#décoden

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Tiffy inspired me to do just part of one of the several doll piles. It's just a fraction but it's a big deal to have managed to get all the the supplies out in one place.

We have 3 projects I can finish in multiple timed 30 minute sessions as craft-treats over the rest of the year: 80s animé skipper, Marnie who needs three lines of ginger blend, Goth BMR who I want to give a darkblue/purple parting so she can wear her hair down (both via @maleficentmrsofallevil)

3 dolls I can't reroot but I'd like to keep them so they're going on display with maybe these wigs (they'd need hair styling and cuts because uuugh) or décoden hair or maybe just bald but not hidden away in a drawer (because out of sight out of mind) : Azura, Tropical Miko and side glance Daisy who is going to go on a modded simba body as nothing matches her yellow tone.

But also Daisy's mermaid body (with that terrible choice of colours) can go to that Simba Belle turned into Belle Rose-gold with a neck graft and while I had the heat pad out, I put Salon Fianna back together ready for sale.

So 3 dolls on display, tomorrow maybe a neck graft for belle, neck mod for daisy. Skipper and Marnie in the reroot drawer as actual projects I can do in small increments.

Unfortunately this has not sparked any desire to tackle the other piles. And added another thing for the wishlist : learn to handle the sewing machine so I can make stretch shift dresses, tops and skirts for curvy.

I'll take it as a win. 👍❤️

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yeah i’m thinking there was definitely some quota or rule to make up for or they would have rolled it out with a fanfare. Jokes on them, barbie packaging goes into the recycling for the cardboard and the plastic front goes to my sis to make shaker cards or clear box covers, i take the sides, cut them up and make throw away palettes for acrylic painting. Curvy dancer’s clear plastic box was instrumental in making the silicone and décoden flocked dolls as i needed something well lit enough to track down individual 1mm crystals.

The Wave 2 RH dolls have (still) not shown up in my area yet...

But the Cheer dolls are in stock at the WM near where I work.

I do not need any of the Cheer dolls, but I really like the Ruby doll in the line...

[les-bijoux-de-sharuru-blog]

N'hésitez pas à me contacter pour une commande,  je peux customiser n'importe quelle coque :D <3

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Purchasing findings online is a wierd gamble (on top of the postal time gamble LOL)

The micro diamonds turned out to be different sizes and the *accidental triple order of microbeads turned out to be just a double order and some larger beads. *why? I was bidding on multiple auctions.

For this head, the client wanted a pale pink hair-do so I went with a very pale pink silicone base so the pink of the findings wouldn’t be drowned out, the microbeads (0.6mm) and the larger but paler and flashier diamonds (3mm). Needs better photos as it’s all washed out and in person she just sparkles like the light is going ting ting ting! I used white decoden cream which is just silicone caulk in smaller tubes, mixed in acrylic paint in VERY small amounts as it doesn’t take much at all.

Helpful notes:

+ Once the findings have been added and the head is fully dry I coat it with water based nail varnish top-coat as Barbie heads are flexible, squish too hard and the findings will fall off if not secured underneath AND on top. You could use acrylic sealant but both gloss and matte added a cloudly coat to AB findings. DO NOT use normal nail varnish, it’ll melt the findings and leech colour.

+ Cheap nail art often comes with junk pieces or wrong colours mixed in, so decant the nail art just a few a a time, into a small white container or folded white paper and use tweezers or a wax pencil to pull out wrong bits before putting it into a baggie or container.

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Daya sparkle video. The AB coating is what puts it over the top otherwise it’s just crystal hair not ting ting rainbows everywhere hair. Unfortunately anytime the rainbow happens my camera gets confused and goes out of focus.

yeah i have five minutes worth of fuzzy pink rainbow footage.

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Artsy Sparkle video with much better rainbow visibility and starring a stray microbead and my henna stained ring finger nail.

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Had a small amount of free time where I wasn’t zonked out so I decided to use up what’s left of the silicone décoden cream which I forgot was very slow to set, woops! anyway I’d been doing the meds and had these silicate filled lids in my recycling bin (the pharmacy keeps switching generics so it’s kind of random what colour or shape your meds are gonna be let alone the packaging so this was new) so I got them out and found one had big 3mm clear balls and the other was like packet sugar so I went with a very pale pink to look like soap or icing and got out some bait heads to play around.

Atepadene on the left is a Summer with the sugary looking silicate and Omeprazole is damaged lashes Licca with the bubble looking silicate beads. Unfortunately Summer has a dent/wrinkle where the stuff hadn’t dried fully and Licca looks like she has male battern balding so she looks like the angel character from good omens. I’ll leave them as is in the “just pay postage” stuff for grabs until I get the urge to do décoden hair again and we’ll see if silicate holds up. I do love the matte soap bubble and the sugary effect of both. I think silicate would take paint well if you wanted to use it as a textural element in your sculpting.  Note: If you’re looking for relaly shiny, you’ll want AB coating glass nail art findings.

While I had the JPP box out, I attempted open mouth lips again following oak23s advice about teeth first. The results are meh but so much improved from before!

Post yielded 3 more knockoff disney fairy bodies made with leftover vinyl pellets = colour marbling in the limbs so I could move Teal Licca (with a beauty spot over the bubble in her plastic) into my permanent collection and rebody two Star Darlings. I put 2-part plumbing epoxy into the back of the neck holes as they have ball anchor necks but also hard plastic so not easy to maneuver a neck graft into there. It’s not pretty (it’s not visible either though so no-one cares except me) but it allows good movement forwards and sideways without their heads falling backwards from the weight of the hair.

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Trial and error with déco flocking.

Barbie “Wonkette”: Success! Décoden caulk in plain white with AB coated 1mm glass beads and 2mm “micro diamonds” sharp facetted AB coated glass. Doesn’t shed. The shimmer effect is *~*amazing*~*. Kept.

Draculaura: Mixed. Décoden caulk white with a drip of red which ended up clashing with the face and not looking like icing at all, fixing caulk errors once it’s begun to dry (and it’s fast) is messy. Flakes don’t stick unless pressed in. Back to bald.

Barbie Desirée: Nope. UHU glue leeches the colour from painted glass beads which discolour in patches (no photos of this step sorry) and stains the plastic. Second attempt with E6000 does not grip the glass beads which shed upon touch. Back to bald.

Bratz Sharidan: Mixed. UHU glue works well with both glitter and plastic diamonds. Very nice and solid. Scalp needs painting first & the shiny showgirl helmet makes the eye makeup look dull. Back to bald.

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Tomorrow, to deal with not being able to do much due to neck-borked, I'm going to go through my findings. I did have a nice organized system and then I started using bigger glitter and smaller non flat pieces for décoden hair. I've been accumulating little baggies of rhinestones, resin bits or flakies (and a whole bunch of silicone dessicant balls) for the past few years, not much but enough to give me a reason to do a sort out of my treasures. Carefully of course.

readmore for length

Because I'm learning the hard way that ignoring twinges leads to pitch black no sound lie still and try not to clench jaws from aaarrgh.

That's something to look forward to. I'd also like to treat myself to some of the past few years' innovations in charms since resin making and shakers went mainstream.

I have a trapped nerve on top of (or caused by) the cramping from pain in the nerve cluster at the base of your neck. I got trigeminal neuralgia that didn't resolve once my teeth stopped compaction, it just got compounded by shoulder junk. There's a simple exercise : arm straight out, palm up spiderman web go style, put hand down so palm is forward facing, now keep your arm straight and move it sideways. If it hurts your neck down into your arm then you have a pinched neck nerve, if it hurts one side and in the other it hurts too but also across your face into your eyes and jaw and you start to wibble from pain that's what i have and I'm dreading having to go for xrays. I just want the doctor to yank my shoulder into a wierd position then crack my head and tada *magic* like when they reset shoulders in the media. Realistically it'll be xrays because i have a family history of spurs or crumbling disks, find a physio who isn't an 'exercise'll fix it' 'gym teacher asshole' type and who isn't selling magnetising and woowoo services and mostly... wait it out like an ankle spain.

Though back to findings, i have a couple of brittle or hard heads from head glue who would be fun to decorate. It's not too repetitive like rerooting or sewing but it is time sensitive : having to take a break before you're done means it's stuck like that. I'll take that risk. I want to make cute stuff.

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i wrote out a whole long long post about how I’m ok admitting that I have envy/jealousy or something about another rerooter who basically priced me out of the game and got a special deal for a really tiny and limited but nicely lit instagram portfolio ... except not enough to be annoyed at them because I have referred at least seven customers since my arm injury... and i’m writing paragraphs and realising I’m not annoyed at them in the slightest: it’s one of the hair shops that’s built up a decade of teeny tiny slights that’s probably them just not being very interested but slowly made me feel really unwelcome. They probably didn’t realise I was a bigger customer than it looks because several regular clients buy the hair themselves then send it with the dolls.

And true, I havn’t worked on my social media presence at all partly because i have enough regular clients and challenges but I also really like that the people who find me tend to understand that it’s a hobby: yes i’m getting paid but i pick and choose my work and would make more flipping popular dolls if it was just about money. There is a certain type of collector who thinks you can insert money and get a miracle, or don’t understand the concept of waiting while something is made and posted from overseas. You don’t want the popularity that brings along that kinda crowd.

But yeah not a single colour comparison or reroot photos sent in was ever used and requests for help choosing between colours and even correcting bad info* were met with a polite “thankyou, uh idk” and I’ve known we weren’t cool for years but it’s nice to name it, file it in a box and never think of it again.

*they were selling blends under the wrong hair fibre name that I knew would frazzle and melt if boil washed.

I’m also not loyal: to brands, to a shop, to a hair type: I mess around with braided thread and wires, go though patches of doing yarn and décoden hair, experiment with what ever doll sized fibres pop up. Friends get loyalty, doll hair can be glitter glue, silica gel balls and a sock I defrogged. ¯\_(❁´◡`❁)_/¯

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Rainbow High Eyes:

-12 plastic cabochons  (Amaya’s were lifted from cheap 20mm eyes with a cone dome, The two others from 22x16.5 from aliexpress.com/store/2825042) cut with wirecutters to have a flat top with any jagged bits sanded on a metal nail buffer. You could also use pullip/blythe eyechips but do not use glass and !! DO use protective glasses, shards of plastic go flying in every direction !!

-Placed on silicone/caulk in the form of décoden cream (you could use household grout or proper airdry clay/putty), which would not dry so I slapped it on my hands and rubbed until it turned into teeny tiny sausages which then got squished together into a putty that then annoyingly dries too fast LMAO. Push into a round shape, squidge into the eyewells and make an indent with your finger where you want the iris to go. Place the iris then squish down hard so that the caulk rises around it and then smooth with your fingers. Using a tool left marks as you can see on Poppy.

-Human eyelashes cut down to about 12mm and placed with the longer lashes on the outside (they’re a bit extra: I might trim them someday) attached using glue and a craft knife to slide them in. set in place overnight using white or clear elastic bands (other colours will stain)

Notes:

Work with the doll’s hair carefully tied back and with the head removed from the body so you can push from inside the head using a chopstick if you put the chip in wrong.

If you want to be able to switch out chips make sure to gently remove the eyechips before the whole thing dries.

They look good from lots of angles but there’s no getting around the fact that they have flat faces so profile pictures were always going to look wierd

I haven’t yet figured out permanent bodies yet, Sunny is lightbrown and Poppy is that shade of obitsu white that’s a cream with no pink undertone.

I’ve just tidied both their eyes since seeing high def photos, but taking photos during the process would avoid that.

Amaya’s eyechips were badly banged up and her eyemaking process slapdash (I had repainted her black eyeliner and the silicone just picked it up so I had to pull out bits of black) not to mention her lashes got damaged so I might make new ones but for real I need airdry clay of some sort instead of improvising alternatives with everything from drywall repair to plumbers epoxy to décoden icing.

To paint or print your own eyechips the keywords are “blythe acrylics” or “clear resin stickers 12mm”

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Year in review: full reroots.

Licca! January saw the arrival of a batch of 12 Liccas (1 sent to a dollblr person, 1 scrapped, 10 customized, 0 sold) and by March I’d bought a second lot because they’re such a fun size to experiment with.

January also saw the ill advised trial of straightening human braiding kanekalon for glow in the dark and emerald-lime gradient hair. I scrapped several reroots and the rest of the glow in the dark hair: too thick for doll size. not worth it.

In March I was commissioned to do a bunch of bratz with “doll planet nylon” and normal nylon. This led to 2 things: renewed dollyhair hate due to a doll getting badly stained and the hunch that aliexpress polyethylene might be this dollplanet nylon. The first purchase was mauve lilac poly to confirm then green + purple + teal then splurged on a whole rainbow which led to rainbow dolls because of course!

From March-May i lost lots of post (including Purple Megara and glow in the dark Twyla above) and realised there would be no market for full reroots. The rest of the year I stuck to passion projects like renewed interest in glow in the dark nylon and commissions which also included décoden diamond hair a but also more personal projects starting with Teal curls Licca and Batsy green.

Notes:

There are a few photos that aren’t up to date (heart mom for example) and some reroots not included because it wouldn’t fit neatly (silver eitan) or havn’t had their paint fixed yet (quite a few 😅).

Working with nu!Barbie has been more frustrating than hard heads and supersized dolls like endless hair Rainbow Asha: the paint fades, the new hair melting technique leaves the scalp brittle and the automated rooting machine is brutally close with the plugs on the front line and parting.

Late March - late April (probs covid), July-August (only worked on Gayle) and November-early December were rough patches but looking at my output this year, especially full reroots not just fixing up bundles with partial reroots makes it look like there was a steady flow: this happened in bursts!

Saran’s still my fave fibre, the way it hangs and it’s heft is still the best IMHO, Poly’s a cheap way of getting vibrant colours but is a pain to style, Nylon’s still not my fave due to it’s slipperyness but glow in the dark has a slight matte texture to it that makes it easier to handle (also it’s just cool), Kiwi’s the newcomer to the scene and I have yet to finish a reroot with it, verdict later in 2021 😁

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Tipped out the intimidating “to photograph and list” box (licca kiwi and klurhn will be “just pay postage”) and you can sort of see the phases of hair use:

The dark blues then leftover blues, cursèd green phase, the two fire gradient gals, the shiny pink nylon swapped from the Bratz commission, the lilac HRnylon from Aliexpress, the glow in the dark turquoise nylon from Retrodolls and test head for the glitter décoden.

WIP: licca pink gradient’s parting is a mess, dracubecca got glow in the dark highlights but needs frozen white filler, as does skipper half-brows with mauve accents, lycca ruby needs half a parting, madison’s head was cracking so it’s been reinforced, asian curvy needs parts replacing with green but i’m still undecided on her hairdo.

I had given her black irises but rookie mistake: used felt tip pen sealed in with acrylic gloss. This is not the same formulation as sharpie and the whole thing melted and stained her face, then when I bleached the stains, the paint went too. I can fix it but it’s going to be an intense effort. one more for the personal projects file. Oh by the way, in a strange twist, her name is Iris (after the flower).

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Humblezombie was my decoden hair inspo: https://humblezombie.tumblr.com/tagged/icing-hair-doll , that and her epoxy + crystal hairdos. Because flocking and me, well we just don’t seem to work but silicone behaves somewhat 😋 you get a small time frame to adjust things before it dries then you have to finish with super sharp craft knife. It’s ideal for heads that are unrootable or are well suited to a cute short hair style...also an excuse to use some of the nail art “treasures” I collect. I’d love to see what you create!

Here’s Daya with the gift Artsy I’m sending her with (she has a brow piercing -  that’s not a stray gem!)

Purchasing findings online is a wierd gamble (on top of the postal time gamble LOL)

The micro diamonds turned out to be different sizes and the *accidental triple order of microbeads turned out to be just a double order and some larger beads. *why? I was bidding on multiple auctions.

For this head, the client wanted a pale pink hair-do so I went with a very pale pink silicone base so the pink of the findings wouldn’t be drowned out, the microbeads (0.6mm) and the larger but paler and flashier diamonds (3mm). Needs better photos as it’s all washed out and in person she just sparkles like the light is going ting ting ting! I used white decoden cream which is just silicone caulk in smaller tubes, mixed in acrylic paint in VERY small amounts as it doesn’t take much at all.

Helpful notes:

+ Once the findings have been added and the head is fully dry I coat it with water based nail varnish top-coat as Barbie heads are flexible, squish too hard and the findings will fall off if not secured underneath AND on top. You could use acrylic sealant but both gloss and matte added a cloudly coat to AB findings. DO NOT use normal nail varnish, it’ll melt the findings and leech colour.

+ Cheap nail art often comes with junk pieces or wrong colours mixed in, so decant the nail art just a few a a time, into a small white container or folded white paper and use tweezers or a wax pencil to pull out wrong bits before putting it into a baggie or container.