She is AWESOME!

Box opening photos under the cut (pardon the lameness, they were taken before the new cam arrived), but here is my awesome Minifee Rena <3

Kitty!

And before I took the nicer photos of her, there was box opening excitement :)

Fairyland 2012 Calendar!

Kitty got the Eliya box

Minifee Manual and Shaggies wig

First peek at Miss Kitty!

Selena's face! (Littlefee Dreaming Vampire Elf Rolly event faceplate)

Kitty!

Hi! I heard you had some hair, eyes and clothes for me? :X

<3

I’m TOTALLY loving the 1/4 size. So glad I decided to downsize to be in scale with Damien. And she’s so cute, easy to pose and HOLDS her poses so well. The Fairyland engineering is utterly worth the price!

I loved Chester very much and have always been utterly charmed by his adorable smile and sweet face <3 But in the end I’ve learned that anthros and fully single jointed dolls just aren’t for me. Dorian will also be going to a new home relatively soon, which is very exciting for both of us as he’ll be keeping his personality and everything! He’ll just be moving across the world on a grand adventure. :3

Also, I got my shipping notice for Kitty (and Selena’s face) yesterday! :D My girls should be home Monday and I am SO EXCITED!!!!

This is a great way to kick off the new year with BJD style :)

I have a number one favorite company as well, but I often feel kind of weird about it since it’s not a popular company so far as actual dolls goes (from what I’ve seen anyway). Most people seem to like one or two dolls from them, but prefer to buy clothes and accessories from them instead. However, I love Dollmore dolls. I love their sculpts. I love their body designs. I love their faceups. I love their resin. LOVE!

Dollmore Youth Eve Fine - my dream girl <3

Over and over again I find myself drawn to their often unusual looking dolls. But what I love most about their face sculpts is that they tend to look like real people, but still have that distinctly BJD-ish quality to them. Some of them look like traditionally beautiful models or movie stars, while others remind me of some of my favorite celebrities who have a more distinct and strikingly unconventional beauty.

Dollmore dolls keep finding their way into my heart and onto my wishlist. And I love more of their dolls than I’ll ever own from them – primarily because I don’t want to collect larger dolls anymore and their MSDs aren’t slim minis (which I prefer in a general aesthetic sense). Most recently I’ve fallen hard for another Dollmore Limited Edition doll -__-;

Dollmore Kid LE20 Snow Blossom Vian - image by Dollmore

Vian and Shiloh are my two favorite “girl” DM Kid sculpts, and this version of Vian is especially gorgeous in the limited pink skin color – a lovely dusty rose hue. I love everything about this LE! Her resin tone, her faceup, her eyes, wig and clothes. Even her black nails, offsetting her pink outfit and hair, are awesome! I’ve been stupidly searching for a doll to be Damien’s biological mom, a succubus who doesn’t even have a name. In Damien’s world, succubi/incubi are shapeshifters who can change their appearance to that of any humanoid which helps them best target any prey (they’re not violent or anything, they just want your sexy energies!). So his mom could really look like anyone and be any shape or size. But I really want her to be a 1/4 representation of a more human version of herself – a default “human” look that she uses as her primary guise while on the mortal plane. Vian would be perfect <3

I’ve also been doing more thinking about what to do with my Loongsoul YeSha. There has been extremely minimal interest in him so far as sales go and it’s been very disheartening to think I’ll be stuck with a doll that I no longer want when he could be in a loving home instead. He’s gorgeous, he really is! But I can’t have two different size versions of the same character. It’s just weird to me. Two different age versions would be another story, of course, but I digress!

I’m going to try to just sell the YeSha head instead of the full doll and get another head to put on my LS body. A head that I should have got as 1/3 Jace in the first place: Leeke Mihael.

Leeke Mihael - image by Leeke World

Mihael was the second BJD that I fell in love with (after Saint), but I was cautioned against doing a hybrid (Leeke bodies = not for me on so many levels) as my first doll by pretty much everyone I spoke to in the doll community. It scared me away from the idea. I gave up on Mihael, and right as I did Loongsoul released YeSha. And so Yesha became doll Jace and Mihael was admired only from afar through photos.

I won’t lie. I am not in love with the Loongsoul 1/3 boy body. I love the way it looks, certainly! It’s very handsome. But the weight of the resin combined with joint locking mechanisms that don’t work in several places (most notably the torso and shoulders – though the knee locking mechs work great) and the infamous and awkward butt joint that has to be manipulated just to get the body to sit have been a key point in me wanting to move it to a new home. The body can pull off some truly amazing poses! …But it struggles to hold the most natural looking “simple” poses, like standing with one hip cocked and a knee slightly bent with naturally hanging arms. I also hate the old default hands. There are all of 4 poses you can do with them that look natural: hooked in a pocket, smoking a cigarette, brushing hair out of face, giving the peace sign. I had planned to get the relaxed pose hands but I don’t even know if they offer spare hand parts after they broke one of their molds. Coupled with wanting to downsize to 1/4 scale and, well, it was obvious to me that I should sell it.

But I’m willing to give it a second chance. Maybe the arms are strung too loosely or too tightly? Maybe I could wire the arms and legs to get more natural looking poses out of the body? I’ll give it a go at least :) And if it doesn’t work out for me, back on the market he will go. There are plenty of people who are in love with the LS bodies – but I’m just not one of them. I prefer slightly more simple and elegant looking/working jointing – like those of Dollmore and Fairyland.

And that’s one thing I love about this hobby: the variety! There’s something for every BJD enthusiast out there. Though sometimes it’s a real pain finding what works best for you XD

She is going to break all of my main “rules” that are supposed to help me keep my doll family/wishlist manageable. But This has been the year of rules breaking… so! My lovely Fine, my dream girl, will be staying with me and I’m very happy about it! She will be transformed into a new character who is utterly unrelated to any of my other dolls. Her name is now Amity and I’ll be getting her a new wig and eyes after the new year. For now she’s wearing temporary stuff I have waiting for other dolls, but the eyes she has in will get passed on to Kitty once she arrives next month. (Eeee! Getting so close!!)

I don’t have a very good photo of Amity right now, and since it’s not her final look I won’t post the one I do have here (it’s on my Flickr, if anyone cares to peek). But I do have a cozy little snapshot of my tiny boys in their cold weather clothes:

Chester, Dorian and Damien in warm clothes <3

They all really need some socks or slippers, but I can’t do any dolly crafting without guilt until I finish knitting some xmas gifts :B

Minifee Rena (fullset version) - photo by Fairyland

This will be my sweet half-angel Kitty! She’ll also have Selena’s face (event Rolly plate) tagging along with her :D I’m SO excited to have secured the Rolly event faceplate that I’m almost more excited about it than having ordered Kitty!

Wheeee! My very first mini and Minifee :D

]]> http://mighella.wordpress.com/2011/10/28/here-kitty-kitty/feed/ 0 mighella mnfrena http://mighella.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/trick-or-treat/ http://mighella.wordpress.com/2011/10/27/trick-or-treat/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 01:40:51 +0000 Mighella http://mighella.wordpress.com/?p=788 ]]> I finally finished the Halloween costumes I was working on for the boys :) And just in time!

Here are my cute little trick or treaters, ready to hit up the neighborhood for some sweets:

Chester the Pirate ARRRR!

Damien as a jack'o'lantern.

Dorian as a little bat :3

All three boys together.

Chester’s Pirate outfit:
hat, top, sashes, bag – me
pants – Barbie
boots – etsy (don’t remember the seller, but they’re Blythe boots)
sword – Mulan doll

Dorian’s Bat outfit:
hood, “romper”, bag – me
shoes – Releaserain

Damien’s Jack’o'lantern outfit:
hat, “romper”, bag – me
shirt – TTYA
socks – Monstro Designs
boots – Mint on Card

For Chester, Damien, & Dorian <3

The little bags have stickers on them for decoration (ghost eyes and moon with bat), but I drew the jack’o'lanterns on construction paper, then cut them out and decorated around them as well. Was lots of fun!

While I had a little mini-faux-studio set up going on, I went ahead and tried to take a nice photo of my mini Lalaloopsy Candy Broomsticks. Not the best photo in the world, but I think it’s pretty cute despite its flaws.

Candy Broomsticks & friends wish you a Happy Halloween!

*COUGH*

There’s Tibia, who will be a 5SD Lydia and who is tugging on my heart the hardest right now. She’s half the price of the other doll vying for first place, but she’s an unpopular sculpt from an unpopular company. Will the model matter to potential customers so long as it’s a BJD and the photos are done well?

Then there’s Kitty, who will be a MNF Juri ’11. I won’t be able to get her head until probably December at the earliest and I’m going to have to snag one second-hand. For modeling purposes, I’d just have to skip out on hats until her head was acquired and could go with creative cropping to keep her “head” out of frame. But would that be off-putting? And would the mold’s unpopularity affect anything?

Or am I seeing model bias where there isn’t really any? I know when I shop on etsy I only care about whether the clothes have a model and whether that model is the same/a similar size to my doll. (Obviously item and photo quality are also very important factors – but this is just about the models themselves.) Then again, I’m used to having oddly in-between sized dolls that require thoughtful shopping with some trial-and-error thrown in.

I have a while to think on this and try to puzzle out which option would be the best. I’m determined to work harder at crafting and keeping my shop consistently stocked in 2012, and having the right slim mini model for the job is a big part of that :)

My favorites are Penny and Sleepy Penny.

Penny & Sleepy Penny - image by JerryBerrys

Plus there’s loads of adorable owner photos over on the JerryBerry Flickr group :)

Not sure yet if I’ll try to get one eventually or if they’ll be another doll I just vicariously enjoy via photos.