencil.

Here’s the gotcha though, the real one has been spraypainted white onto black with a stencil (or series of stencils) I can’t do it that way though, because of the shapes that need to be white, I have to actually start with the case white and then stencil paint in the negative black spaces! I used an airbrush for both the black and the white to make sure it would look like the one from the film.

The front and back weren’t too difficult except that it was not possible to keep the entire stencil in contact all across the front or the back. So it needed to be done in sections with lots of paint on my fingers, lol!

The sides were a different graphic and therefore a different stencil, and trying to keep them contacted with the case sides was even more difficult than the front and the back due to the curvature of the case.

After that, there was quite a bit of touch up of the airbrush overspray by conventional paintbrush and then many coats of varnish and decorative stitching all around the top, the handle assembly, two stud “feet” and of course the insides!

The deocrative stitching goes in!

The handle assembly starts to take shape :o)

The handle is stitched black leather with a metal inner rod that is attached to silver rings which are in turn attached to sterling silver plated copper wire which is attached to the case itself. All of this business makes the handle look real! Because the destination doll doesn’t have posing wrists I will include for my dear client, a strap of elastic clear plastic that will let the case hang from the dolls’ hand as if she’s actually carrying it.

Here’s a view of the lid assembly and some reproductions of Susans’ mementoes inside :o) I have yet to finish the inside bottom of the case. That will be the last bit to be done!

Here are a couple of shots of the skellies frolicing around the sides of the case. I matched the playing painted skeletons as seamlessly as I could from the bottom and the top of the case.

Well that’s it from here for now, thanks for reading :o)

~awsumgal

Hello all!

I have been working away on this and haven’t posted an update recently but she’s pretty much done!

Two of her key accessories took quite a bit of time to get just right. One was her Nefrititi earring and the other was her skull painted drum case. They are both done now -_-

Here’s how the earring came about. The last time I posted about it, I had just added some leafing.We’ve come a long way, baby!

Here’s what it should look like:

I tried this earring a couple of different ways. Sometimes you think something is going to look just perfect and when you get it together it fals short a little.

Here’s the first attempt:

I am using a mix of Swarovski crystal, glass beads and fine gauge wire.

Earring One….

I had to redo this for a couple of reasons. Firstly, my client assured me that the top beads are in fact burgundy, not gold in colour. Oops, I was sure they were gold. It’s hard to get a really clear detailed view. (I watched the whole movie, and then again frame by frame pretty much, lol!) The other reason necessitating a redo was the fact that the whole business was just slightly too long when on the doll :o(

OK, so suck it up and redo it!!

Earring two……

I couldn’t find any burgundy beads that were the same shape as the actual earring seemed to have so I made some polymer clay ones in my funky little oven!

OK, well, better I suppose but I wasn’t completely over the moon with it yet and my dear client pointed out that the bottom bead was clear and maybe we should lose the bottom red bead altogether. Back to the drawing board. No trouble really, I didn’t like the little burgundy clay beads as much as I thought I would anyway :o) They need to be transparent.

Last time’s a charm, lol!

I decided to make a change in the basic structure of the earring by removing the fixed central wire post. The central beads I then strung onto a separate piece of wire that I would then attach to the shaft protruding from the main earring section. I did this to give the earring more movement. Less rigidity would make it hang more naturally and therefore display better.

As you can see, this earring goes together with a mix of wire and beading filament. I think it will be quite strong and stay together.

Then I lopped off the whole bottom business too (yikes!) and replaced it with a single clear crystal and gold shortened head pin ( and a little glue) to keep it on. Much more delicate and expensive looking than the last version.

Now I am in love! This means I have done what I can. I personally can’t make it any more perfect. (Except by trimming those black threads away,lol)

oh, and maybe embellishing just a little bit more on the Egyptian cameo…. I’ll stop now, promise :o)

Here it is on her…

See what I mean about it taking tons of time to get it just right? Now if I could just figure out how to do it perfectly right out of the box, I would save myself a heap of time!

I was going to blog about her case in the post too, but holy cats this is long already! Either I post too many pics, or I blather about minutiae, either way the case will have to wait until tomorrow.

Thanks for following along :o)

~awsumgal

Here we are at WIP 8! I’m still working on the Skull stencilled drum case that Susan uses as a suitcase (it sure would be fun to recreate Jimmies’ skull stencilled econoline type van, but I digress! Maybe one day….lol)

I finally added the piping to the pants. Up the outseams and on the back pockets. I used embroidery floss (ribbon was too wide) and sewed in on with colour matched thread so you can’t really see it. Turned out quite well! I’m quite pleased with the fact that the pants front pockets are functional and “Susan” can put her hands in them if she wishes. I may make more pants like that for this sized girl :o)

They stand up on their own, tee hee!

The pants have their belt loops now too so I can add the leather belt to them.

Her lace bodysuit is finished now. It was a little tricky because the one in the film has a fairly transparent lace top edge to the cups. Finding a lace that was open enough to see through but had just a little pattern to it so you could tell it was supposed to be lace proved a challenge. Most of what I found was too heavy/closed and just looked black or the pattern was so big it didn’t look like lace at all in doll scale. Here’s what I tried first….. Yuck!

I didn’t like it much :o( The torso section is fine. Looks loose in the pic because there’s no fastener at the back yet, but it’s the cups. They don’t want to sit against the dolls’ chest. They’re sort of dropping and buckling and I don’t like the way the lace top bits look. They’re too ragged and unfinished looking. Ew!

Needless to say, I took the cups off. I went and found a better solution for the cup fabric and tried again. Part of the challenge is that the top of the cup is a single layer, to give that lace look, but the lower half of the cup is double layered. It’s darker , like the rest of the bodysuit. So, that top bit has to be robust enough to stand on it’s own so to speak, while still looking all lacy and delicate. Arrrgggh!

Not to fret, tea had, deep breaths taken, solution found!

Looks positively Frankensteinian doesn’t it with all those pins poking out everywhere? After sewing the new lace to the cup bottom, I have gently taped the whole business to her chest in the right spot so that I can sew them onto the body portion by hand. This seems to me to be the only way to have the cups in exactly the right spot! The second body layer is pulled down out of the way so that when the cups are all sewn on I can hide almost everything inside and the sew the upper layer in place. It was worth all this fiddling because it lloks just as I wanted it to!

Yeehaw! Done and dusted! You can see her other studded bracelt in this pic too. It is leather with little metal studs that go right through the leather. Just like the jewels on the other cuff, these studs are not coming off. (Maybe if I had some rudimentary chemistry knowledge, I’d have better luck with glue. It still sems to me that eventually glue will fail, no matter how good it is, and when I put a lot of work into something I don’t want it falling apart in a month or a year, or really, ever :o)

Back to the basque. I have given it straps of clear elastic, and the whole business sits just so on her chest! I love it, it worked out really well, I think! It has to snaps in the back for fastening.

Here’s the real thing for comparison :o)

We’d love to find some Tyler sized Ray Ban type sunglasses, but everything I’ve found is either for Fashion Royalty (too small) or Blythe (way too big!)

Here’s the belt. A simple strip of black leather and a doll sized buckle finding. It’s not s squared off as the original, but it’s a fairly good match.

To make it look more like Madonnas’ I embossed the edge all the around. It’s what hers looks like in the film. I’m using a silver buckle even though in some shots it’s gold. Mostly it’s silver in the film, but there’s a publicity still in which it’s gold. I’m going with movie silver :o)

The edging is all stamped in. Looks authentic, so I’m happy.

The drum case has been getting quite a bit of my attention. Here’s a shot of the real article I’m emulating:

Isn’t it cool? So I have the perfect round lidded box to turn into this case. The case has pink satin lining and in the film is filled with Susans’ necessities and some other amusing bits. Like a whole pile of hotel cutlery for example lol! I have the perfect pink for the inside of the case. And it’s silk! Yummy! (Of course it will be a functional case!)

You can just see on the screen behind that the case has a padded lid section and you can see what a perfect colour match the pink silk is.

More on this when there’s more work done :o)

Countdown is on. I’m down to the case, finishing touches on the earring (piece de resistance) and her big chunky black watch. And then hey ya! Done like dinner :o) Pics will follow when I’m done…..

’til later,

thanks for reading

~awsumgal