Val, Boxed Rooms and More: An Epic Post of Miniature Proportions

     Also a massive post of deeply late proportions.  Considering I started taking pictures for this post when Val arrived back in February.  Somehow, moving away from Wordpress has made me even worse about getting blog posts done, instead of getting better about it.  :(

    Aaaaaaanyway, so, the saga of Leann and Val began back on the Wordpress version of this blog...but seems to have mostly not been posted at all.  *cough*  What little did get posted can be seen here.  (And wow, Wordpress even changed the way you access your own freaking tags and past posts to make it even harder to navigate if you're on a free account.  Don't they wonder why people are dropping them like a red hot brick?  Ugh.)

    The main thing is that Leann and Val are going to be the dolls living in the boxed rooms I'm slowly working on making.  They're both 1/12 scale TBLeague Phicen dolls, bought from the Big Bad Toy Store, and although Leann was in stock when I ordered her (being just a generic nude doll), Val was on pre-order, because she was a fancy doll who came dressed as a (strangely scantily clad) valkyrie.  The boxed room was originally intended to be an artist's one-room loft, containing both the art studio and the living space in a single, double-sized room.  That, uh, died.  It's gonna be more like a makeshift dollhouse-in-pieces in the end.  (But more on that later.)  Val, naturally, is just short for valkyrie, and Leann is so named because she's a leanan sidhe; Val is the artist and Leann is her model and lover.

    But to move on with the plot(?) of the post, Val eventually arrived in February, and I took various pictures of the event...most of which are just relegated, unedited, to the gallery for this post, because there are just too many pictures to deal with, between Val's arrival and all the boxed room stuff.  The highlights of her arrival are as follows....

Val in her unopened package

Leann eagerly awaiting her girlfriend's arrival

The top layer inside the box

The second layer inside the box

Contents of that first layer...

Contents of the second layer...

    Now, before I move on, I just wanted to point out some things about the parts in this last photo.  Most simply:  ack, look how the handle of her sword warped!  More complexly...look at the two hands central in the picture.  Those aren't sword-holding hands.  Those are gun-holding hands.  Why does she come with hands designed to hold a gun?  She's a freaking valkyrie!  A medieval Viking warrior spirit!  Guns hadn't even been invented yet!  Arrrrrggggghhhhh!!!!!

    Okay, that just had to be said.  Now I can move on to the photos of Val with her head put on.  :P  (Though I didn't try to clean up the one photo that tried to show her whole spear in her hand.  It's really quite absurdly long, and I had to pull back quite a ways away from the doll to get the whole spear.  It's in the gallery, but it's a little fuzzy because I didn't use the flash.)

The dramatic heroine pic!

    So...this second picture gives you an idea of one of the major problems with Val's costume.  The plastic breastplate was so precisely shaped to her silicone breasts that if you accidentally (or on purpose) shift it down even the slightest bit, it's almost impossible to get her breasts back in it, and it is from that time onwards eternally trying to slip off.  Not that it can come all the way off, of course; it's not removable.  :(  (Well, it is removable, but in a permanent way:  I had to use scissors and snip it in the back so I could get it off.  Same with the armor at her waist.  The little furry britches under the waist armor aren't designed to come off, either, but being cloth they had enough give that I could slide them off.  Still, considering I paid a good chunk extra for the valkyrie gear, it's a little disappointing that it's permanently on or permanently off, with no middle ground.)

The tender reunion!

The girls sit down for a romantic cuddle and chat.

    That last photo gives you an idea of the skin tone difference between the girls:  Val's skin is almost gray, really, which seems kind of odd, but maybe it's because valkyries are spirits of the afterlife?  (The problem with their different skin tones, of course, is that Val did not come with spare feet, so she has to be wearing either what looks rather like silver tennis shoes, or Leann's flat feet, which are of a remarkably different skin tone than Val herself.  If they had the same skin tone, it wouldn't be an issue.)

    The intervening photos of their reunion highlight that while the steel skeleton inside the silicone body on these dolls is highly posable, it is not nearly as flexible as a human body, despite their claims to the contrary:  trying to get them into romantic poses (like, kissing, for example) ranges from nightmarishly difficult to downright impossible.  (I tried to do some romantic but not revealing bathing poses for them, as I found I had a plastic bathtub about the right size, and some glass fill that kinda sorta looked like bubbles if you squint, but they turned out not merely risque but practically NSFW.  Like, I didn't even upload them into the gallery, they're so close to NSFW.)  Val's face has a much more detailed face-up, but I find that somehow Leann's is more expressive, particularly in terms of trying to have them gaze lovingly at each other.  Val's stare looks blank, whereas Leann's looks passionate.  Not sure why that is.

    But enough about the girls, for the moment!  I want to talk about their home!  My initial plan, since I couldn't find an affordable box room kit that seemed to be the size I wanted, was to make the whole thing from scratch, using homemade bricks and everything.  I did end up making a lot of bricks, but it would have taken me years at the rate I was going to be able to make enough of them to create a whole room!  And I kept seeing this listing on Ruby Lane for a 1/4 scale (in dollhouse terms, not in literal terms, so that means 1/4 inch equalling 1 foot, not that everything is precisely 1/4 real size) artist-made dollhouse, which was basically a (very small) set of shelves with some external details to make it into a narrow townhouse.  And then I was seeing Michael's and Joann's selling these 18" long crates, right?  So I'm thinking, maybe I'll pick up one of those, and use it as the base for the box room I want!  It wouldn't be perfect--where was I going to put the porch with the planters?--but it would be a start, and then all the miniature furniture I'd already accumulated would have somewhere to go.  So I head out to Joann's, and I'm looking at the 18" crate and wondering if any of the ceiling papers I was seeing on Etsy were long enough to fit it (I thought they weren't, but it turned out at least some of them were), when I notice a simple wooden shelf next to it that would make a nice double room set-up.  I didn't see the price on it, but since it was right next to the crates (which were like $10), I thought it would be a similar price.  It turned out to be more like $50-$60, but after I had it all the way up at the cash register, how could I say "ooh, no, that's more expensive than I thought it was, so I'll pass on it!" after I'd been carrying it through half the store?  Besides, I figured I could just think it over and then return it later if I decided it had been a mistake.  The first thing to do, therefore, was to try and figure out how well it would work for my purposes, versus how the crate would do.

    Sadly, it doesn't seem like they'll let me put them on the same line.  :(  But I'm planning on having the shelf lying on its side, because otherwise it's going to block my window too badly.  So, this is not the final arrangement by any stretch of the imagination (especially since the armoire hadn't arrived yet so I was using the plant stand for the porch in the place of it), but it gave me an idea of how much--or rather, how little--I could do with the space.  Then I measured out the 18" on top of the shelf to see how much I could do with that single room space...

    And the answer was "even less."  So I decided to keep the shelf, and went ahead and ordered windows to put in it (haven't had the nerve to cut the holes in that MDF backing for them yet), flooring, wallpaper and ceiling papers.  I also started prepping the furniture a bit...

    So, here's that bed as it arrived.  Notice that the mattress is slightly warped and pops up on one side.  :(  I've been trying to flatten it out by stacking heavy books on it, but no dice so far.  (It's got a bit of wood underneath the mattress, and that's what's been warped.)

    The size is good, though.  :)  I haven't cut down that fabric yet, but it's going to be their sheets.  Anyway, obviously, the bed needed to be painted before it could fit in with the rest of their things!

    The "gloss" black paint is not really as glossy as I would like, but it's all right.  The central square on the headboard was fiendishly difficult to get right, given my absolute lack of artistic ability.  Worst of all, I'd forgotten that the mattress blocked off the bottom of the squares on the headboard!  D:  I may actually have to make them a new mattress that's not as full, and thus blocks off less of the design...

    The armoire was also unpainted wood when it arrived, though I sadly neglected to take a "before" shot of it, so I only have the "after" pics...

Yup, the doors work!

    None of the stuff I've painted is as nice as the chinoiserie-style plant stands I got off Etsy whenever the heck that was, but I think they match well enough that it won't be too jarring.  Oh, and the metal furniture in the room tests?  Since the little table's paint was already scratched and stuff, I decided to go ahead and repaint it to match the rest of the bedroom.  (If I end up putting the rocking chair in there for real, I'll repaint it gold.)

The photo makes it look bad, but it's actually a major improvement.

    Ah, but the windows!  They're going to be epic!  For the dining/living area, I got a gorgeous bay window setup:

    I seem not to have taken a picture of it in its current state, but I also got some glossy white spray paint, so it's nicely ready to go in once I get up the nerve to cut the holes in the back of the shelving unit!  (There's no windows in the windows, if you see what I mean, but I don't think it's really worth bothering to get some acrylic sheets to add them.  The whole front of the room is going to be open anyway, so it's not like it would stop dust getting into the room...)

    And for the bedroom, I got something fancier...

    Two stained glass (looking) windows!  (Also a round mirror which may end up above the little metal table, which is going to be their vanity, or may end up in the other room.)  Unfortunately, on all three of these, the laser-cut MDF frames were left au naturale on the top, and I didn't trust myself to try painting them by hand!  But I had gotten a stamp and gold stamp pad to do the detailing on the armoire, so I just rubbed them across the stamp pad!  It kept coming off to the touch for a couple of days, but it seems stable now.  :)  Oh, I should link to the Etsy store where I got these!  It's Smallsminnimall, and I'm appalled to see that it was actually my own fault that there was no finish, 'cause I never log in on Etsy and so didn't see that the seller sent me a message asking what finish I wanted!  (See, I had to log in to find out where I got it from, so...*cough*)  Ugh, I suck.  Oh well, at least I'll know for the future!  (The bay window came from Miniatures.com.)

    Other than that, most of what I have to say about the boxed room is that I've hit the dreaded "how do I take the next step?" phase.  Because, realistically, the next step is to cut the holes for the windows, put them in place, and then...I'm not sure what comes after that.  Do I do the ceiling next?  The walls?  The floor?  I got special glue to use for the wallpaper (and ceiling paper, presumably), and the flooring (which is actual wood with a beautiful cherry finish) has its own adhesive, but I'm not sure the order of operations there.  And I'm not sure if I should be trying to apply some kind of finish to the outside of the shelf.  Will the bare wood between the rooms be jarring?  What would be less jarring?  Should I paint the outside, like with the white spraypaint?  (Though if I ever try to turn it into a proper dollhouse, I would likely want to apply siding.  Or maybe stucco?  Brick facing?  Dunno, really...)

    So, I'll move on, then!  In the last post I put up on here, I mentioned that my mother had given me one of those DIY Room Kits that are floating all over the internet right now.  (Though she actually ordered it out of an old-fashioned print catalog.  Because those are actually still a thing.)  But I hadn't gotten started putting it together yet.  Well, I'm almost done with it now.

    (And yes, I know people leave reviews on these kits saying how they did them in a single afternoon.  But I am not those people.)

    Honestly, I didn't touch the kit for several months in the middle, because I hit the step of making the armchair, which is wood covered with cloth to make it look like a nice, comfy, upholstered chair.  They did not pre-cut the cloth.  Nor did they even print the lines you had to cut onto the cloth.  There was a paper pattern you had to cut the cloth to match, but I was afraid to pin the cloth to the pattern for fear of the holes showing on the finished chair.

    To illustrate the problems...here is a photo of their illustration of what one of the steps is supposed to look like when you finish it (the chair's instructions took up nearly a page by themselves):

    And here is what it looked like when I completed that step:

    I have zero hand-eye coordination or artistic skill.  :(  The final chair is something of a disaster:

    But I'm hoping it won't look too bad if I hide most of it by putting a doll in the chair.  ;)  I'm thinking some variety of Liddle Kiddle (they came in several different sizes, after all) might work.  But I don't want to worry about that until I've completely finished with the kit.

    I don't have too many steps left, though.  Just the stuff to go on the walls, the final assembly of the walls themselves (they're semi-assembled now, just to give me a place to put all the pieces), and the working(!) light...which I may steal for Val and Leann's rooms if it turns out nicely and the scale isn't too tiny.  (Though I do already have some mini string lights that I got from Michael's, but I'm not sure what I'm going to do with them to make them look like the lights you might see in a real house/apartment.)

    The current state of the kit:

    Okay, technically, that's not its current state, as I've moved around the things on the tops of the shelves a bit so they're less lopsided, but I don't have a good picture of that.  The rainbow sticker you see in the front, leaning against that middle thing, is the one thing in the picture that isn't part of the kit.  I got it from a pride-themed pin Kickstarter campaign, and it's just the right size, so I'm going to attach it to that free-standing shelf, as soon as I decide which side I want to have facing out.  That sticker, like the paint on the walls and floor (a home-brew color I mixed in trying vainly to match that pale blue cabinet in the center) is one of the little touches I'm applying to make the kit more "mine" than just blandly following the directions word-for-word.  (I may also redo the chair with another cloth, or maybe paint over it or something.  I'll see how well a doll can hide the ghastly mess of it.)

    I think I'm far enough along in the process that I can give a pretty good assessment of the kit.  (There are tons of in-process pics in the gallery, btw.  Like, an excessive amount of them.  Partially because I wanted to be able to show my mother proof that I was actually assembling it.  Though the photos impressed her less than bringing one of the openable books along to show her in person.)  It is, overall, a pretty decent kit, though of course the amount of effort you put into assembling it will have a huge impact on how the finished room looks.  (Though that applies pretty much anything do-it-yourself!)  Working on the books for the shelves has really shown me just how much you can accomplish with just printed pieces of paper; a lot of the books are basically "boxes" of paper, with one open side that's meant to be hidden against the wall.  A lot of effort clearly went into its design, but it's very much "I'm doing this to be paid" effort, not "I'm doing this because I love it" effort.  (For example, most of the books have the word "Book" printed on them instead of a title.)  The assembly process is hampered by the fact that it was not really laid out well for the end-user.  I have some photos in the gallery, for example, of some of the paper pieces you have to cut out to make the various bits and bobs and books.  They are typically printed so close together (in order to save paper and thus money) that there's very little room between them (sometimes none at all) for your scissors, and the slightest mistake on cutting one piece will end up damaging another piece.  Then there's things like the chair problem I showed above, where it was easy enough for the person assembling their demo unit, but they were a professional who know what they were doing, whereas clumsy not-even-an-amateur me made an appalling hash of it, because the process was just not easy enough for a beginner.  For the most part, though, there's nothing so difficult I couldn't handle it...although I had to dramatically alter the layout of the room from their demonstration default, because I glued the L-shaped shelving unit wrong.  (And the instructions did remind us to be careful to get it right, but they didn't quite explain what they meant, and so I wasn't even checking the right detail to see if it was right or wrong.)

    Anyway, though you might think it would be, that's not the end of the post!  Not by a mile!

    May I present to you a second boxed room kit?

    This charmer comes from Today is Art Day, a company I've been on the email list of since I backed their Kickstarter for a board game about running an art museum.  (The game is merely okay, but its playing pieces are epic.  Some of them will probably end up in Val's studio, whenever I get it made...)  As soon as they sent out an email including pictures of this room kit, I had to have it!  :D  Fortunately, it's quite small (the scale is pretty much identical to that of the other kit, actually), and it doesn't require any glue, so I actually was able to put it together in a single sitting.  (I didn't take many in-process photos, though, because part of the reason I really charged through it was that I was having a very bad day and working on it made me feel better.  Stopping to take pictures would have lessened that impact.)

    (I tried to get a camera angle that would more-or-less replicate the angle of the view in the original painting, but my meager photographic skills (and limited space to maneuver) did not allow for that.)  Although, actually, there was one spot that needed some adhesive:  the frames for all those things on the walls were glued on at the factory, right?  But the frame for the mirror above the table had come unglued.  I used some Museum Wax (which I got to make sure nothing slips around and falls off once Val and Leann's place is ready) to put it back on, and it seems to be holding just fine.  :)
    Of course, being me, I couldn't leave well enough alone, and had to see if anyone could populate Vincent's room.

    Shirley Skediddle was the first to try out the room.  (I don't have her Skediddler, sadly.  I want to get another Skediddler at some point who actually has her Skediddler...though I know from experience at work that the Skediddlers do not work very well at just keeping the dolls upright...)  But as a walking doll, Shirley here can't sit down very well, and I didn't think to take any of the Liddle Kiddles back out of the T. Cohn dollhouse to try using them (I'll probably put Alice Wonderliddle in the chair in the other kit, if she fits), so I went for a slightly different scale...

    One of the many Littlest Pet Shop mini-Blythes I have hanging about the place!  As she is--to quote Doctor Who's version of Vincent, "very ginger"--I thought this one made a nice fit.  :)  I have a slightly fuzzy picture of her trying to sit in one of the chairs, and the scale's not too bad, though it looks weird because her knees can't bend.

    So, this is the current state of the room.  :)  But I need to get Shirley back out of there, 'cause her spot on the shelf is now vacant, and it needs a doll as tiny as she is, because otherwise the doll in that spot would tower over the She-ra dolls behind it.  ;)  (Also, if there's any rust on the base of her stand, I'd hate to have it wreck up the room...)

    But I do have two more pictures of this room, with a little help from the other room...

    Minception!  (Vinception?)

    Well, whatever you want to call it, when I was putting together the books for the other kit that were paper covers glued to wooden book forms (though rather than inhaling the fumes from the glue they provided, I opted to use glue dots for both these and the book boxes), I spotted this one and was like "oh, that's so perfect!" since the two box rooms live side by side on my shelf.  :)

    Oookay, so the post is one step nearer to completion now.  Just one other miniature kit I want to show you.  It's not a full-on room, though...

    This is a kit I got from a Kickstarter campaign, and unlike many of the others, it wasn't "get funds to have a factory make this thing" but rather "get funds so I can make this thing," so the kit was just laser-cut wood and instructions.

Two of the three sheets of pieces, plus bagged extras

First page of the instructions

    Yup, as that title makes clear, the kit makes a miniature Gutenberg press.  A working one, I might add!

Val taking the print out after the first test run with the "new" press...

She doesn't look too pleased with the way it turned out, though.

    So, I messed up on this one, too.  The lever should be facing towards where Val is standing, not out the back, but I didn't look far enough ahead in the instructions to figure out where it needed to be before I made the nearly random guess as to which way should be the front and back on that center beam.  But this still works, so that's all right.  :)  Of course, it's actually much too small to go in Val's art studio (though it will anyway!):  a real Gutenberg press like this one is about...dang, I've forgotten what the size was now, 10-15 feet, something like that?  Wikipedia had a photo of a man standing beside one, in much the same place where Val is, and it was towering over him, rather than being merely a little taller.  But that's okay; it's a replica anyway, so it's just slightly smaller than the original.  A compact.  ;)

    Anyway, the Kickstarter for this Gutenberg press is (obviously) long over, but there's a second campaign now for a Brisset press (1825), which looks every bit as cool, and this kit is also available through that campaign, so if you're interested, check it out.  (But it ends in five days, on the 4th of July.)

    ...whew.

    With that, I have finally finished this post...(though I could go on to talk about a Rock Flowers-related Kickstarter I backed, but since the campaign is long over and the items haven't arrived yet, there's not much point to that right now...)

    It took so long to write that I'm too tired (I use a standing desk set-up now) to go back and proofread it, so I hope there aren't any mistakes.  ;)  But at least I just barely managed to get this post containing my two lesbian dollies out while it's still Pride Month!  (In case anyone doesn't want to scroll back up to the top, here's another link to the gallery for this post.)

    I don't know how long it will be before my next post, but I'll be spending July and August writing a visual novel for a game jam, so it's unlikely that it could be before September.