It’s Been Awhile

     It has been awhile since I have made a doll. I finished one back on September 10th and before that I finished a few the last week of August. I have not really been making dolls. Do I miss it? Not really. Was it horribly hard to get back into it to make this doll? Not at all. In some ways she is sort of different and was almost a break from working on the smaller items I have been working on most of the time. 

     This lady also has pretty cool hair. The customer and I went back and forth a bit on colors and designs and eventually it was decided she needed tri-colored hair, with the base color being "fog" which is sort of a lavender gray. She then got some streaks of purple and silver. Pulled into a side braid I think it looks fantastic! The way I did this side braid the hair is pulled across the top of her head before being braided, instead of just pulled to the side. I think this makes the braid stay out of the way of the hood nicely and it makes the different colors stand out in a really nice, fun way. 

     Typically the way I make things for my live sales is I start with a big batch of dolls, usually a variety of casual dolls. These don't take a lot of thought process to make after I decide on what colors I want them to wear. Then I sew all the clothes in one batch, dremel a whole bunch of bodies, dress all the dolls sort of assembly-line style, and in a fairly short amount of time I have a decent start to my sales inventory. I usually save all the small items until closer to the end. I invariably make myself crazy doing it this way. Albert Einstein said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. I'm a little bit crazy, but I am not insane, so I decided to do things differently this time. 

     Saving the smaller items until last ALWAYS takes longer than I think it will. The result of that is a feeling of panic and working super long hours trying to get ready for things. I know that people have said that all of my goals and deadlines are arbitrary, I made them up and I can change them if I need to, but I run my business like a business. Which means if I am not reaching my goals it is potentially because I slacked off too much at one point or another. I know it seems like I am working constantly, but while I do work long hours during the week, not all of them are productive hours. And I do take weekends off. 

     So this time around I am working on all the smaller items before I start on any dolls for my sale. The result is that I have not made a doll in a long time. I have not forgotten how to do it, I think it would take a lot longer than a few weeks for that to happen, but "doll work" these days more often than not doesn't actually mean working on dolls. I still have 8 weeks to work on things for my next live sale and I have a decent stock of small items all finished and ready. I have a few more types of things I need to do and then in a week or two maybe I can work on some dolls. I do that sometimes after all.