u/MsNoGood

The sun is slowly leaving us, so I thought I'd try a last attempt on Merry Skier for face deyellowing and a shoot. Her face lighten up a bit more, but not really a whole lot. I think this is about the limit of 20 Vol hair developer and afternoon sun in autumn.

Her tanning reverse-tanning sun reflector is made with potato chip bag glued onto a cardboard. I used Mod Podge fabric glue, but I'm no expert in papercraft as you can see in the quality, but it works!

She is a working girl.

Two moonfaces at once! We're having mooncake and tea for the ritual. The store we bought the mooncakes from gifted us a lantern and I was very excited about it!

Dominique is rocking my Tankou Chinese Girl's cheungsam.

Fighting Milk Saranghae showing off our new favorite boots! And of course I gave her two right boots ( ･~･ ) She still stood okay though, mostly.

Her full name is Pipi Yu, because she STANK of cigarettes hahahaha Pipi also means butt in mandarin (although literally it means fart). It's the first time I can name a doll so quickly. Sorry Tea for Two, but I'm not the one who chain smoked in a room with you.

She has been bathed and hair detangled. Hoping a sun & wind dry session can help with the slight lingering smell further. I made sure to cover up her face because we don't want her plastic to get UV'd on.

Girl traveled all the way from Japan in air, then went on good ol' road trip! She had been through CA, NM, MO, IN, and OH!! Pretty crazy.

She totaled to the upper $80s USD and I expected unspoken damages because it was a listing by an individual and not a professional shop, and the fact that her listing only had 2 photos with a very terse description. I was hoping her bear suit would be enough to protect her from her journey, and I think it did. I'm mostly glad none of the ceramics came off from their vacuum packs.

I'm more bummed about her cut back hair than her smell because the listing only mentioned her bangs cut, not her back hair, but I'll live. Bonus is I got her umbrella and some other clothing items besides just the tea set, which was also not mentioned from the listing.

In terms of JP Mercari:

I knew she was a gamble purchase so I'm not shocked or anything. On the other hand, my other Mercari JP order came perfectly without issue! It's Love Jaylah new in box. She was about $140 USD total. The coupon codes and accidental free shipping from their summer event served us pretty well.

Mercari repacks the items before shipping them to the US. Not that they do a stellar job, they just add some wrapping paper really, but at least they include a big enough box so there is some space between the potential beating of your order's international adventure.

AND Mercari includes their own brand's TRADING CARDS. I thought that was so funny. I got Mike the cat (I've been told it is Mi-Ke), and Zenny the turtle. Not that this is a swinging feature to decide on a platform, but it is definitely cuter than eBay. I almost recycled Mike because I'm terrible with checking my packages thoroughly.

Since I'm keeping my T42 I didn't try their return feature so I can't comment much on it, but I'm happy with my Jaylah and wild card T42 so far. If you're not a gambler, I recommend sticking with pro rated sellers and listings that show thorough photos. If you need your box in pristine condition, I wouldn't use Mercari hahaha even though my Jaylah's box is close to perfect, I can see how it could otherwise not be with a punch or two since there was no bubble wrap in her box.

20 Vol hair developer (translates to 6% hydrogen peroxide) was our choice of deyellowing face goop for Merry Skier today. I didn't want to use usual 40 Vol because I wanted a slower and potentially less harmful oxidization process.

Beginning at 3:30pm and ended at 5:10pm roughly. A total of about 1:40 minutes of afternoon sun, so not the strongest period of daylight.

I brushed the developer on her and tried to avoid her makeup. I used a cheap brush with rather thick bristles, and I recommend to use a finer and better brush if you can.

After that I tried putting the saran wrap on but quickly decided it's not too helpful for our case. Her yellowing is the strongest at her peaks, forehead, nose, and upper cheeks. The wrap was pressing the goop away from those areas, and I wasn't able to observe the reaction too well through all that glare. So I took it off pretty much right away.

Throughout her sunbathing I kept having to move her to different positions to toast her face evenly under the sun, since there are shadows she casted on her own face.

As needed I kept adding more goop on her face on parts that were slowly drying out, and also wipe off the edges that seems to have brightened enough to lessen unnecessary oxidation. As she brightens it started to really reveal the areass that were more stubbornly yellowed that needed additional goop.

I'm pleased with the results! I would say she is about 80% de-yellowed. Her face was almost a bit darker than her blush at the beginning and now it's more balanced. The mid area of her face seems to have the most yellowing, as well as a particular spot on her upper right forehead, so and there are still a bit of work to do. I will likely do another session for those spots.

Will post her full glow-up once she's done!

^(PS. Merry Skier doesn't have any varnish on her face, so I wouldn't know or recommend this method on dolls with varnish unless you accept the experimental nature of that combination.)

Retro-briting session on a good sunny day. Full report will come in soon. So far so good!

It's Saturday so it felt appropriate to have Semedi Marche as the model of choice for a farm shoot. The sky was a white sheet and it really made all the colors rather dull, but Semedi Marche remains one of the most effortless model to shoot with.

We had some great apple fritters with ice cream and mulled apple cider for lupper. It was as good as we hoped! I plan on going back when the sky is blue. That usually makes the green and red pop so much more.

Sometimes I take really bad photos in the poorest single-sourced flickery florescent lighting and I'm too lazy to retake them but they can't be seen without at least some post-editing, and things can get pretty funky behind the scenes!

I'm new with Darktable (Photoshop alternative). It is as expected not the most intuitive program but it's free and open source and it really doesn't matter as long as I can locate the 5 features I need for editing! I was able to get the mask selection to do what I wanted mostly.

Anyways I just want to share Merry Skier looking processed possessed.

I got a few petite Blythes in the mail today! I'm particularly fond of this darker haired girl. I love that she has side eyes!

I haven't looked up who she is yet, but rushed out to take some photos before the rain comes so she can pose with the bit of colors we still have left in the garden.

I don't usually like painted-on underwear but I like the ones she has.

* She is Jiggly Joggly Jaguar!

She is definitely jaundiced on the front face, but I'm liking her more than expected! My technically 2nd SBL. I'm contemplating on how to lift the tinge. I probably can't avoid hydrogen peroxide. I already got some 20 Vol hair developer ready. We will see!

Eiko seems to be our default fruit girl. Probably because her hair pops so well against green plants, and for this occasion her red hair is especially fitting.

We don't wait til Halloween to carve fruits and it's been a bit of a summer ritual to carve a watermelon and then slash it in cold blood.

This time we had extra help. She soothed, she saw, she wept.

Her hair is one of the smoothest nylons out there but the extreme mugginess today was making every strand a challenge "( – ⌓ – )

All these chips were ones that came with other clone dolls that I just changed the pupil color or removed them. The metallic paint for the browns and grays are actually inside the eye chip socket! And it gave it a bit more reflection than just sitting on the pupil. The metallic paint I have is just more gray than metallic and this seemed to help add some more depth.

Her eyeshadows got smudged in the process and in attempt to fix it this is what we ended up with now. I'm not entirely sure about that crease hahahaha a lot of my girls could use an air brush session and I'm way overdue on it!!

It was not easy to capture the moon-like head of Immu (Love Mission) with the eclipsing moon. She was trying to perform the nekkid witch dance ritual, of her own will, not because I was rushing out for a photo and troubleshooting why my camera refused to take any while fumbling to find the AF light assist setting as the moon was running away and not having time to dress her.

I can't stop thinking about that decade running head size metaphor so I'm slapping it on their beanies.

My Love Mission is obsessed with locks. I think her name might be Immu, but pronounced with "aye".

Stress-testing the polarizing filter at the park today with our shiny model.

She found some Cat o' Nine Tails, which isn't very common to see around us these days.

Eiko is our Rouge Noir. Her name is from the anime Project A-Ko that I watched on VHS when I was little. It seemed like a chaotic show and I didn't understand what was happening most of the time, but the red haired protagonist is burned into my memory.

We got this tomato from the farmer's market. I get a good chuckle every time I see it in the fridge.

Her lounge robe is finally done! It took way too long. The super stretchy fabric was not fun to sew in, but sewing it with paper towel underneath helps with evening the tension a lot. The scrap fabric was already in this double layer and I was mostly utilizing its existing seams. The front doesn't actually open, so it's more like a wrap dress than a true robe.

Playing with a polarizing filter on my Pentax Q7. I think it helped a lot with her sheen.