Projects: In Progess or Ideas? What'choo Workin' On?

[General-RADIX]

Current Pikachu progress: assembled his head and ears last night!.. and then had to undo days of embroidery work around his eyes and cheeks because his face was far too high up his head. Insert noises of inarticulate rage.

Although now, his face is roughly in the correct spot; I just have to re-embroider it, as well as fix Shirochu's face (didn't embroider anything on hers yet, thankfully). Still would be nice if I could consistently make forward progress on these sewing projects.

[DollyKim]

Would it help to do the embroidery on a separate piece of fabric or interfacing then attach it to the critter? Or next time put safety pins or stitch markers where you think the face will go then assemble it?

[General-RADIX]

Using pins did help with later attempts, but the problem was more that the pattern piece for the face seemed to mark Pikachu's eyes, nose, and mouth in a much higher place than they actually needed to go, which threw everything off. (If that makes sense.)

(To clarify: Pikachu's eyes and cheeks are made of fleece; by "embroidery", I meant satin-stitching around the edges.)

[Kattriella]

I'm still in the process of pre-writing some "reviews" for some of my Kelly dolls for when I eventually start posting them here, and as I was cataloging one of the fashion packs I have, I realized I actually have the two other pairs of shoes that are shown on the back but aren't included in the set, which is cool, because one of them is a VERY particular shade of blue that wasn't super common.

[Kattriella]

I have managed to lose my original, very extensive list of most of the Kellys in existence, which was basically just my GIANT wishlist, so I'm now remaking it . . . This should only take, like, three weeks.

While I'm doing this, however, I'm also trying to log the variations of each character. And in case you don't know what that means: Back in the day, there was no set way that Kelly and her friends looked. Usually Kelly had blue eyes and blond hair, but sometimes she had green eyes, violet eyes, or even brown eyes. Sometimes she was even a redhead. Her friends were no different. I have found at least two different versions of Melody with reddish hair and violet eyes, while her original doll has red hair and blue eyes. And of course, most lines that had a white Kelly also had a black Kelly, and even those Kellys didn't always have the same hair and eye color.

I'm also trying to determine if there was a pattern to which white redhead and and which black friends "twinned". By that I mean, usually in a line, you'd have Kelly, a friend of dubious ethnic background (usually some flavor of Asian or dubiously Hispanic), a redhead, and a black friend. However, because Mattel back in the day was questionable at best, the black girl almost ALWAYS shared an outfit with the redhead. (This is not the same as when there was a white Kelly and a matching black Kelly in a line.) I'm just curious if Deidre was ALWAYS paired with Melody, if Keeya was ALWAYS paired with Kayla, etc. Will anyone except me EVER find ANY use for this information? Probably not. Am I going to do it anyway so I can feel like I have control over SOMETHING in my rapidly spiralling life? Absolutely. Enjoy my insanity, folks, I'll see you all on the other side of this chaos.

Also, I know I've been saying it for a while now, but I AM on track to start that Kelly Doll Showcase thread by the end of the month. I'm planning to grab a simple, cheap phone tripod and a remote control photo clicker on Amazon to make my life easier (I need them for other purposes anyway).

So yeah, look forward to me FLOODING the forum with Kelly content some time in August.