Mini Draculaura! And many fashion-doll sewing adventures...

Mini-Draculaura, seen here helping D'Laura and Briony model their winter coats, is mini-Adele of Midnight Magic (the source of mini-Pippa, a.k.a. Pilar).

We have all been to Anthropologie.

The second Saturday after I brought home mini-Pippa, I just happened to wander into the Family Dollar in the same plaza with the laundromat (well, there's not much to do there, although it's getting a new Goodwill on December 5) and just happened to visit the toy section and just happened to search thoroughly, cross-examine the lone clerk, and search some more until I found all three of the gals I didn't have.

Clockwise from top left: Pippa/Pilar, Adele, Kyla, Kayley.
Careful observers will remember that sofa used to be pink.

The official site provides no clue whether these gals are supposed to have different personalities. Pippa is the scientific one, and Adele is clearly entrepreneurial, as she arranged for the purchase and redecoration of Vincent Van Gogh's condo. (Vincent took off on a junket to the South Sea Islands to see if painting scantily clad native women would cheer him up.)

Since I got wallpaper onto the dividing walls in the 1:18 condos today, we're going to take a brief pair of home tours before getting back to the important business of fashion doll outfits. (This is the "hey, I've accomplished things!" post. Not that I've actually finished most things.)

Do you think we should also paper the fireplace wall, Adele? It's kind of dark in here.

The floor of Adele and Pilar's condo is a roll of shelf padding from Dollar Tree. It gives the sort of glam Goth-by-way-of-Mexico feel I was aiming for. It also has enough squishiness that the walls are more apt to stand up.

I wonder if Pilar is making homemade dog treats.

Pilar and Adele got the Smaller Homes kitchen and the dog. His name is Woodrow.

Feathers go with everything.

The totem is probably temporary, until I find somewhere better to put it.

Nothing says "glam" like leopard.

The dresser is in the process of being painted black. It would have been finished today, except we had a windstorm.

Kyla and Kayley also have a condo. This one is straight out of the earnest Bicentennial period of the 1970s, right down to the Armstrong vinyl floors (actually cut from Walmart placemats I'd originally bought for a dollhouse roof).

Every bedroom needs a spinning wheel for those middle-of-the-night yarn emergencies.

In the bathroom shot, we can see (a) the top of the wall is not straight [typical of Phoenix construction] and (b) I didn't have the right color ribbon to finish the styrofoam ends of the walls. No matter how much ribbon one owns, one will never have enough of the color one needs. Bits of wood work much the same way.

Cat among the pigeons. Well, ducks. Cat among the ducks.

The cat in the bathroom is a bench. The cat in the kitchen, however, is a cat. Alas, the appliances shifted sideways and I didn't realize it when taking the picture -- I was patching and matching scrapbook paper to get the walls covered, as it turned out that I bought about half as much as I needed.

I could jump on that counter from here. I could.

Kyla and Kayley got the Lundby kitchen, including fabulous faux Corningware.

I wonder if we could stick a TV in the fireplace.

Kyla may think she wants a TV, but she's actually contemplating the prized Jaydon wing chair. All this in the living room is vintage: my mother will probably remember persuading me that the best way to obtain an Ideal sofa was to buy the one on Etsy that came with the buffet and the china cabinet. 

Now back to our usual programming. D'Laura and Briony apparently been to both Abercrombie & Fitch and Anthropologie, making for a bit of a style dysjunction between their sock dresses and winter coats.

Shopping is exhausting.

The coats are an experiment: I basically cut a shape out of felt and sewed it together. I'm still faintly surprised that it came out coat-like.

Meygan also finally got her sock dress and matching sweater. She clearly buys from the same designer as Miss Hanzo.

Stripes and polka dots DO go together.

A little digging in the fabric stash -- where a couple weekends ago, I sorted all my fabric and notions into gallon ziplock bags by color, which requires three bags of beige -- determined I had enough of the leopard ruffled fabric to make Cleo a dress, as threatened during the Mystixx Goth Couture unveiling last night. Here, she models it, along with the trendy nude-look lip.

Walk like an Egyptian...

Yes, I snapped and removed the dark teal lip color with acetone. I was going to practice with lighter lip colors on Dresden, but wherever I carefully put my colored pencils, it was a very good hiding place.

The dress really needs straps -- but I have no thin black ribbon. Cleo would really like a coat, but I don't have felt or super-suede in the right color (which doesn't seem possible -- if there were felt in infrared and ultraviolet, I'd have it by now). My trips to assorted sources of fabric are on a hyperbolic path toward infinity. Eventually, I will oscillate between my normal locations and fabric stores so quickly as to be imperceptible other than a faint, high-pitched whine.

Cleo's current hair style is the result of my pulling it out of the way so I could fit the back of her dress, and at some point, I was punchy enough to decide to roll with it as a "look."

You laugh now, but wait until next month's Vogue comes out.

It's kind of a given that I don't enjoy sewing, I'm not good at it, and my involvement with it involves copious amounts of swearing. So of course, at 5:30 on a Sunday, after fussing with Cleo's dress for most of the afternoon, I was drawing a pattern to make Julianne a western vest of prodigious proportions.

People will be in awe of my two-step when I wear this vest.

The vest has extensive gores for no really good reason. It may eventually get more ornamentation -- as I was running out of light, the glue holding the fringe on hadn't even dried yet.

I was hoping to start on dresses for the Minions (Rei and Ami), but when I went to put my new ironing board cover on the ironing board, I discovered that I'd bought a cover for a portable countertop-sized ironing board. I'm leaning toward thinking this is a sign that I should own a portable, countertop-sized ironing board, instead of hauling the big one out for tiny sewing projects. It's not like I don't need to go to a place that will carry them... But that's a project for another day, as I'm not going to Walmart after dark in a windstorm.

Happy trails, pod'ner.