Sometimes A Mess is Progress

     Sometimes all of my doll making supplies are neat and organized. There are also times when everything is jumbled up in a huge spaghetti mess. Ribbon ends up looking more spaghetti than most things. 

     I store my ribbon, or a lot of it, in a scrapbooking box. It is a nice size and holds a ton of ribbon. Most of the ribbon in the box is lesser used stuff, the things I use often are kept in my doll bag. Once the mess gets to this stage it is time to do some sorting and organizing so I at least know what I have. This is a project that happens with the fabric drawer more often. 

       Once I got it all organized I had a ton of space in the box. Some of that is because I currently have most of the grosgrain ribbons in a project bag to work on bareback pads. Once I am done with those the ribbon can go back in the box until I need it again. While I was cleaning I found that I had 6 empty ribbon spools in this box! Definitely I should clean this thing more often. 

     The ribbon box cleaning was part of working on things in my car while I did the laundry. I had already discovered, while working on bareback pads, that the red ribbon I was using was a bit too wide for the 1/8" buckles. It's funny how much width variation there is in the different ribbons. Anyway, in another excursion into the ribbon box I thought I saw a second spool of red grosgrain and I checked to see if it was a bit narrower than what I had been using. It was. So I remade all of the red billets on the bareback pads and finished up putting the buckles on everything. 

     It was one of those long, sort of tedious jobs but it got me to the point where I could finish up more pads. I now have 6 finished and ready for my live sale. I have vague plans to make at least a few more. I just need to try to find the time for it. But I have definitely made progress on these. 

        I also made some progress on rebuilding dolls. I am not a big fan of youth dolls. They really take a ton of work and are not as realistic as the Yvonne-type dolls when they are finished. But I had 2 I needed to make so I got both of the bodies worked on at the same time. One of the remade dolls is going to sit for at least another week or 2 until the slot for that one comes up, but at least I have the body prepped. This process takes at least an hour, per doll, to do it properly. Nothing is easy with youth dolls. 

      I have made decent progress this week, both on cleaning and sorting of supplies and doll making. Maybe not as much progress as I would have hoped, but some progress is better than no progress.