Narae open-eyed (Itzel) is here!

Yaay! What a wonderful surprise! My open-eyed (N404) Narae faceplate with headback arrived today! So fast, just 6 business days from ordering, D-Storic sent her to me so quickly. Now I am sooo tempted to get another body when they're having a sale for them. ;o;

They packed these two items in a cute little gift box. <3 Now I need to scramble and find a suitable faceup look for this new girl and come up with a name! XDD

*add on: 7:30pm

I gave her a quick faceup. She looks unlike any of the open-eyed girls I've seen. :c Lol, but it's a good thing. And I finally applied lashes onto an msd-sized doll! Not very well done, but at least there are lashes (though, not very firm ones).

Here some evening mobile photos!

She looks Russian princess-ish in the blond mohair. I love her with short hair! Now I need to go look for more short hair styles. @_@

I've named her Itzel, meaning Star of the Aurora Sky. To match with Mitzi, who's Star of the Sea. <3

Inspiration

Just today, I was matching up the clothes that were completed, namely the contrast collar blouse and mesh lace shorts. I found that the shorts would look nice with a cute little ribbon bow belt and some pearl accents.

So I went ahead to sew on some pearls and will be getting my mother's help to sew on the striped red canvas ribbon with bow centre onto the shorts. <3

It has been a while since we released non-limited runs of clothes. I hope we can make some basics that are priced inexpensively so more people can afford our clothes. :) Most of our releases have been limited due to the limited amount of material we have. For instance this lace we used for the mesh shorts, it was only enough for three pairs for each size. I seldom buy materials in bulk, but when we do, we get to make basics! Hee.

Oh, earlier this afternoon I was searching up Unoa on Yahoo!Auctions and found this amazing Japanese unoa owner who sews modern clothing. She is called Atri, and she is such a diligent designer. Quite a few of the designs I have wanted to make for dollies (and have yet to touch on), she has already created them. *-* My new dolly fashion idol!

She makes beautiful lingerie sets too, with pleasant combinations of various prints.

Her clothes are presented in a neat, professional way. I can't wait to make peter-pan collared sweaters! I have also been researching on various collar types to try making dolly-sized detachable collars. I myself have collected three collars for my own wardrobe, sequined, pearls and velvet. I was still wondering what sort of fabric we may use so the collars will not pop out too much due to the small size. We shall see! :D

Progress!

My current favourite album to listen to is Ellie Goulding's Lights. It's been my crafting mood power on album, plus Sunday Girl's random numbers. ^^ Music paints the world a different 'filter'. Hahaha.

Yay, one more new item to share with all of you (it's not completed yet without snaps at the back collar). Contrast collar sleeveless blouses! Two for SD and MSDs. One of my favourite blouse trends these months is the contrast black collar on milk white fabric. These close with a zipper at the back.

A picture of my mother using our trusty serger. It has been with us for so many years, possibly a vintage model already. The modern machines are usually white and have plastic coverings. The older machines use metal and are so heavy to move around. x_x

The pieces before the new collars were added. Mother tried sewing on the collar a certain way in the beginning, but they didn't work out, so she had to unpick and redo these.

She spent so much time on these four pieces because the fabric was tough to manage.

I have been spending bombs collecting materials to fulfill my ideas of dolly sweets deco necklaces and hair accessories! I've just ordered beautiful hand-made 1:6 and 1:12 sized macarons from AiClay in three pastel shades, and various findings and ribbon connectors online. I've also finished designing our label and am looking for a clear stamp maker online. It'll be 1" long and I can stamp our label onto the inside back of our light-coloured clothes! About time, I'd say. ^^;

I really can't wait for everything I've ordered to arrive! That would probably take another two weeks. It would be nice if I can release many things at once, so I guess I can't release the three new clothing pieces this weekend. I get so excited sometimes and want to release new things whenever they're completed. It would be better for customers if they get a wider selection of items to buy together.

So mother is off from work for the day and once I finish sewing on the snaps on all the cardigans and tops, I can try to make some cute tank tops! It's been so long since I last touched the sewing machine, and I do miss it. :)

Picking the right typeface

So I had the plan of rebranding the dolly label near the end of last year. After reading various books on branding, I realized that Angel.Candy-Rock wasn't consistent in its brand design. I did not know anything about brand concept, my target audience etc. as well as logo design. It was created at the beginning as a casual 'for fun' thing.

Now that I know what is lacking, I have sat down to properly write out what I want this doll fashion label to be. The new name 'lovesprung' was born, and I opened a sub label under it called 'piccola fenice' (which means Little Phoenix in Italian. My mother gave herself this alias in Mandarin: 小鳳 :) to house my mother's designs.

The last logo concept I tried to do for Angel.Candy-Rock was this:

I'm a big fan of shabby chic, or furls, folds, elegance. It was a cute logo, but I felt the name itself no longer matched the style of clothes we are making. I did try a Bodoni style of lovesprung initially, for lack of time in finding a typeface that matches the feel of the brand as closely as possible. After a while, I didn't like it anymore. I am worried that my fickleness will prevent me from ever settling on any set typeface for the brand. :(

Currently, I am using a very modern and straight typeface for lovesprung (with the love sprouting out literally). It was a cool concept, but I'm afraid it still felt cold to me. So I started looking again for a proper typeface today, and I found a free font called Derivia by Ekloff fonts on dafont.com. I'm not a professional typography artist so I do not know how to make pleasant and healthy typefaces. I can only use ready-made free fonts and alter them a bit. So sadly, there is no 'blueprint' pictures of how the font was formed (like on behance). Lol.

In progress using nifty Adobe Illustrator (I didn't like the shortness in its arm/ear?, so I extended it longer and overlayed a bigger spur? Haha... Now you know I didn't have any basic foundation in typography to properly identify the different parts of a typeface):

Not-so-final version (I think I might want to close up the g) with the original typeface with wider tracking (space between letters) above. I thickened the overall weight of the typeface:

The maker of the font says of this typeface:

"An expressive serif font with a small x-height. It has a serious, yet quirky disposition. Capital letters based off of "Livia," a free public domain font by S.G. Moye." (I didn't use any capital letters so... hee)

I was considering another typeface that looked a little handwritten, but it came off too casual. The maker of Derivia saying it is 'serious, yet quirky' helped me solve my problem. It's fascinating how typefaces give off different personalities. I will have to start applying this logo onto new packaging (I'll be ordering a custom stamp to stamp the brand on clothes soon!) and update banners and such. It is a time-consuming task to undergo rebranding, when one requires consistency in all materials. @_@

Shopping day

Spotlight had a special sale today and I wanted to get this snow leopard fur fat quarter listed in their newsletter, as well as some gold/hardware beads to try out some dolly bracelets. I was planning to use the fur as a rug for their room, but sadly, when I reached there 10 minutes after opening, there were only the dark pelts left. Hopes of having a cute furry floor under their day bed were dashed.

I did manage to buy two packs of different gold beads and a ball of Perle string.

Then I went to Daiso (somewhat on a small spree lol) and bought a 10 compartment bead storage box (to store the new beads as well as incoming rhinestones. I still need another one, 10 compartments were not enough x_x;) and some cute sweets stationery. After visiting Rui at her workplace, she told me about this adorable white wire-design chair that was sold at a store opposite hers. It's meant for jewelry but big enough for both MSD and SD dolls! What a lovely find! I can't wait to use it in dolly shoots. ^^ Thank you, Rui!

Here's a picture of some of the dolly-related buys (the book's for order recording for 2012 ^^):

As I have more time right now, I've been working with mother for the past few days on our upcoming new pieces. There is a light yellow floral cardigan for both sizes where I'm sewing up the pearl accents for. I got these blue-gray beads from my mother's pill box:

It's really vintage beads judging by the year stated on this bottle, which was 1983. o_O So I decided to store the sequins and pearls in the same bottle, but organized the other little seed beads into my new bead storage box. Here's after all the finger picking (phew!):

I cut out border stickers from my stash of cute paper stickers I got from Gmarket to identify the beads. The Koreans and Japanese make such adorable, crafty stickers I find it almost too wasteful to use on anything.

And here's the work-in-progress shot of the upcoming floral cardigan (it's hard to get nice floral-printed jersey fabric from the fabric shops, so I bought this pair of Uniqlo leggings... ;) :

And a preview of our cute little lace-trimmed high waist shorts (I'm still undecided as to whether I should add on little sparkles or pearls or just leave them as they are):

That is all for our first post on the dolly blog! ^^= Thank you for reading!