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Ordering Custom Eyes from CandyKittensEmporium

15/8/2018

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I'm still working away on Paradigm, and one of the things I found a little frustrating is the mismatch between his eyes.  As I mentioned before, his purple eye is a Safrindoll one, a 14mm low-dome small iris, and his grey one is an Alice's Collections eye in 14mm high-dome normal iris.  I know his grey eye is supposed to be artificial, but the difference between them was jarring even before the major gapping caused by the high dome.

The problem is, it's actually really hard to find nice purple eyes, and just as hard to find nice grey ones — and to make things worse, although Paradigm's supposed to take 14mm eyes, the gapping at the sides was really bad.  So what do you do when you need eyes?  You hit up the usual haunts!  Only... while Mako eyes have a nice grey, they didn't have a purple I liked.  Cast In Glass's site layout always confuses me slightly and I forget where I've found things, and having to email the order kind of put me off too.  (For some reason I thought it was them who only had open order periods now and again, but I can't remember... so that put me off a little too, I didn't want to go bothering someone who wasn't expecting to receive orders.)  And so many other places only have high dome eyes, which really weren't suitable...

So with no real hope of success I turned to Etsy... and on Linny S. Shephard's 'CandyKittensEmporium' promptly found some purple eyes in the absolute perfect shade for him.  So at the ever-sensible time of ~10:30pm on the 2nd August I asked whether it was possible to have eyes in purple and eyes a little like another kind available with small irises ... and fully expected to hear back the next day (if at all — I have variable luck contacting people about things they're selling, it's pretty much 50/50 on whether they actually want to deal with me so for the most part I've stopped bothering).

I wasn't expecting to get an almost immediate reply from Linny with more information and a couple of questions.  We chatted back and forth about Paradigm's peculiar eye needs until Linny had all the information required and on the 5th August I paid.

Ten days later they've just come through the post — much faster than I anticipated — and they're perfect.  They're exactly the shade I wanted and they both fit perfectly and look incredible in him.  I'll definitely be ordering again: Linny also does cat-eyes and I have a little Doll Family-A MiaoMiao who shipped with some worryingly human ones, so once he's painted he'll be in need of something a little more feline.

I probably shouldn't be looking around to see who else could use some new eyes...

(Photos will be inbound when 1) I fetch my camera back downstairs and 2) Paradigm has hair.  I should probably have taken a picture of them on the card they arrived with, but honestly?  Too excited to see how they looked in him.  And really a cellphone picture wouldn't do them justice.)
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Paradigm with his older, mismatched eyes. Grey one: Alice's Collections; purple one: Safrindoll.

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Paradigm's new eyes, and another terrible cellphone photo. One day I'll learn to use this thing.
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Long Time No Squeak

22/2/2017

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It's been a long time since I updated.  Poor Maxim, only introduced in the last post, still is lacking mods, faceup and wig -- although I've at least started work on the wefts for that.  Yay for neon pink yarn that, the more you work with it, the more you start questioning just what reality is...

I also made...

*dun dun duuuuuuuuun!*

A table.  An actual table scaled (in a somewhat haphazard manner) for 70cm dolls like Tay.

He was, in fact, my baseline for it and paid the price in terms of embarrassing and apparently mid-dance arm positions...

It was an interesting experience, requiring buying two bundles of balsa wood (it's cheap and easy to bully around), an argument with Amazon about the delivery of some dowel rods (don't use Royal Mail, they're idiots) and a lot of guesswork because I haven't done woodwork since I was 14, which is an embarrassingly long time ago now.  I have something approaching progress shots, but they're weird even in context.

I also managed to quietly murder my respirator filters, by forgetting to put a filter over the filter for sawdust, so... new filters and proper add-ons inbound, I guess.

I even made, albeit a while ago, doll-size folders for papers.  Because what are government agents without paperwork?

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Yes, I am aware I have no life.

All I need to do now is make some doll-size sticky labels for those folders, and some authentic doll-size tea stains.  And given I managed to find a heavy, but still in-scale tea set when I was at my last NaNo meet...

Tea stains, here we come?
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Neewer 80cm Photo Tent

29/9/2016

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I've been eyeing the Neewer 80cm photo tent for a while now, ever since I saw a post on Tumblr talking about how helpful and affordable both the tent itself and their products in general were.  Considering that I use a Neewer remote shutter for my camera and am starting to wonder how I did without it, I figured that I might as well take a punt.

It was £23.99 from Amazon.co.uk from a Prime seller, so it arrived the day after I ordered it, and I enlisted a little help with opening it...
It's quite big if you're only 70cm though, so Tay had to enlist a little help himself, in the form of his almost-brother-in-law Milos and between them they managed to pull the handy 40cm bag from its wrapping and then pull both the backdrops, handily wrapped in one bag, and the tent itself wrapped in another, from its case.

​And then this happened.
No dolls were harmed in the making of this photo. Not so sure about the Air Ram though.
Because this photo tent?

When you take it out the plastic, it explodes.
This was its third airing and my folding has improved, so I had to ask it nicely.  I've learned to keep my distance.
I have no idea how they convinced it into such a small space, but it clearly did not like it because on exposure to air it promptly unfolded itself to its full 80cm height.

I mean, it stayed flat so I can thank the gods for small mercies, but bloody hell.  Which is exactly what I accidentally shouted as it leapt from my hand with a surprisingly loud *whumpf*.  Loud enough that it was only after I'd finished these photos that I realised it'd knocked the Air Ram over and the dogs, who'd been trying to look at what I was doing before this, suddenly decided that the office wasn't​ that exciting after all...
Tay holds up a red backdrop while Milos stares, faintly horrified, up at the full height of the tent.
It comes with four backdrops: white, black, blue and red, and as they're all folded they all arrive with very neat rectangles creased into them.  I try to iron them, but first I'm going to try either draping them over something or rolling them into a tube and hoping that they just sort of... fall out.  I'm not big on this ironing stuff.

The tent itself remains flat even after it's disrupted your household and you pull open first one side and then the other.  These are surprisingly sturdy and open into a good-sized shape.
As you can see, it fits Milos (a Dollshe Saint) with room to spare -- his fingers were only just grazing the roof.  It's not entirely as square as the promo images would have it but that's no big deal.  It doesn't give the impression that it's going to roll away even with slightly more rounded lines.

It's a little fiddly getting the backdrop into the tent, partially because you do have to crawl into it to push it against the velcro, and partially because there's velcro on both sides of the backdrop but the tent comes with no instructions, so it takes a moment to figure out which side goes back to the tent.  I still don't actually know what the velcro on the other side is for -- it's not for sticking it together for storage, far as i can tell -- but maybe it'll become clear in the future.  Or maybe it won't.

It also comes with a velcro cover to block out additional light, which has a handy slit in the front for your camera lens.  This does ideally require quite a low tripod.  I can't imagine this playing so nicely with my larger one, if I'm honest; the lowest possible height would have the lens pressing against the fabric at the top, so it's something to be aware of if you only have larger tripods.

I bought this to use in the conservatory, which is full of natural light in the day and where I often try to take pictures (and no one needs to see the stuff -- and the cats -- usually floating around in there) and I don't have standalone lights for a proper setup, but I have to say I am now considering buying some to enable me to use this in other rooms in the house.

Word of warning though, 80cm is inexplicably huge.  You'd think I'd be expecting it, given that five out of eight dolls are 65-70cm boys, and you know what adds insult to injury?

That the bloody thing does not want to go back into the bag.  I should've been expecting this, it's referenced in reviews quite frequently, but I think I was thinking these people just aren't trying hard enough.  Nope.  It's not that at all.  It's that it simply does not want to co-operate, and this is again why I wish it came with written instructions.  And when your bag is 1/4 of your tent?
It came out of that bag.  I don't know why I can't get it back in again.
Meep...
HOWEVER!  Skimming through the Amazon.com reviews and discounting the smug ones who state they can flatten it in 30 seconds without stating how, a Danny Perfect wrote a very useful review with this instruction:
It begins to fold in and then you fold the front of the tent into the back face and it is now folded and just needs to be twisted properly to put back into its case. To twist it up completely grab two opposite corners and turn both of your hands clockwise at the same time. Doing this will twist the tent back up into the little circle it came in.
Which works, albeit with a lot of internal swearing.  Thank gods.
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    Pax Asteriae

    A noodler with a doll obsession.

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