31 day of Halloween - day 14: The Graveyard

31 day of Halloween - day 13: The Gargoyle

31 days of Halloween - day 12: the Skullies

31 days of Halloween - day 11: The Drowned Girl

31 days of Halloween - day 10: Catrina

31 days of Halloween - day 9: The Witch's Broom

Looks like I forgot to cross post some of these from instagram!

31 days of Halloween - day 8: the Monster's Bride

31 days of Halloween - day 7: The Monkey's Jaw

We have a mummified monkey, did you know that?  It's actually on display year round but it really freaks the trick or treaters out on Halloween. My husband's father was a high school biology teacher and we inherited it from him.

31 days of Halloween - day 6: Frankenweenie

I saw these models from the movie at the theater yesterday but forgot to post here
"Creepy Girl" and "Vampire Cat"

Enchanted doll goes resin!

Some of you fellow dollie-o-philes may already know about Enchanted Doll, Marina Bychkova's amazing ball-jointed porcelain dolls.  The dolls are amazingly life-like and all handmade and painted by Marina, often with detailed miniature costumes and accessories.  Apparently Enchanted doll is expanding into the resin market and while the dolls are currently still very pricy and only available at the shows she's going to, one can hope that eventually she may have a mail order service and perhaps a slightly less pricy doll.

You can check out a gallery of all of Marina's beautiful dolls here.  Just be forewarned - many of the dolls are nude and are made and painted to be as life-like as possible.

"Alice" photo care of Enchanted Doll

31 days of Halloween - day 5:The Doomed Bride

There's something wonderfully gothic about the doomed bride, whether vampire, ghost or corpse.  My personal favorite is poor Elizabeth Frankenstein, "throttled" on her wedding night by the dreaded monster as he wreaks his revenge on Doctor Frankenstein.

An outtake and many more on flickr here.

Monthy photo challenge: "Spring"

This was a hard one for me given it's very summer-verging-into-fall here. But I finally ended up using the last of the summer roses to give me a bit of the flora I feel like "Spring" needs. I'd been rummaging through old toys a while ago and ran across my tiniest doll, one that my mom bought for me in San Francisco's Chinatown when I was about 9. She's only about 1.5 inches tall and a little worse for the wear given her age but still rather sweet.
 

31 days of Halloween - day 4: Are you lost little wolf girl?

31 days of Halloween - day 3: Sitting in Mom's chair

31 days of Halloween - day 2: Poor little dead girl

She's so pale, is she as dead as the flowers around her?



Pullip Seila in my yard amongst the fallen bougainvillea blossoms.

31 days of Halloween - Day 1 - Sea skellies

Resin Angels had the brilliant idea of a "31 days of Halloween" daily photo challenge.  I *finally* got instagram (bauhausfrau) and may well do all the rest there (#31dayshalloween) but I'll probably cross post and today's I took using the hipstamatic app.

These are two Day of the Dead mer-calaveras that my friend Marilee gave me a while back.

I'd like to do some more sophisticated shoots but knowing my crazy life only a few out of the 31 will be fancy set ups.

Doll Bar

This is cool, crazy and a wee bit creepy: http://circles-of-rain.blogspot.com/2012/08/cafe-du-coin-st-malo-doll-bar.html

The Sunbather

I took a few pics of Lagoona at the beach.  Sadly, most didn't really turn out very well with the exception of these shots in the sand - which I could have done at a playground!  Oh well.

Death Takes a Holiday

I took a few dollies along on my recent seaside trip.  I wanted to bring my custom b/w Monster High Frankie as "Death" for a "Death takes a holiday" shoot.  I thought it would be funny and have some nice contrast with all the sun and color at the beach.  It was REALLY windy and so harder to shoot that I'd have liked but after a few pratfalls I managed to catch a few decent shots.

Monthly photo challenge: Circus (July)

I was inspired by Aussidolls  to finally get my act together to do something for this theme which I love.  

Photo challenge: stories from the sea (August)

Living in LA I had an "LA Woman" idea in my mind for this.  While there are is no actual ocean I hope it still feels a bit sea-side-ish to you.


This one ran a close second in terms of my favorites of these, but I've done a lot of swimming pool shots of Lagoona and figured the first one was more interesting. 9.staticflickr.com/8003/7640744346_355ec83a86_z.jpg" width="640" /> It was a lovely day and had a lot of fun with this - despite it being so bright I couldn't see what I was doing!  You can see some more out-takes in my Monster High set on flickr

More modding madness

I've got a few pics of a few MH mods I've done recently.  First off we have Eve, the daughter of Mother nature (formerly a CAM witch) and if you don't think MN is a monster think about all those storms and earthquakes and think again! 




Then we've got the little blue devil, my custom Rochelle, confiding in Napoleon about how much she misses her native France.

And lastly, my favorite Wendigo, Ithaqua's daughter (a modded Ghoulia)  Ice witch, devil or zombie you decide.  Poor thing has to borrow the Wraith's dress for now since it was the only suitable white tattered doll costume.

Death

Got got my latest shipment of mohair and so was able to finish my custom black and white Frankie Stein as the Sandman's Death.  Her clothes aren't quite right, she really should have black jeans and a black tank top but they were the best I could come up with at the moment.  I'm really happy with how she turned out, she's got the impish look I was hoping for.

Tails and horns and skeleton torsos, oh my!

I thought the other Monster High fans reading this might be interested to know that Plastic Curves is selling horns, a reptile tail and best of all a skeleton rib cage torso for the CAMs.  You really have to check out the torso if you're at all interested in this sort of thing, supposedly it's somewhat articulated too.   And yes, they have a variety of colors besides pink!

Sisters - Monster High Photo Story

Clawdeen, do you remember how we used to play out here when we were little?
I used to chase you all around, I'll bet I drove you crazy! Yeah, I remember, you DID drive me crazy!  And look at you now, you're all grown up! I'm...I'm going to miss you when you go off to college in the fall Clawdeen.

I'm going to miss you too Howleen.  I going to miss you too.

More monster modding

Still having fun modding MH dolls.  As per usual I have a bunch of different project all going at once.  I still haven't finished Bastet's hair mostly because the crimping bead ends take forever and are SO boring to do!!  One of these days I'll complete her though.

In the mean time I've been having fun swapping bodies.  My latest is putting the skeleton CAM head on Spectra's body.  I'm really NOT a fan of Spectra's mold but I love that ghostly body and I think the lines of the skeleton girl's sculpt fit a ghost much better.  My plan is to make Spectra's head into another Catrina, I think I might like her better with her whole face painted.

I also swapped Howleen and Cleo's bodies.  I want my Cleo to be a sort of fierce fairy type and the smaller body suits her.  And I'm making my Howleen into a werefox and wanted a larger body, I did keep the heads with their original hands though, so for anyone else interested in mixing monsters Howleen's hands will fit on a larger body and larger hands will fit on the Howleen body.  My Cleo is actually done, unless I decide to make wings for her.  It took me a lot of tries but I really like how she finally turned out!  The poor thing is naked until I made some clothes for her since Howleen's gear just isn't right for her.

Monthly photo challenge: Adventure

I've been neglecting my boy bjds of late so I thought I'd give one of them a turn, here's Valentine (my migidoll Ryu) off on his adventure.



In a way this shoot is a long time coming.  Back when we lived at the farm we actually had a fairly large section of woods we could hike into.  I always meant to take some of the dolls up there for a photo shoot but somehow never got around to it.  In our yard here in LA we have a sort of overgrown stand of tress and hedges screening us from one of our neighbors.  The kids love it because there is a "hideout" inside the mass of hedge and trees, and it turns out to be a nice stand in for "woods" for the dolls too!  :)

Monster High Prom

I've been wanted to do a few "Prom" shots ever since I finally got a Gil to go with my Lagoona, but I didn't have the right clothes.  Thanks to the miracles of ebay I've got a tux for Gil (an altered one from "Twilight" Ken) and an adorable handmade beaded dress for Lagoona.

Oh Gil, it's going to be the best night ever!


Mom, you're embarrassing me with all the photos, I feel like a fish out of water!


Ah, that's better!

Let's dance!

And then you've got to kiss the girl!

Oh Gil!



Edited to add hilarious photo shoot moment - me putting Lagoona down for a moment while I finished getting Gil dressed and seconds later one of my kids yelling "Mom, one of the kitties has your doll!"  He got her away from the cats before the ripped her to shreds.  Our cats LOVE to eat mohair!

My custom Lagoona Blue

In some ways Lagoona's my favorite character, but I've never quite been satisfied with the dolls.  In general they don't look as sweet as I see her being but worse still the two I've gotten have had very greasy hair that just didn't seem right at all.

I've had a custom Lagoona in my head for a while now. I've only done one Lagoona custom and she didn't want to be the one I had in my heart set on. So when a Skull Shores Lagoona appeared at Target I snatched her up. I wanted a really soft sweet face with closed eyes so I just used pastels and pencils and didn't use any paint at all.  I'd been looking for blond mohair for a while but hadn't found the golden sand I was looking for.  My cats came to the rescue aka partially destroyed one of my bjd wigs and I managed to salvage some of the mohair for my Lagoona.  I blended in a bit of blue mohair too although I'm not sure it's visible in these pics. I'm really happy with how she turned out!