aslipintime

[aslipintime]

Crinoline update!

So I worked on this for a week, and I’d get the length and arc sorted on one section only to then realise it was wrong in another etc etc etc; and the angle at the back it kept getting sharper and sharper.

My husband figured out what was happening: basically, this garment is back-heavy, so it naturally wants to swing forward (more weight at back than front). So I was trying to compensate for this problem by changing the tapes and the lengths/positions of hoops, but this was an impossible way of fixing it. All that happened was, shortening the hoops and distorting the shape at the back.

i toyed around with weighting the front, or with adding more side-struts, but eventually, i’ve added little strings in 4 places at the front, and tied it to her legs. (specifically, it’s a lark’s head around the hoop, and a double-overhand around the leg, because that’s easily adjustible but still holds firm,and doesn’t “tighten”). This is actually a trick that Balenciaga used in some garments so that the skirts move when the wearer walks.

#bjd #bjd clothes #doll clothes #historical fashion

[aslipintime]

IDK if anon is still following the comments on this post, but it reminded me of this blogpost on how to wear vintage menswear without looking like a man. Maybe some helpful tips in here?

https://blog.americanduchess.com/2016/03/how-to-wear-vintage-menswear-without.html

its even worse as a trans butch. constant misgendering. you gotta seriously put in the legwork to convince someone you arent a dude

I have definitely heard that, especially with people interpreting that kind of trans female masculinity as normal male masculinity. Ig the trick is to look female in male clothing, which might be a bit difficult to pull off, even for some cis women, good luck to u tho icon the people who see you as who you are are the people who really matter, remember that

[aslipintime]

1860s Elliptical Crinoline (doll-scale) WIP!

So the design is based on a photo in Izabela Pitcher's book the Victorian Dressmaker, which in turn was made from a pattern by Truly Victorian.

I've done a lot of attempts at sorting the hoops, but what's working is pipecleaners (failed attempts: trying to build a form with foam - with 3D cardboard pieces - doing it straight onto the crinoline with fabric and card). I started by placing the vertical ribbons on the waistband, based on the picture; and there's a little 3D "basket" of ribbon which you may be able to see, which is the shape of my doll's butt. So the crinoline won't swing forward.

idk if international readers have pipecleaners where they live, but pipecleaners are a craft product that have a thin wire covered in fluff, which bend easily but hold their shape (historically, they were used for cleaning pipes). Putting a needle through the ribbon and out again, creates a little loop or pocket where you can thread the pipecleaner without sewing it down, and then you can tinker around increasing and decreasing the hoop lengths, placements, angles and so on. I strongly recommend pipecleaner for doing this kind of sculptural/draping

I don't know if this is going to be the "final" version of the crinoline. The strips are 2 layers of calico - ideally, I need to replace this with ribbon that won't stretch. Similarly, I don't know if pipecleaner will take the weight of the skirt - I suspect it will. But I'd like to take photos of her sitting down in it, and suspect this will distort the pipecleaner. However, once this version is done, it will be very easy to take a pattern off - by measuring the length of lines, and distances in between the join-points. And then the pipecleaner can be replaced with something firm.

The other thing is, I'm desperately in need of a stand for her; the first few hoops at the back, I had her leaned against a box; but now I've started the hoops which go forward, I'm constantly worrying about her falling.

#BJD #BJD clothes #doll clothes #historical fashion

[aslipintime]

OH LORD HE’S DONE

I spent 1,025 hours over 3 years making this glitter bomb of a jacket 😭😭😭

wtf do I do now though

#clobber envy #my god

[aslipintime]

So it's going OK? I need to put in a contrast belt and neckline, and I'm also going to tack in the illusion of a chemise. But it feels like it's missing something

The wig isn’t a match for the dress (most women in history wore their hair up), but its the wig I have; I feel like she maybe needs a prop?

There's just such a big expanse of skirt below the underbust, and in doll scale it doesn't gather right so it's just there. But regency dresses weren't fancy below the underbust? idk, I am going to do some research.

Alternatively, I'm wondering if I could get some props to push it in more of a 1970s Laura Ashley/living on a cult compound direction. Which would work better with the wig I think.

But yeah, it looks alright, and the bodice is all hand padstitched so it's got this structure to it that is so, so satisfying to handle.

Part of the problem is, not knowing what colour to make the belt and neckline - I do have some purple silk but I think that’ll be far, far too strong, and I can’t order new fabric yet.

#bjd #bjd clothes #bjd sewing

[aslipintime]

Reblogging to endorse.

Recasting is deliberately counterfeiting someone else’s doll, in order to sell it as if it were that doll (picking up sales in part from people who just google and don’t know the difference, because the products are designed to “look identical”).

Making a cast for personal use, from plaster of paris (a material no one could mistake for a “real” doll), as part of your craft process is not the same thing, and it’s an unnecessary expansion of the concept of what a recast is, and why we have community rules about them.

Having a head form is a normal part of wigmaking (we don’t make wigs for humans with actual humans sat there, we use a form head); and ditto body forms, for draping clothes onto.

Some of these dolls are crazy expensive, or irreplaceably rare; I’m working on a bodice for my doll atm, and you know, pinpricks happen, pencilmarks happen...so yeah, I’m making a body form to combat this in future. 

Being this pernickity is ultimately a form of shutting down creativity, and chasing off enthusiastic collectors; it is killing the forum, which is sad, because I love the oldschool forum environment; it undermines the idea that these dolls are creative objects, for making for and modding and using as a startpoint for your own ideas, and instead reasserting that they’re just a thing you buy and wigs are a thing you buy; and frankly also, its misrepresenting the reasons why a pro-artist stance is important.

(Like, “proartists are elitist” sounds like a bad argument; but then you get stuff like, DOA apparently expects wigmakers to buy duplicate heads just to make wigs on, and you’re suddenly more aware of where that meme comes from).

So yes. I second the OP, and would like to see this decision reversed.

Just read about yet another user banned from Den of Angels due to having plaster casts of heads five years ago to make wigs on. I think that's overkill. One of the oldest tutorials I read back in the day was making plaster casts for Puki feet & legs to make shoes on. I do not feel this is the same thing as recasting. Crafters and hobbyists aren't making these things to sell. We need torso forms and head forms and foot forms to craft on so we don't ruin an expensive doll (or even sometimes need to pin or poke into or glue on that we can't do on a doll).

I have loved DoA for all the user contributed tutorials and information for longer than I've owned a BJD. I want the mods to reconsider these bannings. ☹️

#doll hobby stuff #recast drama tag #semi-regular I should start a doll forum blues

[aslipintime]

My relationship with content creation and hobbies, in general, got a lot better when I started learning to reframe it as a simple act of human creation, and not a metric of my own self worth.

We’re taught competition, and perfectionism, and shame. If I say “I cook” I must add “(but not well)”. If I say “I run” I must say “(but I am not good at it).” I say “I code (but I mostly know frontend).” I create and express and my first impulse is to guard against embarrassment. Lest I fall so short of marketable competence. Lest I subject myself to the mockery of being caught creating poorly. I wound myself first so others may not.

Even the advice that fights against this says “your only goal should be to be better than yourself yesterday.” But why must I be in competition with her? What happens, after the initial rapid climb in skill, when I plateau? What of injury, and atrophy, and depression, that flake these skills away? Must I return feeling compelled to over-achieve? To wallow in embarrassment until I can surpass my own previous record? To hate my work until the reception, the notes, the engagement outperform an ever rising bar? I do not want to be paralyzed by the mountains I built behind me. Why should I look behind myself when there’s a wide swath of untilled Earth that stretches far out of sight ahead of me? I want to enjoy my work, and my mediocrity, moving forward with all its ebbs and flows.

At my worst, I was nothing. I was not a writer. Because I had forgone writing for all the fear and stress and damage to my self-worth that it wrought. I was not a coder. Because I was only useful for the niches of my job, and didn’t have the heart to create something badly, on my own, for fun, lest it confirm my suspicions of mediocrity. I was not even a runner - despite the extreme and exhaustive amount of time I sunk into it - because I fell short of my previous self, and I could not hold a candle to the actually-skilled runners, and I was forced to speak of this hobby in all those guarded terms - “but i am not good” - because of how much that ate at me. 

I was no cook, and no homemaker, and no creator, because when I did those things, (I did them poorly.) 

And when all these came together, I wallowed in emptinesses. (I still do, sometimes. It’s hard and complicated). Because emptiness is what was left when I stripped myself of the things and the pursuits whose lack of value could be used to hurt me.

The change for me - the change, I think - came at the time I started to recognize that I do not deserve self-punishment for my mediocrities, for the failings of my current state of being. It was not a revelation all at once. It was a slow and progressive flirting with the idea, found almost by accident on self-help youtube channels of a very particular ilk. It came with the recognition that I had trapped myself, wiling away my time and my energy, in a state of constant apology, and shame, and self-correction for the mediocrities I dare not unleash onto the world. I boxed myself up with the promise “once I am good enough, I will be allowed to come back out”, and that was a lie. I would never have come back out. I was chasing punishing metrics of self-improvement that I did not need, and would never actually catch and maintain, and which would never love me back.

It took a long time to internalize this. It took a long time to get angry on my own behalf. It took a long time to act on it, and write again because fuck you. To run on my own terms, at my own pace, for my own enjoyment because fuck you. To create with my hands again because fuck you. To lean into the happiness of creation that I had not “earned”, because fuck you.

I like creating because it fills an emptiness that used to be there. It’s so simple, and so lovely, that humans are like this. That we want to build with our hands. That we want to assemble and construct. That we derive joy from stacking pieces together, and stringing words together, and assembling colors on a page, and moving, and singing, and baking, and knitting. Humans love to build little worlds around them. 

So why must we so actively try to cut people off from it off from it? Why do we condition ourselves to fear its mediocrity? Why does this still our hands? Why do we suffocate it for ourselves, before others can? I don’t have an answer. I can only recognize the monster. 

I want to make bad art today. I want to make bad art tomorrow. If I am a worse writer tomorrow, I want that to be fine. If I am never more than a mediocre runner, I want to be at complete peace with that. Because if not, then I might box away my hobbies again, and my loves, and my pursuits. I might go back to empty. I might go back to nothing.

I hate that emptiness I lived through. I hate that nothing. I want to make bad art for the rest of my life. 

#craft philosophy

[aslipintime]

Relevant to my incoming salty rant on the erasure of working class textile/garment workers from the history costume space.

Songs of textile mills and workers.

Cover image is a 1911 Lewis Hine photograph of Magnolia Cotton Mills spinning room.

Down on the Merrimack River- Si Kahn

The Factory Girl’s Come-All-Ye- Diane Taraz

Boston Town- Della Mae

Doffing Mistress- Jackie Oates

Granite Mills- Cordelia’s Dad

Four Loom Weavers- Maddy Prior & June Tabor

The Mill Was Made of Marble- Magpie

Babies in the Mill- The South Carolina Broadcasters

Spinning Room Blues- Mike Seeger

Give Me That Textile Workers Union- Joe Glazer

Cotton Mill Colic- Pete Seeger

The Mill Mother’s Song- Yvonne Moore & Mat Callahan

Let Them Wear Their Watches Fine- Peggy Seeger

Cotton Mill Girls- New Harmony Sisterhood Band

Weave Room Blues- Sheri Bauer-Mayorga

Hard Times in the Mill- House of Mercy Band

Bread and Roses- Utah Phillips & Ani DiFranco

Aragon Mill- Amythyst Kiah

18 tracks; 51 mins. [Spotify]

#actual historically accurate sewing

[aslipintime]

From The Depths, William Balfour-Ker, 1906

This 1906 print by William Balfour-Ker shows a lavish social event in a large ballroom attended by the well-to-do; the party is disrupted when a fist erupts through the floor, beneath which are the struggling masses of the less fortunate who provide the foundation support on which the wealthy rest.

Description by:

[aslipintime]

I’ve set up a small discord for costume hobbyists & makers (history, cosplay), with a strictly non-commercial ethos (no self-promotion, or advertising products or services to other users - we live and die like amateurs!)

It’s for both sewers and enthusiasts, and we have a handful of sewers for history-in-doll-scale also.

The goal is to try and make a welcoming space which puts fun first, & trying to form a strong community of friends, and is a bit less impersonal than some of the other online spaces I’ve been in.

You are welcome to join us; & please recommend us to anyone you know who would be a good fit for the space x

[aslipintime]

Third version of my basic doll bodice. I always draw out the pattern each time onto the cloth, measuring distances with a ruler and using a protractor for accuracy - tracing necklines and armscyes. I find this better than tracing, because it comes out more accurate

#doll clothes

[aslipintime]

anyway its funny how Ursula really is the culmination of everything I’ve learnt this year, and shows off literally all my skills.

I’m genuinely super proud of her and it’s something I never would have attempted this time last year. But I am grateful this whack ass year has been good for some growth for me.

#the hobby tag #Celebrate your successes :D

[aslipintime]

#Victoriana

[aslipintime]

Check me out, joining the hobby!

#bjd #legit bjd #TwoSoul #TwoSoul Xiao Qian #the doll tag #doll nudity

[aslipintime]

I wish I was better at writing female characters. it’s an embarrassment, I know. Somehow, the scorn-laden “just write a PERSON” tropes online don’t seem to do anything to name or undo the actual barrier.

Part of me wonders that this is a Trans Thing. Like my experience of “imagine what it would like to be a woman” is a false, mimicry of a thing, an attempt to live up to an image I have learned.

Whereas, on the flipside - putting my fujoshi hat on - “imagine what it would be like to be a man” is this wallowing space that tastes somewhere between dark chocolate, the velvet of my beloved’s eyes, and victorian high melodrama, this luxuriant and emotive nightmare-bliss of teen disaster bandom.

My ideas in this space aren’t necessarily more diverse or creative or original, they’re just variants on parts of my psyche - but ultimately, they are parts of my psyche which I feel connected to as human and vibrant, if a little silly. Whereas my female characters can’t get out of this rut of a nice-looking Victorian mother, who is pleasant if a little sad, or a frosty femme fatale.

But I don’t want to pull a “it’s fine cus I’m trans” either, like, there’s an equally good reason why a cis man would have no idea how to write experiences he hadn’t had, and an equally strong political imperative for him to Get Over It. And I’d go so far as to say also, that there are some compelling reasons why women would struggle to overcome the cultural programming and limited roles they see women in in fiction. 

So yeah, the tl;dr of this is - I would like to read more from people who are really digging into the why and the how to fix the “bad at writing women” issue, rather than just making demands and using shaming. Like, it’s a problem worth solving, so what are the tools?

#the doll stories tag

[aslipintime]

I need you to understand that whatever fandom you’re in, your fandom experience has benefitted in countless ways by the efforts of autistic/adhd & neurodivergent fans. 

Both directly and indirectly. I guarantee you’ve unknowingly consumed fan content by neurodivergent creators. More than that, fandom culture in general was built by ND fans using the early and pre-internet to build new ways of socializing around their hyperfixations and special interests.

Fandom has entered the mainstream now, but please remember it started as a safe space for ND fans (mostly women & queer folks) who just wanted the freedom to be weird and overinvested in star trek without people trying to shame their behavioral quirks.  

#the hobby culture tag

[aslipintime]

Me: when my new doll comes she is going to be my best friend

My husband: she's made out of resin and yet, somehow still less toxic than your actual friends

#the doll tag